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[Jon Zingale]

Frank, Glen, Nick,

Glen writes:
`... 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).`

Fully homomorphic encryption† was also the metaphor I originally
had in mind. In an effort to not complicate matters, I decided to focus
on the idea of public key encryption more generally. Thank you, Glen
for taking it the rest of the way. Because Glen, Nick and I appear to
differ on Frank's mind only in that we disagree about the way that
Frank's mind is public, I will attempt to switch sides and argue for
why his mind may be private.

Firstly, while we may only need to know some combination of
*transformations* which will allow us to know his mind, it may
be the case that those transformations are not accessible to
us. As an example and in analogy to computation, it may be the
case that we are not the kind of machines which can recognize
the language produced by a mind. While we as observers are
able to finite automata our way along observations of Frank,
his mind is producing context-free sentences, say. I don't
entirely buy this argument, but it also may be defendable.
As another example/analogy, we may be attempting to solve
a problem analogous to those geometric problems of Greek
antiquity††. It may take a psychological analog to Galois theory
before we understand exactly why we can't know Frank's mind.

Secondly, it may be that the encryption metaphor should
actually be something closer to hashing. A friend of mine
once said that *rememberings* were morphisms between
*forgettings*. We are often ok with the idea that memory is
lossy, but why not thoughts themselves? Perhaps, at least
with regard to what we can observer of Frank, every time
Frank thinks of a covariant tensor he is reconstituting
something fundamentally different. The *remembering* is
always between different *forgettings*.

Ok, I am not sure I could necessarily defend these thoughts.
Further, I am not sure they are necessarily helpful to our
conversation. It seemed a good idea to try.

On the topic of steganography, I wanted to mention the
book *Steganographia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganographia>*. I had
originally read about it in some
part of Neal Stephenson's *Baroque Cycle*, and it has since
found a place in my heart. The book, originally written in
1499, is perhaps the oldest text on the subject of cryptography.
What is amazing about the book is that it is an example of
itself (nod to Nick). The plaintext content of the book is
on the subject of magic, but for a reader clever enough to
find the deciphering key the book is about cryptography.
I had found a copy from the 1700's in the rare books library
at the University of Texas some years ago. The content was
*doubly hidden* from me as I neither had the deciphering
key nor can I read Latin ;)

Jon

†: If any members of the group would like to form a reading
group around Craig Gentry's thesis on FHE
<https://www.bookdepository.com/Fully-Homomorphic-Encryption-Scheme-Craig-Gentry/9781243663139>,
I would gladly
participate.
†† While it turned out that the Greek's assumptions about
the power of a compass and straightedge were incorrect,
work beginning with Margherita Beloch
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margherita_Piazzola_Beloch> (and culminating
with the Huzita-Hatori
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huzita%E2%80%93Hatori_axioms> axioms) show
that origami would
have been a more powerful choice!
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