[Buddha-l] I do not deny my non-self

[Malcolm Dean]

The non-denial of the non-self
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=7854216
The Economist, Aug 31st 2006
How philosophy can help create secure databases

IN THE 1940s a philosopher called Carl Hempel showed that by
manipulating the logical statement "all ravens are black", you could
derive the equivalent "all non-black objects are non-ravens". Such
topsy-turvy transformations might seem reason enough to keep
philosophers locked up safely on university campuses, where they
cannot do too much damage. However, a number of computer scientists,
led by Fernando Esponda of Yale University, are taking Hempel's notion
as the germ of an eminently practical scheme. They are applying such
negative representations to the problem of protecting sensitive data.
The idea is to create a negative database. Instead of containing the
information of interest, such a database would contain everything
except that information.

The concept of a negative database took shape a couple of years ago,
while Dr Esponda was working at the University of New Mexico with Paul
Helman, another computer scientist, and Stephanie Forrest, an expert
on modelling the human immune system. The important qualification
concerns that word "everything". In practice, that means everything in
a particular set of things.