2025-02-10 -- meaning by interpretation
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There is this joke where a novice enters a Dominican
congregation, and they tell him that the code to the keypad
at the door is "1234". "That's easy to remember", the novice
says; "it's the year St. Dominic was canonized."

This goes to illustrate that data generated with low entropy
can appear to be generated with high entropy, and vice
versa. I remember there was some controversy between the
xkcd "correct horse battery staple" approach to passphrases
and Bruce Schneier's advocacy of generating passwords by
garbling an English sentence, thought up, without any true
randomness, by a human. Schneier's point is valid: it's not
about increasing the entropy of the password generation
method, but about decreasing the probability of attackers
guessing the password. What if your method, by perfect
randomness, spits out something that is all zeroes, like the
Shakespearean monkeys? A more delicate study about the
meaning of entropy -- or the "amount of surprise" in
Shannon's sense -- on the generator's side versus on the
attacker's side is necessary.

But it also shows how we can intepret meaning where there is
no intention, and vice versa. We tend to see patterns where
there are none, like eyes without a face in the bushes of
love. Ever since the Death of the Author, we are stuck with
this pattern recognition to skim mistake from design. I
remember how I was invited to Berlin in 2019 for 30 lines I
had written in 2018. In a poetry workshop there, I explained
at length all of the thoughts I put into my words, and I was
met with the question: "Do you really expect your readers to
find all of that?" And yet, the opposite can also happen.
Like Mephisto says: "Gewöhnlich glaubt der Mensch, wenn er
nur Worte hört, / es müsse sich dabei doch auch was denken
lassen."

The catalyst for this post was the following paragraph from
page P-3 of Hofstadter's 20th-anniversary preface to GEB:

     Compared to a typical formal system, human language is
     unbelievably fluid and subtle in its patterns of
     tracking reality, and for that reason the symbols in
     formal systems can seem quite arid; indeed, without too
     much trouble, one can look at them as totally devoid of
     meaning. But then again, one can look at a newspaper
     written in an unfamiliar writing system, and the
     strange shapes seem like nothing more than wondrously
     intricate but totally meaningless patterns. Thus even
     human language, rich though it is, can be drained of
     its seeming significance.

I have spoken in similar terms of church windows after a
friend taught me about them in Zurich in 2020. To the
uninitiated, a window is a window is a window; but once you
know about their details, what was common by tradition and
what was left to personal choice, you can date the
construction period and recognize the architect's conscious
decisions. In a sense, you can read the facade like a poem.

It is tragic to imagine a failed attempt at communication --
when your utterances and actions are attributed to
insignificant randomness, as if their p-value were too low.
In 2016, I thought about this a lot: how can you be sure
that others really understand you, that you do not,
unbeknownst to you, suffer from some kind of speech
impediment or lack of clarity that renders you
incomprehensible? Along with David Bowie, I looked at the
cavemen's paintings and wondered whether they had ever
guessed to end up on TV, or whether Major Tom can really
hear us. And then, in 2021, Bo Burnham aptly mixed the
question with dread and cynicism:

     Is there anyone out there?
     Or am I all alone?
     It wouldn't make a difference --
     Still, I don't wanna know.