Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Just be aware, to everyone else that word does mean the field of study, which is fairly advanced.
All the examples are specifically constructed by humans to carry, but not hide, meaning - Morse, Braille and Quipu "encode" information, but for transmission/accessibility/storage. Cryptography roughly translates to "hiding-writing" and is more or less specifically intended to keep secrets. An encoding is just a different representation of whatever underlying message, assuming one is there. As a result, they can only roughly be interpreted as encryption. Actual encryption means you can know which "format" it's in and still only get the original message if you have the proper key (or whatever).
All of this seems unrelated to seeing "messages" in mundane things. If you look at a flower and think "fuck me, that looks nice" that's great. If you look at it and think "well, the arrangement of these petals is clearly a message for me," then it might be a symptom of things.
I never said anything about "hiding" meaning (versus "carrying" it), but to someone in writing-centric societies, the effect would be the same, due to the presumption that writing is the axis mundi of physical communication. I also wasn't saying cryptography as a field wasn't advanced, just that this isn't the sense of the word I was referring to (any other word seems equally problematic, e.g. "encoding" typically is tech-related).
You may anticipate it as a "symptom" of something (maybe that's why we live in a writing-centric world in the first place), but you'd be surprised where it turns up so as long as someone intends it to. Someone discovered the objects on and around the table in the last supper painting functioned as musical notes for example. Would you call that "hiding meaning" or "carrying meaning"?