[FRIAM] hidden

Mon May 18 17:29:01 EDT 2020

FRANK!  I have always admitted to the existence of the mind.  I just don’t think it’s what you think it is.  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 3:21 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

At least you admit the existence of a mind.

On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 3:13 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto: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 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 1:16 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com <mailto: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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Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

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