self-expression & the lossiness of human communication / thought
Human communication is really lossy... even when the two people use the same logic and the same architecture. Maybe the goal of my formalization dreams could be couched in terms of bridging this gap: even if we both understand and use the same "logic of common sense", neither of us speaks a language that can express it easily. Hopefully, one day, natural language will seamlessly use metaphors from mathematics & programming languages (see Sussman's "The Legacy of Computer Science"). Not the mathematics & programming languages of today, mind you, but formal structures matching the common sense logic that we use in everyday life (I think that planning formalisms come close to what I want).
Why is it so hard to express oneself musically? I can hear beautiful music in my head, but it takes lots of training to communicate it to others, and even then there's a bottleneck. I can easily "see" a picture that I can't paint in my mind's eye. I can automatically recognize a known person's face, but I can't easily give this information to someone else.
I believe that this bottleneck lies in the brain itself: it's what happens when we convert information from parallel to serial. Since our communication channels are serial, communicating such "parallel" information with others requires us to first convert it to serial.
New media can do a lot to relieve many of these constraints, but I think that some of these constraints are fundamental.
Could one make a business out of creating software to let people express themselves and/or communicate better? What about software for people who have communication disorders?
Btw, has anyone modeled the tip-of-the-tongue effect? This seems exactly like the kind of thing that would not exist if our brains were purely serial. While in some examples of recognition-is-easier-than-production tasks (see also one-way-functions), one may accept several possible false matches, this does not seem to be the case with the tip-of-the-tongue effect (only the right word will satisfy the person).
See also: Thinking the Unthinkable
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Related to this issue of self-expression, I will soon become an emacs wiz.
Why is it so hard to express oneself musically? I can hear beautiful music in my head, but it takes lots of training to communicate it to others, and even then there's a bottleneck. I can easily "see" a picture that I can't paint in my mind's eye. I can automatically recognize a known person's face, but I can't easily give this information to someone else.
I believe that this bottleneck lies in the brain itself: it's what happens when we convert information from parallel to serial. Since our communication channels are serial, communicating such "parallel" information with others requires us to first convert it to serial.
New media can do a lot to relieve many of these constraints, but I think that some of these constraints are fundamental.
Could one make a business out of creating software to let people express themselves and/or communicate better? What about software for people who have communication disorders?
Btw, has anyone modeled the tip-of-the-tongue effect? This seems exactly like the kind of thing that would not exist if our brains were purely serial. While in some examples of recognition-is-easier-than-production tasks (see also one-way-functions), one may accept several possible false matches, this does not seem to be the case with the tip-of-the-tongue effect (only the right word will satisfy the person).
See also: Thinking the Unthinkable
---
Related to this issue of self-expression, I will soon become an emacs wiz.