Glen -
The "holographic" principle of [non]privacy: All valid questions about one's inner world can be properly asked as questions about one's interaction with the outer world. (Or for those triggered by "inside" and "outside": All valid questions about processes beyond a boundary can be properly asked as questions about the surface of the boundary.) 1st order privacy: There's a combinatorial explosion of possible ways to decode the surface. 2nd order privacy: The map from encoder to decoder is many-to-many. Feel free to continue to criticize [†] those. In the meantime, I'll just keep plugging along. >8^D My candidate for 3rd order privacy is *gaming*.
Let me first acknowledge that previious my questions about the choice of "holographic principle" as a term were mostly a tangent. Your own criticism that (wide use of?) metaphor risks excess meaning was in evidence... I wanted to help *trim* that excess meaning while *possibly* teasing out the useful extrapolations/interpolations within the metaphorical source domain of holography as an art/science for the target domain of privacy. I'm pretty sure I can let that go here, though I *do* think there is inspiration to be found in holography for the purpose of obfuscation. But all that for another thread, if I can muster the focus to give you a proper steelmannable strawman to start with.
I also want to acknowledge (and thank you for) the explication of the way you prefer to use the term criticism [†] in this context, I think it improves the quality of discourse here.
On to the meat of the matter:
1st order) When we encounter a signal (use text stream as a
familiar example) we may or may not recognize that there is
obfuscated meaning in that stream. In the common example, of
course, the stream usually looks like pure gibberish... having an
*apparent* high entropy. Attempts to decode the stream usually
involve seeking transforms which yield a low entropy or high
information content. Ideally, yielding a very specific, highly
unambiguous text stream which is not only recognizeable to the
decoder but possibly directly meaningful. In the classic
imagined examples, we have spies and counter spies attempting to
pass messages and intercept/decode those messages, etc. This is
where the specific technical term Steganography takes on
interest and I think alludes to or defines your 3rd order? I'm
not trying to impute specific meaning that you didn't intend, just
looking to tease out the language you are seeking to use and align
it with existing lexicons which may or may not be fully apt for
what you are getting at.
2nd order) I am literally not clear on what the implications of many-to-many are here. 1st order... one-to-many would seem to imply that the *decoder* is searching through the space of possible decodings (combinatoric) for the presumed singular encoder, but it also implies that the *encoder* is choosing from a similarly large number of *encodings*. Perhaps you are alluding to the case where some encodings can be decoded by more than one decoder or in some cases, multiple encoders can be decoded by the same decoder? I'm not sure what you are getting at, though I *am* confident that you are getting at somethings specific that I'm simply missing (so far).
3rd order and beyond) I don't know the technical implications in
cryptography for iterated encodings by different means. My own
preferred examples have multiple encodings being very different in
quality... and in particular semantic and socio-cultural encodings
of a message as implied by your reference to Moorcock/Joyce and
poetry in general.
FWIW, I would like to suggest that not all obfuscation is
adversarial in the strong sense. Dense as well as broadly
imagistic writing may be obfuscated to the casual reader for a
variety of reasons and in my experience good prose and poetry can
have many layers of meaning/implication. My own recent re-reading
of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a good example,
where I derived a very different message from that book than I did
when I read it at 20ish (whilst being deeply embedded in my own
brand of Motorcycle Cult(ure)). I'm not sure if Pirsig
necessarily considered all of the interpretations I might have
drawn at different times of my life with different experiences
under my belt, but in fact the message I received at 20ish still
seems valid and not a subset of the one received in my 60s? Is
this a tangent from your intended discussion?
- Steve
[†] By "criticism", I(glen) mean(s) the type of playing along, steelmanning, empathetic listening, constructive criticism to which I've (glen) tried to allude ... not sophist nit-picking about jargonal definitions of words, or appeals to authority...
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