Reddit mentions of Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes

>I agree, but being "one of the great works of literature" is conditioned upon our human perspective on the matter. To an alien race, both books are equally random and thus equally "complex".

This is where you are mistaken. Any intelligent species would be able to recognize patterns and might eventually decode our language. Why? Because there is a structure that is non-natural, non-random. You make the mistake of assuming that because we recognize such patterns as intelligent beings that therefore these patterns are the product of an intelligent mind. This is exactly backwards. Because we have an intelligent mind, we are capable of recognizing patterns that are real. The complex structures of a shark's eye would exist with or without us, and would be objectively more complex with or without us. The fact that a mind is requisite to understanding this thing does not mean a mind is a necessity for its condition. Rather, all we do with our mind is describe an objectively observable phenomena. Any intelligent mind would be capable of coming to the exact same conclusion because of the fact of the brain's construct. This is not a matter of perspective. It is a matter of observable fact.

>20 A's in a row versus 20 seemingly random letters in a row versus 20 letters in a row that makes sense to you. How would you rank them in terms of complexity, and why? I'm guessing you'd go from bottom up, but I might be wrong.

That depends on a lot. The first is actually quite complex in that it is an unnatural pattern. One would never expect to get a series of A's randomly, so it is almost certainly the product of a non-random phenomena. The second might be complex in that it could be a coded message. Both these facts could be determined by an intelligent alien species with absolutely no knowledge of Earth languages. Indeed, if such language were truly random, we would never be able to decode "lost languages" like written Mayan. Yet, amazingly, because we are so good at recognizing patterns, we can eventually decode languages that have not been written for over a thousand years, and for which there are no translations to work from of any kind. If language really were all the same as you posit, this would be impossible.

If you want a good example to challenge your assumption that this string is only meaningful to humans, I would say lets step away from language and towards other patterns such as faces. Dogs can recognize faces just as humans can. We can both recognize a face because we both have the ability to recognize patterns. If you rearrange a face randomly, the ability to recognize a person goes away. Why? Because the pattern has been lost.

>I agree, but being "one of the great works of literature" is conditioned upon our human perspective on the matter. To an alien race, both books are equally random and thus equally "complex".

The great work of literature part is surely a subjective judgment, but that wasn't really the thrust of my point. The key is that in one case, the book communicates information, in the other case, no information is communicated at all.

>both strings contain equally much data and are thus equally complex.

Ah, but that is decidedly not true. There is in fact a statistical distinction between truly random information and non-random information. Indeed the entire field of Information Theory was developed in recognition of this fact. It started when someone happened to notice a strange coincidence that turned out to reveal a very important phenomena: the distribution of the "bits" sent over telegraph very much resembled the statistical curve of thermodynamic processes. Turns out, this distribution exists precisely because the information sent over telegraph is highly ordered. As soon as you send truly random information, the distribution looks like a system that has achieved entropy. It is all meaningless background noise. This is why, when we look for intelligent life, we look for patterns, because patterns are an objective feature of information exchange. Without patterns, information literally cannot be exchanged.

In fact, if you are open to having your viewpoint changed, there is a great book about information theory called Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes which explains a lot of what I am articulating here. In short, the very fact that we are able to understand things about the universe and then take advantage of that understanding is contingent upon 1) these patterns existing and 2) us being able to understand and manipulate these patterns. If they weren't real, we wouldn't even be able to make sense of our surroundings. Indeed our very existence is owed to these patterns existing, for life and evolution would be impossible without it. So it is not a matter of perspective, it is a feature of reality.