gusl: (Default)
My view of natural language: there is a huge communicative gap between any two human beings: our thoughts need to be serialized in order to fit through the information bottleneck that are our communicative channels. This channel is 1D, slow and noisy. Things are not so bad, because one can usually (but not reliably) convey the concepts that one is thinking of, given enough time and a collaborative communication partner. But we can and should overcome these limits.

Consciousness is a spotlight. So is speech. I can give you (or myself) a tour of the structures in my mind (associations, explanations, complex theories1 2) by means of a narrative. But wouldn't it be great to do it in parallel, as happens in "The Matrix"3? This communicative limitation of ours is analogous to having PCs that can only copy CDs the way VCRs used to copy VHS tapes: by playing the whole thing.4

I have a lot of concepts and background knowledge in common with the rest of humanity, but unless they speak one of a handful of languages, we will not be able to communicate. It's like trying to look something up in a book where the index is gibberish.

But even when two people speak the same language, they are restricted to using words and constructs that are available in their common languages. More fundamentally, this 1D channel doesn't allow one to convey associations and feelings that appear briefly in one's consciousness (thought is faster than speech), although filmmakers sometimes do a pretty good (if extremely expensive) job of it.

But why does the text medium copy the auditory medium? Legacy. Text has the potential to be much more. I believe that we now have the potential of inventing visual languages that provide much more natural representations of our thoughts, for the sake of better human-human interaction.




1- someone once said that finishing a complex mathematical proof is like arriving at the end of long and winding road: even if you can retrieve each step as requested, you can't see it all at once.

2- as represented by argument maps.

3- To be nitpicky, Neo's auto-lessons taught him procedural, not declarative knowledge.

4- this analog analogy also models the introduction of noise. This is also analogous to the way that revisited memories get distorted.
gusl: (Default)
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.

February 2020

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