What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

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carchasm:

triviallytrue:

antihumanism:

triviallytrue:

antihumanism:

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littledeconstruction:

twocubes:

I remember being in elementary school and feeling a deep alienation at people’s just vicious rejection of mathematics, the reason being, like

It’s like. A classic approach to hypothetical communication with aliens that you start with the things you know you have in common and proceed from there. Mathematics is that.

Imagine you approach someone you don’t understand with a thing specifically designed to be something they and you can agree on as a starting point for communication and they just react with “yeah i hate this”

imo this approach says a lot about astronomers themselves being into math, and less about the universality of mathematics itself. there’s no reason at all to make math the thing that humans & aliens can agree on – like your example shows, it assumes that aliens approach math from the same point of view, giving it the same intellectual value, that (some) humans do.

it assumes you have mathematics in common, and we don’t know that about an alien species.

it’s not even true for humans.

i understand why human scientists use it as a marker of intelligence, but it’s an extremely limiting one.

imagine you approach someone you don’t understand with a thing specifically designed to be something they and you can agree on as a starting point for communication and they react with scorn – and you think that “i hate this” isn’t communicating a huge amount of information.

i’m not alienated by mathematics. i’m alienated by the idea that mathematics is inherently superior to other forms of communication.

you see what i’m talking about? i just talk about using math as a common language and people are immediately defensive, here visible in this stranger projecting this idea that we’re talking about it as superior and/or a sign of intelligence, rather than a simple point of reference.

also projecting onto me the idea that i didn’t understand that “i hate this” was communicating a lot of information.

no, i got that information very clearly. that’s why it made me feel bad.

Every number system is base-10 from the perspective of the civilization that developed it, and explaining what “ten” is takes as much effort as explaining anything else.

Chemistry is far more “universal.”

watch this

0 =

1 = |

2 = ||

3 = |||

4 = ||||

5 = |||||

6 = ||||||

7 = |||||||

8 = ||||||||

9 = |||||||||

10 = ||||||||||

11 = |||||||||||

any society capable of space travel will almost undoubtedly be able to understand the concept of number bases and explaining what which symbol means which quantity is literally that simple, good luck explaining chemistry that concisely

So you admit that mathematics is not universal? That it requires translation? Very good. We’re making progress. In the case of alien contact, I’d advise using multiple repitions, though, of “1 = / …”, “1 = o …” and so on to head off confusion. This is the same way you teach someone a foreign language (Jack is running, Jill is running, Spot is running; Amo, Amas, Amat).

As to how I would “explain” chemistry, I wouldn’t have to. They are capable of space travel, they already know chemistry (and math and physics). If they were provided with a periodic table of elements and a collection of pure samples, they could use their technology capable of space travel to determine, based on atomic weight and so on, that this sample of “Iron” is what they call “Bleep-bloop,” and this “Hydrogen” is “Flippity” and the “Oxygen” is “Hummdy.” And this molecular arrangement of “Flippity”  and “Hummdy” is “King Sooper’s Grocery Store” or as we know it “Water.”

Which is the other aspect of “math is a universal language” that is wrong. Pure math is not a language because it has no content, which is why it is boring. Figuring out how to translate numbers would be important if you met aliens*. People are extremely good at learning math in the context of games or work because there is important content, but that content comes from outside of the math. Math is just a vessel for card counting, firing cannons, determining cell counts, evaluating drug effectiveness, etc.

*All this business also assumes that the aliens making first contact are “qualified” to do so. In the event of an E.T. scenario where literal children are making first contact, they might figure out how to count together but that’s not going to help them.

So you admit that mathematics is not universal? That it requires translation? Very good. We’re making progress.

going to ignore the vaguely condescending way this is phrased and point out that the goal of this is translation, and the ease of translation around mathematical ideas is the entire point

As to how I would “explain” chemistry, I wouldn’t have to. They are capable of space travel, they already know chemistry (and math and physics). If they were provided with a periodic table of elements and a collection of pure samples, they could use their technology capable of space travel to determine, based on atomic weight and so on, that this sample of “Iron” is what they call “Bleep-bloop,” and this “Hydrogen” is “Flippity” and the “Oxygen” is “Hummdy.” And this molecular arrangement of “Flippity”  and “Hummdy” is “King Sooper’s Grocery Store” or as we know it “Water.”

this is… almost infinitely less useful than the ideas you could communicate if you fully understood each other’s math. i could communicate these ideas with integers alone by sending the number of protons and neutrons in certain elements, along with some additional drawings.

Which is the other aspect of “math is a universal language” that is wrong. Pure math is not a language because it has no content, which is why it is boring.

i’m trying to understand what you could possibly mean by this and falling short. pure math has no content? what?

Math is just a vessel for card counting, firing cannons, determining cell counts, evaluating drug effectiveness, etc. 

i mean, if you want to avoid doing interesting math, sure

Much as I’d like to side with the mathblr folks here I think @antihumanism is right that math is far from a universal language - the biggest barrier to understanding math for me as a physicist is all the formalism and definitions that need to be learned, not the concepts themselves - so it’s not the ideal place to start with communication compared to say, the stable atomic configurations in terms of protons and neutrons, which would be the same everywhere.

also the original post is somewhat incorrect about the facts - the Voyager Golden Record has quite a lot of chemistry and biology information, such as the elements, structure of DNA, etc. on it and not a whole lot of math outside of the definition of our numeral system. I also borrowed that proton/neutron example from Carl Sagan himself when talking about how we’d look for aliens on Cosmos

both you and @antihumanism have sadly completely failed to understand the thing I was saying. Please refer to the other conversation branch for more information. This conversation is now obnoxious and I will no longer be responding.

I feel like there’s a major miscommunication happening here, and it has to do with the elision of preference as a relevant aspect of context, and context as a relevant framework for communication.

I’m married to a logician, but I’m not a math person. Math, to me, has always been largely incomprehensible. Nonetheless, I understand the argument that you could use math to communicate with aliens on the basis of numbers being more intrinsic - more literally universal - than just about anything else.

However.

This approach also assumes that aliens themselves have no culture, no context, no preferences that would impact on either their willingness or ability to use math as a shared language - that no alien, in this hypothetical scenario, could possibly dislike maths, or not want to use it to talk, or prefer to try some other method first. To take a very basic example: an assumption made in these hypotheticals is that, as human astronauts and other scientists who deal with space must all be well-versed in maths in order to do their jobs, the same would necessarily be true of any alien counterparts they encountered in a first contact scenario. Because it’s not what humans do, we don’t have a framework for a species saying, “The people who build the spaceships are a completely separate group from the ones who fly them. We do not carry mathematicians into space; instead, we send those with other skills, because [insert whatever xeno-cultural reason you choose to conjure].”

Thus: while we can make an educated, well-reasoned argument for the likely universality of mathematics to hypothetical aliens as an intelligent species, it doesn’t make sense to assume that, culturally or socially, those same hypothetical aliens will of course send their mathematicians into space, or consider maths as universal in the way we do. If you can imagine some judgemental human in a first contact scenario saying of aliens, “How could they possibly understand the Fibonacci sequence?” even if, actually, it makes logical sense that aliens could indeed do this, then you can understand how, potentially, a hypothetical alien could look at humans and think, “There’s no way this species understands the Sacred Numbers.”

So, yes: while it makes sense that maths could be a language for universal communication with aliens, you’ve got to remember that culture still plays a role in how communication happens between different groups. Look at what’s happened in history when humans who speak different languages and come from different cultures have met each other for the first time - have we all instantly sat down and started counting to show each other that we’re people? No! Even when those first reactions haven’t been overtly hostile or violent, maths is not the first tool we reach for. We do other things first to prove that we’re people, or to test if the other people are the same as us, because that is how people function.

I think the trap we fall into in thinking of maths as a universal language for alien-speaking without caveat or question is in assuming aliens to be above culture, beyond something so tawdry and human as bias or xenophobia or peculiarity. We think, “maths is pure, devoid of the cultural complications that come from belonging to a certain language background, and therefore it will make more sense to aliens than any attempts at speech, because they’ll already have it,” which automatically assumes that aliens are devoid of cultural complications and will of course have the same view of maths and its universality as certain human scientists do.

So while I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade about the joy they find in the idea of maths as a universal language, I do feel obliged to wave a small social sciences/humanities flag in the background of this STEM conversation to point out that, actually, if aliens are people, then they’ll bring their own quirks to the communication table, and it doesn’t make sense to assume that, just because math can be used universally, that’s what they’ll think or want to do themselves, especially straight off the bat.

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    I remember being in elementary school and feeling a deep alienation at people's just vicious rejection of mathematics,...