In what language or symbolic system would you do so? The Pioneer plaque and Voyager records both made an attempt in that direction, but I’m sure there’s a better way.
In one of my classes in college, we were asked to try to decipher the supposedly universal language of the Pioneer plaque, which should have been relatively easy insofar as we shared a species (and thus a neural architecture) with the creators. We got some of it, though not all, which is apparently better than many of the NASA scientists on the project!
We humans can decipher ancient human languages given a large enough corpus. Non-humans shouldn’t have too much trouble. The chief trouble I imagine is getting from idiomatic ways of saying things to what we’re really trying to say, e.g. “I would be surprised if it were green” to “The sky is not green”.
In what language or symbolic system would you do so? The Pioneer plaque and Voyager records both made an attempt in that direction, but I’m sure there’s a better way.
In one of my classes in college, we were asked to try to decipher the supposedly universal language of the Pioneer plaque, which should have been relatively easy insofar as we shared a species (and thus a neural architecture) with the creators. We got some of it, though not all, which is apparently better than many of the NASA scientists on the project!
We humans can decipher ancient human languages given a large enough corpus. Non-humans shouldn’t have too much trouble. The chief trouble I imagine is getting from idiomatic ways of saying things to what we’re really trying to say, e.g. “I would be surprised if it were green” to “The sky is not green”.