Questions for GEB Unit VI

Mårten Stenius URL: http://www.nada.kth.se/~d90-mst/courses/geb/q6.html

Page and figure references are from the English Penguin Books edition, unless otherwise noted.

Dialogue VI: Canon by Intervallic Augmentation

Note: The haiku-styled sentences occuring in the text...

(p 154) What is the difference between Achilles' and Tortoise's way of interpreting Tortoise's fortune cookie?

Note: The similarity between the button labels B1, C3, and B10 on the jukebox and the construction of their corresponding record players.

The buttons were chosen at random (p 155) - but still Tortoise finds a connection between them (multiply with 3 1/2 etc). Could this be an illustration of how noise may erratically be interpreted as information?

Chapter VI: The Location of Meaning

Try swapping record player and record in the four reasons at page 161. Note that the statements still makes sense if you think of how the "Crab type" jukebox works. Does this mean that the record player and record are in a sense equivalent?

(p. 170, top) Is there such a thing as communication without any form of (explicit) language? And if the answer is "yes, implicit language", where do you draw the line between explicit and implicit language?

Can a message ever be completely out of context?