[FRIAM] hidden

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

> You jumped close to where I was about to go! Now that we have some conception of how this principle is holographic (everything's there on the surface, all we need is the way to read it)
I appreciate this (added) exposure of your (hidden/interior) meaning of
"holographic".   My own experience has me "reading" your use to imply
something *slightly* different.  I see with this expression that you are
focusing on the dimension-reduction (from 3D to 2D nominally?) whilst
maintaining (near?) completeness/homogeneity in sampling?  In practice,
*light holography* is only capable of transferring the radiosity from
the surfaces of 3D objects to another surface (photographic plane/plate,
photographic emulsion on an arbitrary surface).     The key point to my
observation is that only "occlusion" is obviated, not "interiority".   I
accept that the way you are using holographic might derive from a more
cosmological view and the "things being imaged" are not prone to obscure
or occlude others... 
> , I'd like to demonstrate that we don't *need* "interiority" to argue for privacy. But my argument differs a bit from yours below. Yours below argues that the keys/ways to read the surface may be inaccessible. My argument is that there are *many* ways to read the surface, some of which may even be mutually exclusive [†]. Further, I think there's a no-go result lurking beneath that we might get to if we get past the lower order results.

Following the (light) holography analogy, it is the re-illumination of
the hologram with the same wavelength of coherent light that reproduces
the surface characteristics of the object (somewhat) faithfully.   If we
illuminate with (not necessarily coherent but modestly collimated) white
light, or another pure frequency of coherent light, we get distortions
of the original image (the first method is convenient and yields what
most of us would call "rainbow" holograms, while the second yields
*scale* shifts which is often used to effectively resize/scale the
hologram).   Knowing the original setup of the hologram recording
(frequency/phase  and spatial location of the source and reference beam)
(when used for metrology for example) allows for more complete/accurate
reproduction.   This is similar to doing decryption with an exact copy
of the codebook.   Code breaking and even practical
encryption/decryption in the field admits for the possibility of
incomplete codebooks (e.g. using different editions of a phonebook or a
bible or other widely distributed book.)

> I'll start with comprehension of strings to work my way to the simplest form of privacy. Stronger forms might follow. Given the string "tin", what ways are there to transform the string? And by what ontology do we decide which of those transforms produce something meaningful? Obviously, an English speaker would land upon the reverse() function, reverse(tin) => "nit". A programmer might use cons(cdr(),car()) => "int". Someone who triggers on "interiority" might use the simpler cdr() => "in". >8^D A chemist include selecting just the first 2 to get Ti. We could elide the middle to get TN, Tennessee. Etc.
These are all examples of selecting or valuating transformations
(letter-scrambles and elisions) based on the relative entropy yielded in
a secondary lexicon?
> The idea is that when a *surface* presents itself, what are all the possible ways to *decode* that data? And, further, which decoding processes produce meaningful results? (I'd argue this is the definition of intrusion detection, anti-virus software, code breaking, etc.) 
thus something like entropy relative to the target domain of some model
or another?

>  If a super simple example like the string "tin" shows an explosion of possible transformations, what can we get from a more realistic example like finding Waldo in a kid's book? Or (Satan help me) interpreting an ink blot?
>
> Given that combinatorial explosion, it is practically infeasible [‡] to slice/rebundle the possibly meaningful transforms down into a collection that can be handled in any small amount of time/resources. Hence we get the simplest form of privacy: "privacy through obscurity". 

> None of us will ever know Frank's image of some childhood friend because there are simply too many ways to parse the data. David Icke can always recant some silly conspiracy theory by saying "that's not what I meant". Trump can avoid responsibility by claiming he said something sarcastically. Etc. There's no way for us to know, for sure, that a chosen decoder isn't the wrong decoder.
And there IS an art to plausible ambiguity, which Trump seems
particularly adept at.   I think that was roughly what Dave did when he
declared "the end of the Pandemic".   While such slip-slideyness ( a
variation on moving the goalposts?) can be maddening, it can also be
fascinating.   My father taught my sister and I to play "Battleship" on
a simple pad of gridded paper (long before I ever saw the Mattel plastic
board-game, and a cousin taught me a meta-game on that same theme,
principle, which was where each side was allowed to *move* it's ships
after each shot was fired.   So this made it a more symmetric game where
the one can in real time decode the *intentions* of the other player as
they design a pattern of fire.   A good "defensive" player could in
principle avoid being hit right up until there are "no places left to
hide".   The game played this way was probably   just a complicated
version of tic-tac-toe with only "bad play" not any particular "good play".
>
> Of course, this raises the question of big data, AI, Moore's Law, etc. With enough time/resources, we can brute force our way through it. With enough crafty logic, we can winnow the space down. So, if anyone cares, we can take further steps to establish higher order privacy. Note that I'm *still* assuming that everything's there on the surface. I'm trying to use the position I infer from EricC and Nick to *demonstrate* privacy.

And you aren't even invoking quantum computing, which throws a whole
other wrench into, no?

I don't know if anyone else here (besides Marcus) has watched the
streaming series "Devs"?   It has some ugly flaws in it by my measure
but overall it is a good study on the question of the (a?) multiverse
and the possibilities implied by bid data and AI and of course, quantum
computing?


- Steve