Sovereignty demystified.

I am about to commit some significant changes to my current working copy: local branch master checksum ID of 402ba642a6. Central to Clique Space(TM - although this link to a blog entry published in late June of 2012 is showing its age) is this thing I call the Sovereign. The changes I talk about here implement the the Sovereign's prime purpose.

If one wants to design a system that could potentially act as a medium through which individuality can be projected if not also manifest, the notion of individuality would have to be well defined and delineated. This had been a prime necessity that mothered the concept's invention way back in 2004. Back then I had only the most incidental of notions (I knew it would involve digital signatures created from something that would never be transmitted between Client Devices) of how this feat would be pulled off.

The fact in 2004 was that there was so much about the mechanism of Clique Space that was opaque to my intellect - so much that I could not hold in my mind that I had to start implementing it before I could figure out all of the concept's subtleties. I could see that although the data model (thrashed out a little before publication in the patent of 2008) disclosed the possibility of realisation of the concept, more than fourteen years of deliberation had to be endured before the question of sovereignty could be approached in any substantial way. Sovereignty is the central notion for Clique Space - a notion without which Clique Space would simply not make sense.

The patent first published in January of 2008 used the name Account. At that time, and although the notion of delineating that which was and was not self was considered important, these notions were still a very nascent. As the years advanced and the concept evolved (through terms such as "Repropsyche"... don't know what I was on there, "Absurdum"... indeed I must have been losing hope at this point, and Axle ... a name I trialled because I began to understand how truly central this Element would be), I settled on Sovereign. This fact was disclosed in a blog entry made in December of 2012.

The something that is never transmitted has evolved to become what I now call "that which is sacred". I take this to note that if there is a way to introduce quasi-religious terms into one's software, then this, as far as I can tell, appears to be it. It appears to be a systematic formalisation of the necessary ideal of the sacred, monopolised by religion for most of human experience hitherto, to make manifestation possible. Perhaps this feature is also responsible for inspiring religion in those who are manifest... who knows? I'm no believer, but I find the intersection I appear to have to navigate in Clique Space to be curious.

That which is sacred is stored in a Client Device as a message digest of something that can be input to a digest algorithm. I have used SHA1 in the implementation, but have noted to myself that this algorithm has weaknesses that render it unsuitable for general use. The SHA1 algorithm has proven convenient for my implementation. That which is sacred is never disclosed between Client Devices; it is something that is probably known to the manifest individual (it would certainly serve the interests of the manifest individual to know what it is), but is certainly not known to anyone else because shared knowledge of this value could render the subject vulnerable to a breach of their sovereignty.

The Identity, like the Sovereign, is a component (an Element as stipulated in the patent) that has survived from the concept's genesis, although it too was renamed from the less poetic Active Affiliation. Identities are used to project one's presence onto things in the world. Identities are known as identified Elements because Identities (as well and Participants) are identified by a 20 byte string known as an identifier. It was the coincidence between the length of the identifier and the length of an SHA1 digest that motivated me to use SHA1 while implementing the proof-of-concept; it wouldn't be much work at all to change the length of the identifier when another algorithm is selected, but I decided it was too much work for me to worry myself about now.

The Identity's identifier is combined with that which is sacred using a bitwise exclusive-or operation. This yields an input to the SHA1 pseudo-random number generator which is used to generate a key pair. The private and public keys are assigned to a structure known as a co-Sovereign key, and this key is stored inside the Identity instance. The presence of a co-Sovereign key inside an Identity instance signifies to the Client Device that the given Identity is a Sovereign Element.

Another structure known as a contra-Sovereign key, containing only the public key, is created. This structure is stored as a quale which is assigned to the Identity's key property and communicated inside transmitters between co-engaged Client Devices over synapses formed by the process of engagement. The mechanisms that permit all of this were designed and constructed after the patent was published, as part of the fourteen year journey in the wilderness of concept's development thus far. There are plenty of previous blog entries to regale the interested reader.

A Client Device that receives an Identity key's surrogate will reconstitute the quale and assign the quale to the Identity key's property under a new disclosure if this is indeed a new disclosure. If a new disclosure instance is added to the property, the Client Device will compute a presumptive co-Sovereign key for this Identity. If the public key of this (currently presumptive) co-Sovereign key matches the public key of the disclosed contra-Sovereign key, the co-Sovereign key is stored within the Identity instance; the quality of sovereignty has been proven to be actual and not merely presumptive.

Hence, an Identity's Sovereign Element status can be communicated between two Client Devices. In a similar way, Connections also have sovereignty in that Connections represent Client Device communication access points. A Sovereign Connection represents a co-sovereigned Client Device or rather a unit of mechanism that manifests a particular individual known as the Sovereign to both devices. A biological neuron is an instance of the mechanism of cognitive function in a similar way that a similar machine is an instance designed with the purpose of participating in cognition as a Clique Space aware Neuron (an instance of a subtype of Client Device). A Connection represents an individual Client Device (or perhaps merely one way of contacting one Client Device - one Client Device could have more than one Connection) so activities like synapse formation in Clique Space can occur.

It's all going well. I think my concept is demonstrable to those who might be able to understand its function and can see its application while a practical demonstration of an application is still a ways off. Perhaps I'll find someone who will see Clique Space for what it can promise. Perhaps some day soon.

This is my 200th blog entry.... yay! Two hundred blog entries (most of which appear to have been made in 2010 - 2013 because I was doing a lot of "heavy duty thinking" back then) in over nine years!

Naked Neurons, other types of Neurons.

It's been a while since my last post. I'm still alive; I'm still doing this thing I call Clique Space(TM).

This evening, I feel somewhat relaxed. I have a working copy (only a little more than two weeks' old) still to be committed to my code base. This working copy is the first revision where I have moved the main method out of the Neuron and into two new projects. The first is called the "Naked Neuron", and the second, the "Clothed Neuron". The first represents an ongoing specialisation of the Neuron, while the second is somewhat of a hypothetical (even rather useless) specialisation of the Neuron so that I can conduct further tests on the efficacy of the Client Device project more generally. My motivation for writing tonight came from an observation that perhaps I see a reasonably stable implementation of the way in which Neurons can be specialised.

Apart from the fact that Neurons can contribute fully in cognition (glia are denied this privilege because they cannot engage their neighbouring Neurons as respondents), a naked Neuron has no capacity to do anything else. A naked Neuron can act as nothing more than a relay between otherwise clothed Neurons who may not share a direct engagement. Naked Neurons know how to communicate in Clique Space as initiators and respondents, but have no other ability; apart from Clique Space itself, a naked Neuron has no capacity to contribute to "thinking" by virtue of the fact that naked Neurons do not model any other medium.

Clique Space acquires a thinking capacity because some Neurons can be specialised: some can perhaps be made to respond to photons hitting them; some can be made to contract like muscles; some can, when stimulated by other Neurons, perhaps produce some sensations that yet other Neurons specialised in some other way can react to. Glia (I cannot consider a naked version of these ever to make sense) can be specialised to maintain a nice environment for themselves and their Neural brethren. They can perhaps help by dilating nearby nutrient vessels when they detect their neighbouring Neurons undergoing heavy cognition, or perhaps glia help speed signal flow by enclosing the axons of their Neural neighbours in a sheath of myelin.

A Clique Space Neuron software implementation can be specialised by extending the inbound Connection class (NeuralInboundConnection) exposed as an abstract class in the Neuron project. This class can be extended to capture stimuli that are generated though some other medium present on the specialised Neuron's host hardware. These stimuli must be recorded as qualia - the units of cognition - that must also be accompanied by instances of a surrogate - a serialisable proxy of a quale - so qualia related to a given stimulus can be sent as a signal from one Client Device to be reconstituted as quale in another. Signals are individually wrapped in envelopes, and collections of envelopes are bundled in transmitters before transmitters are exchanged as part of a synapse's activity cycle.

A property also needs to be created and stored (usually) as a native property of the extended version of the inbound Connection. This property allows a Neuron to form and communicate a belief that a particular stimulus (the object - perhaps associated with a sense datum quale different to the object quale) has been received by the a given Neuron, and is being asserted by a given Identity.

This very quickly put together summary of Clique Space constitutes a semantically rigid language of thought that I have no reason not to believe would ultimately derive of a synthetic mechanism the ability to exist.

Perhaps... I have no idea really and odds on this is probably bullshit. Even so, it appears to have worked for me so far.