Re: [FRIAM] *-sovereignty

[Jon Zingale]

"""
I'm thinking along the lines of your side note that propositions have
many proofs (polyphenism) and agents have many identities (robustness).
"""

Thank you for that connection, I hadn't thought about it. It is the
polyphenism that I typically find most exciting about proofs, the way
proof of a single well-defined proposition may find many expressions,
that a new proof of a known result can provide insight into unfamiliar
domains. For instance, last vFriam I mentioned my first encounter with
Furstenberg's proof of Euclid's famous proof, and how it provided me my
first real insight into point-set topology.

"""
So when we do this authentication and attempt to retain self-sovereignty,
we're simply inferring some sort of *signature* that is as unique as
their "soul", but is not a structural analogy to their (unique) soul.
"""

That's how I understand Stephen's proposition, but I don't really know.

.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives:
 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
 1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

[Jon Zingale]

"""
I know these are supposed to be not-very-serious examples, but to take
them at least somewhat seriously would you elaborate a bit? Let's focus
on the bucket filling with water. Are you saying that this can be cast
as a stigmergic interaction? How so?
"""

Sure, though perhaps stigmergic-adjacent, like an automaton that is one
stack shy of a Turing machine. I am struggling with your question for a
number of reasons that I can only hope to successfully convey. I am
guided by two related images:

1. The problem a flatlander faces when attempting to establish that they
are in fact on the surface of a projective space, that locally all looks
nice and flat, but bracketed "out-there" at infinity is an inaccessible
"twist".

2. The observation that while a stream function and a potential function
(ψ, φ) appear to be distinct, and spookily related, the picture is
quickly clarified when one sees these two functions as different aspects
of a single analytic function (φ + iψ)[∆]. For our purposes, I imagine
generalizing ψ and φ to endofunctors on behavior. Some of what this buys
is the wiggle room to allow the behavior spaces to be of different kinds
than one another and for the duality not to need to be strict inverses,
instead pseudo-inverses or adjoints.

Consider the classic stigmergic ant-pheromone system. The *indirect*
coordination of ants is mediated by pheromone *in* the environment. This
is the picture of a system where ants are a thing and the pheromone
memory is not *in* them. I see this as a particular choice of basis, one
where a decision is made about what is or is not part of the ant and
what is or is not part of the environment. I see this as a localization
and a factorization of a complex whole. On the one hand, we can perceive
the ants as performing a search, but just as easily, on the other,
perceive the "search" as pheromone organizing itself in space, (the ants
playing the part of a local update rule), that is, one can argue that the
ants are a function taking pheromone in space back into pheromone in
space. Such a process begins with pheromone potentially everywhere and
ends with it organized along some geodesic.

This point is usually a tripping point that leads to endless pedantry[!]
in the form of asking whether or not the ants, themselves, lack memory.
For one factorization of what an idealized ant *is* they have no memory,
from another they do. A useless misunderstanding from my perspective.

Moving on, let's take a lead from Nick and consider a thermostat system
(or some other governor in its context). There we have the coordination
of atoms in a coiled bimetallic strip with a switch that is hooked up
to a furnace that vents into a room with the bimetallic strip...

Again, we perform some arbitrary localization, placing the "twist"
either inside or out, the twist here perhaps is the thermal capacity of
the room acting like a leaky memory. From one perspective, the atoms in
the bimetallic switch change their behavior indirectly, via the furnace
and the room. Alternatively, we could have chosen to make *the agent*
the furnace and made the following parallel:

(termites)
1. Some termites build a little bit of mound here and then there
2. A mounding threshold is met, and then
3. A "switch" is flipped in behavior of the termites that follow, or the
mound's form signals to future termites, and
4. The termites are now set to go off to do some other task.

(furnace)
1. A furnace builds up the temperature in the room bit by bit.
2. A temperature threshold is met (via the coil), and then
3. A "switch" is flipped in the behavior of the furnace, or the coil's
form signals to the furnace, and
4. The furnace is now set to another task (quiescence)

More generally, I am not very clear on what makes stigmergy so special.
My joke with the buckets is to suggest that nearly everywhere we see
dynamical wholes, we can probably find a localization and a factorization
yielding a stigmergic perspective. In the bucket case, I wanted to take
a step further than the thermostat situation and suggest a non-leaky
memory, a non-governing system, one where the dynamics clearly switches
mode never to return.

Apologies for this muddled rant, I probably should have taken a lead
from Marcus and coded up some examples in a functional reactive style.
Really, I only meant to emphasize that stigmergy appears to me as a
local concept and that it might be useful to characterize the notion in
the language of endofunctors and natural transformations.

[∆]: https://math.mit.edu/~jorloff/18.04/notes/topic6.pdf

[!]: In my earlier post, I wanted to throw a bone to the realists by
suggesting that there might be something to the idea of privileging some
bases more than others from the perspective of an induced computational
complexity. It is easy to make termites without mounds and hard to make
mounds without termites, a choosing of basis by optimizing a trapdoor
pairing. I haven't thought this through very carefully, so maybe I

Re: [FRIAM] *-sovereignty

[uǝlƃ ☤ $]

Ah, thanks. So you were talking about robustness in both cases. Sorry for my 
confusion.

I suppose there's also some ambiguity in "global". Sometimes I use "non-local" 
to indicate information bound to the context, but where there are still 
encapsulated/opaque regions. And then "global" means *everything* is 
accessable, even if it's encapsulated inside some sub-region.

Your comment about colorings sounds like you're expressing doubt about 
univalence axiom. But, in my ignorance, it seems to rely on a singular 
definition of equivalence. For well-defined things like graph coloring, rules 
like "no adjacent color" seem to establish an unambiguous equivalence. But such 
things rarely obtain over dirty objects like humans (or even computing in the 
wild e.g. intrusion detection or forensics). As long as our authentication 
methods assume such tight equivalences, we'll be susceptible to adversaries. 

A great example are these silly authentication apps. Sure, it's harder to steal 
one's authenticator creds than it is to capture one's SMS traffic. But the 
flaws are in the same category. The biggest joke is the big 3 credit agencies 
tendency to have you verify against your previous addresses ... or vehicles 
you've owned. Pffft. For those sites that make you select a series of personal 
questions, I pity the poor fool who answers them with actual historical facts 
from their life. If you're targeting me and you *don't* know my mother's maiden 
name, then you're a *terrible* hacker. 8^D


On 10/21/21 8:57 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> """
> Could the verifier be allowed a global understanding using something
> akin to homomorphic encryption, though?
> """
> 
> In some sense I would suppose yes for FHE, but the method of verification
> in ZKP seems not to be. Again, you mentioned playing fast and loose with
> the bindings. It would be great to really understand FHE systems better,
> and there is always plowing through the Gentry paper or checking in on
> how far Google has publicly gotten with it. From what I understand about
> FHE, one encrypts some data (whole databases, perhaps) and then one can
> operate on that data in its encrypted form via homomorphisms. Now one
> can operate meaningfully on the data without having access to the data.
> I would suspect it is necessary to present a limited DSL of homomorphic
> actions to make this privacy truly work. One wouldn't want one of those
> accessible homomorphic actions to be to simply decode the database.
> 
> 
> """
> So, I would have said: Just like propositions participate in many
> proofs, identities can employ many agents. But we're playing fast and
> loose with our bindings. "Agent" often means the object/thing, whereas
> "identity" means the attributes of that object/thing. So, maybe you
> accidentally flipped that as you went along in the post?
> """
> 
> I am considering the bipartite (hyper?) graph at the top of Stephen's
> earlier Wikipedia reference[ω]. There they use the word entity instead
> of the word agent. I do mean many proofs for a proposition, for instance,
> the proposition could be that there are an infinite number of primes.
> A piece that I could easily be missing is in the "colorings" formal
> analogy. There, do different formal proofs of a statement give different
> colorings? Is there ultimately an isomorphism between possible proofs
> and possible colorings? This part doesn't seem right to me, I would be
> surprised. So, I know I am missing something.
> 
> [ω] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Identity-concept.svg 
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives:
 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
 1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/

Re: [FRIAM] *-sovereignty

[Jon Zingale]

"""
Could the verifier be allowed a global understanding using something
akin to homomorphic encryption, though?
"""

In some sense I would suppose yes for FHE, but the method of verification
in ZKP seems not to be. Again, you mentioned playing fast and loose with
the bindings. It would be great to really understand FHE systems better,
and there is always plowing through the Gentry paper or checking in on
how far Google has publicly gotten with it. From what I understand about
FHE, one encrypts some data (whole databases, perhaps) and then one can
operate on that data in its encrypted form via homomorphisms. Now one
can operate meaningfully on the data without having access to the data.
I would suspect it is necessary to present a limited DSL of homomorphic
actions to make this privacy truly work. One wouldn't want one of those
accessible homomorphic actions to be to simply decode the database.


"""
So, I would have said: Just like propositions participate in many
proofs, identities can employ many agents. But we're playing fast and
loose with our bindings. "Agent" often means the object/thing, whereas
"identity" means the attributes of that object/thing. So, maybe you
accidentally flipped that as you went along in the post?
"""

I am considering the bipartite (hyper?) graph at the top of Stephen's
earlier Wikipedia reference[ω]. There they use the word entity instead
of the word agent. I do mean many proofs for a proposition, for instance,
the proposition could be that there are an infinite number of primes.
A piece that I could easily be missing is in the "colorings" formal
analogy. There, do different formal proofs of a statement give different
colorings? Is there ultimately an isomorphism between possible proofs
and possible colorings? This part doesn't seem right to me, I would be
surprised. So, I know I am missing something.

[ω] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Identity-concept.svg

.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives:
 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
 1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/

Re: [FRIAM] *-sovereignty

[uǝlƃ ☤ $]

Could the verifier be allowed a global understanding using something akin to 
homomorphic encryption, though?

I'm thinking along the lines of your side note that propositions have many 
proofs (polyphenism) and agents have many identities (robustness). I worry that 
I've missed your point, though, because polyphenism isn't analogous to 
robustness, they're complements. So, I would have said: Just like propositions 
participate in many proofs, identities can employ many agents. But we're 
playing fast and loose with our bindings. "Agent" often means the object/thing, 
whereas "identity" means the attributes of that object/thing. So, maybe you 
accidentally flipped that as you went along in the post?

In any case, I see the authentic human/organism as at least somewhat opaque to 
an infinitely extensible peek process, verification process. Their essence is 
always encrypted out of reach. Then we do verify that any communication is with 
them "up to taste" ... or fit to context purpose. So when we do this 
authentication and attempt to retain self-sovereignty, we're simply inferring 
some sort of *signature* that is as unique as their "soul", but is not a 
structural analogy to their (unique) soul.

I can't help but think someone must already be working on a well-stated problem 
like this. SteveS mentioned Cardano awhile back. And I'm constantly on the hunt 
for distributed VMs I can actually use (you know, like you would use Linode 
 but pay with some crypto coin instead of 
monthly draws from your credit card). It seems that somewhere in the smart 
contracts space, someone should already be working on this problem. Have any of 
you actually used such a dApp, paying with ADA or ETH or whatever?

If so, what's more interesting re: this thread is the adversarial stance. If 
you're doing some computation, can I *hack* it and steal your computation (or 
your computational result)?

On 10/20/21 5:27 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> I suppose the slogan could be:
> "Proofs are to propositions as identities are to agents",
> and in the context of zero knowledge protocols, the parallel extends to:
> 
> φ: Verifying a proof without exposing the proof.
> ψ: Verifying an identity without exposing the identity.
> 
> To the degree that φ is the case and that the formal analogy connecting
> φ to ψ holds, I suspect ZKP is sufficient for establishing self-sovereign
> identity.
> 
> In practice, I imagine that to each agent a provable proposition (of
> some significant computational complexity[κ]) is assigned. The statement
> is then converted into a 3-coloring problem[З] while the proof is
> transformed into an instance of one such 3-coloring. The rest is pressing
> plates. It seems worth mentioning that just as a proposition may have
> many proofs, an agent may have many identities.
> 
> A thing that has always impressed me about ZKP is that the verification
> process is constrained to be a local process. That is, at no point does
> the verifier get a global picture[λ] of the proof (as that would give the
> proof away) and instead, in the spirit of a Las Vegas algorithm, one
> verifies only up to taste.
> 
> For those interested, I highly recommend this numberphile episode:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ovdoxnfFVc_channel=Numberphile2 
> 
> 
> [κ] Where the proposition is about products of RSA group elements, some
> discrete log problem, or some other trapdoor function.
> 
> [λ] In my much earlier post to Nick on limits of inference, I attempted
> to connect this locality to physical limitations such as light cones,
> and propositions to phenomena like spin. Unfortunately, EricC shrugged
> and nothing more came of it ;)
> 
> [З] 
> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.419.8132=rep1=pdf
>  
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ


.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives:
 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
 1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/