Concepts and Categories

I use ‘category’ here in the simple sense of a bunch of things that seem alike somehow. This is the dullest of the notions found here—maybe duller. Where do categories come from. There are public categories and private categories. It seems to me that categories are structures in our head and they come into being and only later acquire a name. We categorize unconsciously and this process must go back to the earliest cluster of nerves, perhaps earlier. It is one of the earliest payoffs of a nervous system; “Do those sensations indicate a predator?”.

I just ran out of stuff to say. I started this to complain about the confusion of what it is to exploit the Spectre phenomenon. Just what is and is not a Spectre exploit? We have a category name but no boundary. We have a sample of two real exploits—sort of alike. We can be sure that different people will have different concepts on this. This battle will be more like ordinary warfare and we don’t know where the enemy is yet. I fear that it is down to whack-a-mole—narrow fixes to special attacks.

The Spectre paper carefully lays out one particular devastating ‘proof of concept’ and otherwise leaves the scope of “Spectre” undefined.

I propose a fairly precise limit on scope of ”Spectre attack” here.

Glimmer

See last part of this.