[FRIAM] hidden

Mon May 18 17:20:44 EDT 2020

At least you admit the existence of a mind.

On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 3:13 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Glen,
>
> I wonder if this conversation is an example of itself.  I do not possess
> the knowledge, language, etc to understand what you are saying, here, hence
> it is "hidden".  A color blind person lacks the code to see the numeral
> hidden within the diagram.  Is this a fair oversimplification of the
> concept you are getting at?
>
> Mind you, I have much less of a problem with "hidden" than I do with
> "inside", which I think launches discussants into an endlessly useless
> confusion between the mind and the brain, the latter being
> uncontroversially enclosed within the skull, the latter being distributed
> across the environment and actions of the person whose mind it is.
>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
> Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 1:16 PM
> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: [FRIAM] hidden
>
>
> The best layman's example of what I mean by "hidden X" (where X means a
> category of things ... "states", "behaviors", "information", "spaces",
> etc.) relies on steganography (which SteveS mentions a lot). But 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). But my own reliance on the *opacity* of the boundary
> prevents me from communicating my point clearly, especially re: some kind
> of holographic principle for modeling a person's internal world via their
> observable behavior.
>
> So, even though I still think homomorphic encryption is an excellent
> analogy for the mind, a particular *type* of steganography is an actual
> example of (not a metaphor or analogy for) information hiding. Here are 2
> concrete examples: 1) hiding one image "inside" [†] another image, and 2)
> hiding a QR code "inside" an image.
>
> Here are eg links:
> (1)
> https://towardsdatascience.com/steganography-hiding-an-image-inside-another-77ca66b2acb1
> (2)
> https://projet.liris.cnrs.fr/imagine/pub/proceedings/ICPR-2016/media/files/0542.pdf
>
> (1) and (2) are examples (again, NOT metaphor [‡]) of a type I've tried to
> call "thin models". Everything about the model is written right there on
> the surface of it ... plain as day. All you have to do is *read it
> correctly*. My canonical example is a typical (system of) ODE model.
> Barring something pathological like it being "stiff" or whatever and
> forcing a wise choice of integrator, a typical ODE model is very thin,
> everything you need to know is right there in front of you. Of course, the
> normal form of some expression can *hide* the intent of the modeler because
> the modeler will group terms (bounded by operators like + and *)
> mechanistically ... to communicate some sort of meta- or semantic
> information about the model's components. The normalized form can hide the
> modeler's intent through (e.g. algebric) transformations. But no
> information is actually lost ... that apparent lossage is just an artifact
> of the way the model is read ... just like in (1) and (2) above.
>
> I hope that helps explain my (perhaps perverse, but I don't think so) use
> of the word "hidden". And I'm hoping that the 2 links will help with
> not-really-mathematical-though-it-may-look-mathematical understanding.
>
> To get from this discussion to the one about scale, celery mechanisms, and
> telescopes, all you need is to imagine either (1) or (2) with your phone in
> between you and the image. Without the phone, with the phone, without the
> phone. The hop-distance (in transformations, here the main one being the
> phone) from your eyeball to the image *measures* the hiddenness of the
> hidden information. The embedded information is 1 hop away. Maybe you can
> imagine the hidden information is reversed so not only do you need the
> phone, but you need to look at your phone in the mirror. Then the hidden
> image would be 2 hops away, 2 transforms away. Etc.
>
> If you've read this far, thanks. I value the opportunity to clarify the
> idea (even if I don't believe it).
>
>
>
> [†] Please dampen your *trigger* on the word "inside". An example of what
> I mean, here, is something like a string of characters being "inside" a
> word ... e.g. the letter "i" is inside the word "sit". It's only "inside"
> if you process the string in a subset of ways. The same is true of both (1)
> and (2) above. If you reallyreallyreally can't dampen your trigger and are
> so impulsive that you simply can't think without arguing about the meaning
> of that one little word, then change the word "inside" to something like
> "side-by-side with" or "bracketed by" -- thx Jon -- or whatever you need to
> do to force yourself to grok the idea. To boot, with the QR code, example,
> it's arguable whether the QR code is inside the image or the image is
> inside the QR code ... just like if you read "sit" as {s}i{t}, then you
> could say "i" is outside but "s" and "t" are inside ... whatever.
>
> [‡] Except in the sense of some kind of set closure or equivalence class
> where all the elements of the class are analogs for every other member of
> the class. Extensional equivalence via intensional metaphor?!? [ptouie] >8^D
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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-- 
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