On May 2, 2005, at 5:06 PM, Maru Dubshinki wrote:
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?
Why would it be? The TS presupposes transparency...
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?
I really have no idea. All I know is that they don't respond isomorphically to pharmacological intervention, and that what drugs *do* work don't work consistently over time in even one schizophrenic brain. That's not necessarily meaningful to a scientist, but to an SF writer it's interesting.
Look, I try to base my stories in the plausible, not the truly really hard SF, and that's why I have FTL transport and schizophrenic couriers as opposed to deep-enciphered data and lightyears' passage of messages between stars.
I want my stuff to work in science, but I'm very very interested in human dynamics. To me the idea of a boy caught in interplanetary politics -- and so unable to get the help he needed -- was much more interesting to me than the idea that "in the future, all wrongs will be righted".
My SF is not about tech, or at least not totally, though I want to make that relevant. It is about what human means. I like those kinds of questions, and I like exploring them in my stories. I'm willing to fudge a bit to make them happen; for instance I have one deeply shattered character reflecting thus:
==
He fell, he fell four hundred years in forty days, cast from hell to watch a star rise on distant textured shores.
He fell and in the fall was safe wrapped proof against cold, death so chill not even stars warmed it, and it was all around him and he had taken it with him and it is outside him still and he knows, he knows the others sense it.
And they do not make him see it himself, they do not call it from his depths to hang before him, and he can stay wrapped in the shroud and hold still. If he holds still the pocket stabilizes, it is like not moving in cold water, thin layer of heat vanishing with any motion.
Because outside, in the dark, is —
It is dark like a mirror of black water and it stirs and in it faces not his own reflect on him.
[From my _A Fire in Arcadia I: Kindling_]
==
Now I'm talking here about a boy with a broken mind, and he's slowly reintegrating that. But how to make it sensible? He's been sent to another world by parents desperate to help him, but the trip itself cost time and he was affected by it -- it was, after all, a plunge through endless black death. Impossible according to us now. Am I troubled by that? No. Sometimes the words are better than the facts, I guess.
So he sees faces near him. and they remind him of the emotional ghosts that haunted him in his 400 LY trip.
This is not about science per se; it is about a melding of science and feeling. Will I fudge to make room for prose? Absolutely. I hope you can see why. I want to make the compromises palatable, that's all. And as I do, I want to bring to the fore the idea that we don't always know what we think we know.
In that light, the idea of a single youth with a damaged mind poised against the financial bureaucracy of 20 worlds is, to me, deeply interesting. So I'm looking for the obvious faults, not the subtle ones that will surface -- it's the obvious problems that are under control of the governments. We can assume the subtle ones are suppressed.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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