Bateson's alien

Let’s recall Gregory Bateson's tale of an alien encountering some “signals” from earthlings, but only sees either marks or noise that have no meaning for him beyond being “physical” entities that almost escaped his attention. As an outsider of any terrestrial writing system, he deduces that, by occurring in proximity, the marks or sound waves must be from a significant source. The “glyphs” he sees are in units and bundles of these units. The accompanying sound file varies in rate, pitch, or volume etc. He also entertained the possibility that the sound file may be connected to the marks, that one could be a version of the other. But he also wants to think that there must be a direction that the marks don't explicitly say like some kind of metadata. Also, there are a series of surfaces, and moving from page to page, so to speak, could have some value or function as well. Some marks just unravel in straight parallel series, while some are in block formation. Others are more dispersed, like the fragmented versions of some previous joined bundles he saw. He has, therefore, a parsing issue on his hands. Then, apart from that, even if he gets an idea of the parsing method, he still needs to know if there is some order to the marks, something like a “syntax” (a.k.a., a leap of faith) and if the order of the marks depended on the order of the sounds, or vice versa; or if they each have their own order, and can diverge or run parallel to each other. All he has from his world is an ancient fictional tale about Shannon's “information” theory, a magical beast composed of numbers with always two faces. With a dash of inspired transposition, he quantifies the signals by assigning them specific values, and simply reconstructs the language of the mythical beast called “algorithm” to see what would happen. He did notice some repetitions and also wide divergences, though this could be fatigue setting in. The repetitions though seem dominant, so he thinks the divergences are mutations. He still does not have any code to judge that the signals also encode some order or hierarchy. The plain sequence or bundles of marks for him are elements that are just too “baryonic,” like the free-falling photon he has observed by chance around the event horizon where he used to play hide-and-seek-the-neutrino as a kid. He is looking for the emergence of a so-called “grammatical” order from the sequences. To do this, he looks to his own culture and compares the patterns he knows, if the quantum syntax of his language and the dimensional mappings are similarly done. But he has nothing remotely similar since his own language is the pure stochastic vibration of the quantum field. Time and space are absent and therefore any syntax is a metaphysical beast existing only as an imaginary dimension where one could pinpoint a coordinate and use a frame of reference. Perspective and point of view are thus also fictive entities. He needs to become a metaphysician to construct a syntax, a ''language.'' He needs to flatten his state of superpositionality so that a ''rhythmic'' order or sequence could be imagined. In short, he needs to invent an entropic universe that has at the same time a negentropic pull. It's all too contradictory, he quips. How can all that cohere long enough to build a syntax? It would be like the rarest element with such an existence so fleeting that it comes closer to his own quantum language. Well, he admits, such a universe is fictional anyway, the stuff of myths. It's not his problem if no communication or language is possible in that fictive world. This was easy for him to say because things are always entangled in his own nonrelativistic dimension. Communication there is absolutely instantaneous. No one even needs to speak. That is why there is, in effect, no communication or photon. They are not needed.