Frank, Glen, Nick, Glen writes: `... in last week's Zoom, I mentioned to Jon (in response to his query to Frank about RSA-encryption::mind) that I think homomorphic encryption is a better analogy (to mind).`
Fully homomorphic encryption† was also the metaphor I originally had in mind. In an effort to not complicate matters, I decided to focus on the idea of public key encryption more generally. Thank you, Glen for taking it the rest of the way. Because Glen, Nick and I appear to differ on Frank's mind only in that we disagree about the way that Frank's mind is public, I will attempt to switch sides and argue for why his mind may be private. Firstly, while we may only need to know some combination of *transformations* which will allow us to know his mind, it may be the case that those transformations are not accessible to us. As an example and in analogy to computation, it may be the case that we are not the kind of machines which can recognize the language produced by a mind. While we as observers are able to finite automata our way along observations of Frank, his mind is producing context-free sentences, say. I don't entirely buy this argument, but it also may be defendable. As another example/analogy, we may be attempting to solve a problem analogous to those geometric problems of Greek antiquity††. It may take a psychological analog to Galois theory before we understand exactly why we can't know Frank's mind. Secondly, it may be that the encryption metaphor should actually be something closer to hashing. A friend of mine once said that *rememberings* were morphisms between *forgettings*. We are often ok with the idea that memory is lossy, but why not thoughts themselves? Perhaps, at least with regard to what we can observer of Frank, every time Frank thinks of a covariant tensor he is reconstituting something fundamentally different. The *remembering* is always between different *forgettings*. Ok, I am not sure I could necessarily defend these thoughts. Further, I am not sure they are necessarily helpful to our conversation. It seemed a good idea to try. On the topic of steganography, I wanted to mention the book *Steganographia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganographia>*. I had originally read about it in some part of Neal Stephenson's *Baroque Cycle*, and it has since found a place in my heart. The book, originally written in 1499, is perhaps the oldest text on the subject of cryptography. What is amazing about the book is that it is an example of itself (nod to Nick). The plaintext content of the book is on the subject of magic, but for a reader clever enough to find the deciphering key the book is about cryptography. I had found a copy from the 1700's in the rare books library at the University of Texas some years ago. The content was *doubly hidden* from me as I neither had the deciphering key nor can I read Latin ;) Jon †: If any members of the group would like to form a reading group around Craig Gentry's thesis on FHE <https://www.bookdepository.com/Fully-Homomorphic-Encryption-Scheme-Craig-Gentry/9781243663139>, I would gladly participate. †† While it turned out that the Greek's assumptions about the power of a compass and straightedge were incorrect, work beginning with Margherita Beloch <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margherita_Piazzola_Beloch> (and culminating with the Huzita-Hatori <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huzita%E2%80%93Hatori_axioms> axioms) show that origami would have been a more powerful choice!
-- --- .-. . .-.. --- -.-. -.- ... -..-. .- .-. . -..-. - .... . -..-. . ... ... . -. - .. .- .-.. -..-. .-- --- .-. -.- . .-. ... FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
