[Teever]

The implication of the argument that you're making is that humans could never understand any alien artifact that we come across. Or that we could never understand the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs or Linear B, or that we could ever understand the purpose of the Antikythera mechanism.

It may be the case that it will be impossible for us to understand a particular alien artifact if we came across it because it is too complex for us to understand, but that doesn't mean that we wouldn't be able to understand all alien artifacts that have ever existed (if they exist)

One could say that hieroglyphs are different because they were made by people, so they have a mapmaker but all that indicates is that meaning can persist across the lifespan of the creators and then if that's the case it's just a question of for how long, and through what casual chains can that meaning persist.

You might also suggest that the function of the Antikythera mechanism is just something that we arbitrarily project onto it but that's not likely. The gear ratios correspond to actual astronomical periods that we didn't just arbitrarily decide, instead we discovered them. That means that the meaning as an astrological clock was fixed into the mechanism by the creators and transmitted to us.

It's the same thing with DNA. It has no mapmaker and yet it contains meaning, meaning that we've made tremendous strides to understand. How is that possible for a thing that doesn't have a mapmaker to have meaning?

[bch8_]

No that's not an implication of the argument. You are misunderstanding. It is not necessary to continuously inject increasingly complicated historical scenarios, I am not going to respond to those, we can just talk about the clock. If you want to restate your argument in terms of that example, I will be happy to respond. As it stands I am not even sure what you think the argument was if those are the implications, or what the point of all of these scenarios is supposed to be. Also, I am just relaying the argument of the paper FYI, I am not making the argument.