On 4/25/05, Warren Ockrassa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > OK, fair enough -- but how would that really supply you with an answer? > If you simulated all senders and receivers, how would that be > significantly different from the message content's encryption itself? > You'd have a reduced range of possible transmitters, sure, but you'd > still have a range of equally-likely interpretations, wouldn't you?
You are not working from a priori principles are you? You (as in the ridiculously wellfunded hypothetical opponent, Carl) have tons of information about your targets already, so you can narrow it down enough to be useful. It is placed in a somewhat Transparent Society right? > >> So the more I thought about that, the more it seemed that only people > >> with actual organic abnormalities might be possessed of a different > >> enough neural map that a Rosetta device couldn't "read" them. They'd > >> have to be conscious, capable of more or less high function, but also > >> organically variant. That pointed to schizophrenia. > >> > >> The tragedy of it, of course, is that in such a future it's in > >> government and corporate interests *not* to treat or cure > >> schizophrenia. I love it when dilemmas like that get dropped in my > >> lap; > >> they really punch up a story. > > > > I'm afraid I'm not following why the schizophrenics would be > > unreadable: if 'Rosetta' is flashing all its inputs and storing the > > (arbitrary) responses, simply differing from other humans wouldn't > > make much difference, I would think- the differences could be as > > random as one pleases, and they would still be compensated for. Now, > > if the Rosetta's were working from a precomputed table of > > action/reactions to decipher the thoughts, then I could see why > > neurologically atypical individuals would be useful. > > That's the idea, yeah -- there's basically a very large table of neural > responses to stimuli, and as the patterns are matched the ways of > reading those neurons become slowly more clear. It's based on a pretty > big database; the only reason it takes a while to get a Rosetta > translation to work is the human bottleneck. Sensations, images and so > on have to be fed in and responses read, and that's what really takes > the time. > > But since schizophrenic brains are both nonstandard -- significantly > deviant from the normative clusters Rosetta would already contain -- > *and* (presumably) unique from one another, there's never been a way to > pattern their neural responses to anything. In essence each set of > responses in a schizophrenic brain comprises its own database entry in > the set, with no correlates. So 100 such brains would equal 100 entries > with no (or proximally no) cross-matching of patterns. No 'correlates'? How realistic is it that schizophrenics are *that* alien? Certainly they have major differences from you or I, but compared to yeast, or a dog? There must be considerable overlap or communication would be utterly impossible (but feel free to ignore this assertion). > > Perhaps the Rosettas could vary in capacity? Dumb, miniature ones > > working from hash tables, and expensive sophisticated realtime ones? > > That's sort of how VR simulators work in the story. One of the > characters gets a simulation game console and can't play it, because > there's no basic map with which the simulator can work to feed in > impressions. > > A custom "translator" can be made that's keyed to the basic senses, > something that lets the most fundamental aspects of a simulation > function, but it's many orders of magnitude less complex than anything > a Rosetta attempts, and it works (more or less) because things like > sensory information, which is fed into the brain on a pre- or > unconscious level, is easier to encode than something like a probe for > a thought. Furthermore since the simulations aren't as interested in > responding to conscious ideas, they don't need to receive -- just send. It seems to me that if you can get the basic sensations/qualia you can bootstrap your way up in abstraction. Get the senstion furry and brown, invokes dog. Get a certain taste, invokes a complex image of a round orange fruit. Invoke the fruits, get an orchard and a home. etc... Would it take longer working from base sensations? Yes, but it is like working through all permutations; the tortoise route. Incidentally, why wouldn't Alice and Bob in your scenarios simply use quantum cryptography? That's barely sci-fi these days. > -- > Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books ~Maru _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
