Cryptography

Cryptography is a form of psychological sublimation whereby the discomfort of being unable to really say anything to anyone is replaced with the pursuit of preventing others from reading one’s ostensibly secret communications through the application of sophisticated mathematical techniques.

No one really has a “native language”. We all had to learn to project reality down onto the surface of whichever language coincidentally was taught us. What I want is a kind of anti-cipher: a special code that can be understood immediately by anyone who reads it.

Two people are having a conversation. Each is in the same place in their own copy of the world—two parallel dimensions that are almost the same except for some superficial differences. Each is the sole inhabitant of their copy, which is desolate apart from themselves, and, strictly speaking, they are themselves not even in the world at all; rather, the world is inside the self. These two worlds are connected by a thin electric telegraph wire. To send a message across, we follow this protocol: First, conceptualize what we want to say, guess what the other person is looking at, find a sequence of words that will lead the other person to notice what we want them to notice, and then encode it and begin transmission. We cannot know for sure if they understood what we sent, because if they didn’t understand the code, or if they saw something else, they nevertheless may be able to produce a response that coincidentally looks like what we would expect if they had understood. Or, they may understand, yet be unable to respond in a way that is intelligible to us.

Some people believe that all real things can be described in words or mathematical theorems. Can you send an effective reproduction of Robert Delaunay’s Les Fenêtres simultanée sur la ville over a flaky telegraph connection in Morse code? Using flag semaphore? And even if so (since this is approximately how images are transferred over the Internet), can you send the painting itself? If you believe it’s possible, or if you think that there is not really a difference between a painting and its representation on the Internet, you have been tricked! It is a mortal danger to confuse reality with language. All scientists at least pretend to have made this mistake, and some of them aren’t lying.

Technique for preserving evidence of dreams

After waking up, it’s obvious how different reality itself is from the view of it that is filtered through the brain. For a few seconds it’s apparently possible for the brain to produce memories, even if only vague ones, yet still bypass the normal filters that reduce experiences to images of experiences and objects in the world to descriptions of objects in the world. It helps to prepare in advance: Before falling asleep, or even while dreaming, prepare yourself that as soon as you begin to wake up, you will try to memorize an exact sequence of words—because words can survive the forgetfulness that otherwise accompanies waking up—and then, very quickly, at just the right moment, compose a message to be sent over the wire that preserves the necessary meaning. It must be so simple that it can be transmitted over a flaky connection, yet precise enough that it cannot be misunderstood.

Don’t worry about getting it on your first try. It takes practice and even then it only works one time out of a dozen.

Or, perhaps try this: The thought is murdered and memorialized by a cast bronze statue depicting it; a plaque is written and placed next to the statue, and the statue itself is destroyed, but the plaque is left behind. None of the immediate qualities of the thought itself survived, yet evidence of its existence is undeniable.

Even if successful, this method accomplishes not much more than proving that there is something which is totally irreducible to words yet could be experienced by the same soul that is able to induce this human brain to create memories. But it’s a start. Many people in here won’t even admit that such non-physical, non-logical things exist, or if they do exist, that they are as foreign to us as they are, or that they are more real than more familiar things. This technique can prove beyond any doubt that such things do exist and that they possess a primitive quality of realness.

See also