Re: Close, but not yet...
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
Re: Close, but not yet...
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
Close, but not yet...
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7304 The article describes new inroads into electronically sensing what human brains are perceiving. There's quite a lot of sensationalistic language to it, and not much substance IMO, but there are a couple of interesting passages to me: The pair showed patterns of parallel lines in 1 of 8 orientations to four volunteers. By focussing on brain regions involved in visual perception they were able to recognise which orientation the subjects were observing. Each line orientation corresponded to a different pattern of brain activity, although the patterns were different in each person. ...and: More subtle forms of mind-reading such as working out intentions or beliefs are much more speculative, she argues. Even if such subtle information could be gleaned from brain scans both studies suggest the patterns are unique to individuals. This intrigues me because of something in my WIP, _The Seven-Year Mirror_ -- one of the subplots involves using schizophrenics as information couriers. The reason is pretty simple. In the 2K+ -year-distant future there's a sophisticated machine called Rosetta that can read thoughts. What it does is flash a long series of (essentially) test patterns at a subject, including sensations, aromas and flavors, and the subject's responses are charted and mapped to a general consciousness model. When enough data points are in place, that subject's conscious mind becomes more or less transparent to Rosetta, and whenever s/he has a conscious thought it appears in a visualization device. The idea is that schizophrenics, whose brain chemistry and structure are at variant from the norm, can't be read in Rosetta, which makes them essentially totally secure couriers of information. (The details of embedding the information and wiping it are also covered in the story.) What's funny about this is that I came at it from a totally different angle than the biological; I was looking at it as a simple cryptographic problem, just noodling a couple years back with a few random concepts. If we all have more or less the same *basic* idea of what a cat is, and furthermore how it's different from a dog, then it seems to me the only *real* organic difference in how those thoughts are held has to do with individual neural layout, since of course brain structures are not identical. However, they might well be very *isomorphic*, which got me wondering whether it wasn't possible to, in essence, compare enough scrambled signals against a baseline, thereby getting an idea of what ... well, what a given idea was someone was holding. Which meant, to me, that with enough data points and a large enough neural mapping database, pretty much anyone's thought patterns could be mapped, though not with 100% accuracy or clarity. At least not yet. So what would be the way to prevent that mapping from working? It seemed obvious to me: A one-time pad. One-time pads are used to scramble a coded message and are then discarded (hence their name); with a genuine one-time pad encryption, a message is irretrievably obfuscated. The only way to decrypt it is with a key, and if that key is lost, so it the message, forever. This is because with a real one-time pad any single character in the message could be replaced by any other character. A note the length of this one would probably never be deciphered, even if the universe lasts another fifty or so billion years and there was an infinite number of compute cycles to commit to its cracking. 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. -- 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 ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Close, but not yet...
On 4/25/05, Warren Ockrassa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip This intrigues me because of something in my WIP, _The Seven-Year Mirror_ -- one of the subplots involves using schizophrenics as information couriers. The reason is pretty simple. In the 2K+ -year-distant future there's a sophisticated machine called Rosetta that can read thoughts. What it does is flash a long series of (essentially) test patterns at a subject, including sensations, aromas and flavors, and the subject's responses are charted and mapped to a general consciousness model. When enough data points are in place, that subject's conscious mind becomes more or less transparent to Rosetta, and whenever s/he has a conscious thought it appears in a visualization device. The idea is that schizophrenics, whose brain chemistry and structure are at variant from the norm, can't be read in Rosetta, which makes them essentially totally secure couriers of information. (The details of embedding the information and wiping it are also covered in the story.) What's funny about this is that I came at it from a totally different angle than the biological; I was looking at it as a simple cryptographic problem, just noodling a couple years back with a few random concepts. If we all have more or less the same *basic* idea of what a cat is, and furthermore how it's different from a dog, then it seems to me the only *real* organic difference in how those thoughts are held has to do with individual neural layout, since of course brain structures are not identical. However, they might well be very *isomorphic*, which got me wondering whether it wasn't possible to, in essence, compare enough scrambled signals against a baseline, thereby getting an idea of what ... well, what a given idea was someone was holding. Which meant, to me, that with enough data points and a large enough neural mapping database, pretty much anyone's thought patterns could be mapped, though not with 100% accuracy or clarity. At least not yet. So what would be the way to prevent that mapping from working? It seemed obvious to me: A one-time pad. One-time pads are used to scramble a coded message and are then discarded (hence their name); with a genuine one-time pad encryption, a message is irretrievably obfuscated. The only way to decrypt it is with a key, and if that key is lost, so it the message, forever. This is because with a real one-time pad any single character in the message could be replaced by any other character. A note the length of this one would probably never be deciphered, even if the universe lasts another fifty or so billion years and there was an infinite number of compute cycles to commit to its cracking. Ehh. You are correct that no mathematical approach can break one-time pads, since there is no connection between symbols for the math to undo, but if you had an infinity computer (or a decent approximation), you could simulate all possible senders and receivers and break it that way. 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. -- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books 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. ~Maru Perhaps the Rosettas could vary in capacity? Dumb, miniature ones working from hash tables, and expensive sophisticated realtime ones? ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Close, but not yet...
On Apr 25, 2005, at 12:41 PM, Maru Dubshinki wrote: On 4/25/05, Warren Ockrassa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So what would be the way to prevent that mapping from working? It seemed obvious to me: A one-time pad. One-time pads are used to scramble a coded message and are then discarded (hence their name); with a genuine one-time pad encryption, a message is irretrievably obfuscated. The only way to decrypt it is with a key, and if that key is lost, so it the message, forever. This is because with a real one-time pad any single character in the message could be replaced by any other character. A note the length of this one would probably never be deciphered, even if the universe lasts another fifty or so billion years and there was an infinite number of compute cycles to commit to its cracking. Ehh. You are correct that no mathematical approach can break one-time pads, since there is no connection between symbols for the math to undo, but if you had an infinity computer (or a decent approximation), you could simulate all possible senders and receivers and break it that way. 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? 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. 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. -- 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 ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
