[humanmarkup] Re: Martians & Venusians

[Michael Lacy <mlacy@modulant.com>]

This got me thinking about some of the limitations of HumanML and I
thought I'd share with you all: 
1.) HumanML will be nothing more than another "language" for humans to
use in order to communicate with each other. Some people communicate in
English, others through music...the point is that groups of people
communicate with one another through a common understanding of a
universally accepted language within the group of people the person
chooses to communicate with. 
2.) Using this new language, people will still be able to express irony,
simile, and metaphor in their interactions with others, the true meaning
of their statements manifesting themselves indirectly into a human
understandable format, obscuring the truth of their feelings behind a
safe allusion to a story outside of themselves. 
3.) The more universal the language, the more powerful it will be. On
one level, HumanML is just another communication medium for people to
learn to express themselves through. On another level, it attempts > to
capture the true feelings of a person and express them with the subtlety
and directness that face-to-face interaction brings. Think about having
a conversation with someone else. There are so many perceptual clues as
to how that person feels, a rolling of the eyes, a crossing of the arms
across the chest, a heavy sigh. The big > challenges I see are: 
(a) how to come up with a set of semantics and syntax to capture these
non-verbal gestures in their full detail without trying to elaborate
every possible variation of every possible feeling; and 
(b) how to get people to feel safety in expressing their true emotions
and feelings to other human beings, something we have been notoriously
bad at for several thousand years. I think the challenge we face here is
less of a technical problem as it is a human, cultural, societal
dilemma...and that's how to get people to communicate authentically,
with an understanding for other people's point of view, and actually
care about what they are communicating instead of resorting to their
unconscious defenses and spewing their isolated, judgmental views of the
world. 
-mike