I am reading Douglas Hofstadter, and I am to his chapter “The Location of Meaning.” He argues that messages have three levels of meaning: frame, outer, and inner. The frame meaning is “this is a message”: you must recognize that there is something to decode here. The outer meaning is how to decode the message, to get from marks on a page to what the writer was trying to express. The inner meaning is what the writer was trying to express. To read a message in Japanese, you must (1) realize that it is writing, not a bunch of little pictures; (2) realize that it is Japanese (and be able to translate it); and (3) read it.
There are many puzzles yet to be solved because the fact that they are puzzles is not explicit. Games Magazine hides a puzzle in each issue, perhaps in the page layout or the structure of another puzzle. At least they tell you that there is a game afoot, if only you can find it. The titular Da Vinci Code is hidden in plain sight because nothing says, “This is a code!”
Continue reading ‘Obeying Outer Meanings’
