Re: Purely informational XML documents is an illusion

On Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 11:27 AM Roger L Costello <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Here's a summary of my argument:
>
> 1. All sentences are instructions.
>
> 2. An XML document is a sentence.
>
> 3. Instructions elicit behavior.
>
> 4. Instructions have semantics.
>
> 5. Semantics can be represented by an interpreter. This is called
> interpreter semantics.
>
> 6. To understand a sentence -- to understand its semantics -- run it
> through the interpreter.
>
> Do you agree with my argument?
>
> /Roger
>


Absolute statements are generally not true. Even mathematical "facts" like
"the sum of all angles of a triangle is 180°" are not universal truths (for
example in non-Euclidean geometry).

And information could be regarded just as an imprint (photo/projection) of
an event. As such, the recording tells us as much about the author and the
recording technique as the imprint itself.

Add to this that every fact (or equation) has at least two sides... What
could be "useful information" for one type of observer could be just
"noise" for another type of observer, and vice versa. Any two such
observers (you call them "interpreters") may exist independently and have
no awareness of the existence of any other observers. This may give us an
infinite number of possible interpretations of the same information.

There is nothing instructional in a dried ancient river bed, just a remnant
that may go unnoticed or not attributed any meaning to, in many thousand of
years, and the light that comes to us from the beginning of the Universe
(The Big Bang, at around 14 billions light-years afar) may never be
interpreted or "acted upon as intended" because there might have not been
any intention behind this event.

Thanks,
Dimitre


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