But what if all we had of an ancient civilization was a very complicated thing, complicated in more than a technological sense—let’s say, one copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Now let’s assume that the achaeologists who find this copy of Hamlet are not humanoid, don’t have books, don’t have plays, don’t speak, write, or think at all as we do. What are they going to make of that little physical artifact, the evident complexity and purposefulness of it, the repetition of certain elements and the non-repetition of others, the semi-regularity of line lengths, and so on? How are they going to read
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