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36 sats \ 18 replies \ @Scoresby 26 Aug \ on: Stacker Saloon
Is all alphabetic writing digital?
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Alphabetic letters are a way of turning speech (which is a kind of fuzzy set of modulating audio waves) into a set of discrete digits. This was a surprising thought to me because "digital" feels like such a modern invention.
And really, alphabets aren't just digitizing speech, they're digitizing language, and since language plays such a big role in how we think these days, alphabetic letters become a way of digitizing meaning.
But humans may not have digital minds in the way that a computer does -- if what a computer is can be said to be a mind.
Another interesting place to take this is that non-alphabetic languages (like Chinese) might be better suited to human thinking? (this is now me wading way out into pure speculation without really thinking any of it through). Also, apparently numbers are considered ideograms.
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I think the word that more accurately conveys what you probably mean when you write "digitizing", is "discretizing". The example of tonal languages is great, because musical signals are definitely decomposable (both by wetware brains and by electric circuitry) into discrete syntactic elements, regardless of any digitisation of the signal.
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I suspect that if you follow this distinction out all the way, you'll find that ideographic writing is also a collection of symbols that can be considered digits, although the base is much higher... while English might have an effective base around thirty (if you allow for some punctuation), Kanji has an accepted common base of a few thousand and if you held some professor's feet to the proverbial fire, you could probably establish some mathematical bound for this base.
Check out syllabaries. Some writing systems are really quite close to an extremely compressed trace of the analog signal, while still being a linear sequence of symbols.
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probably everything is digital. We know energy is digital. Probably time and space are as well.
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It's much easier to coin words if you set aside semantic propriety and just shuffle around the syntactic elements. Any actual physicists would probably be horrified by this most improper of personifications; photons can't possibly be agents, performing some action! They don't even experience time, as once you actually quantize some photon away from the arbitrary noise of the electromagnetic field, the photon's entire trajectory is all one spacetime interval.
Semantic propriety can be fun, although it takes an effort: the photing is photed by the fabric of spacetime itself, and individual photons are illusory, a notational convenience for drawing signals out of the noise.
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