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From: riddle@woton.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: IEF007ACA: WRONG THOUGHT OR PRE-VOCALIZATION
Message-ID: <944@woton.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 12-Nov-87 12:52:18 EST
Article-I.D.: woton.944
Posted: Thu Nov 12 12:52:18 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 14-Nov-87 18:30:01 EST
References: <8711111913.AA01260@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Organization: Shriners Burns Institute, Galveston
Lines: 32
Summary: How much of thought is expressed in syllables?
Overtly-Oral: "Bob"

I agree that wiring people up in such a way as to detect "covert oral
behavior" would constitute "interesting but scary interface
technology."  But how much of thought do you really believe is expressed
in syllables?  It's my opinion that only some thought is verbally (let
alone orally) based.  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis notwithstanding, I
think that on introspection most of us would realize that there are
plenty of ideas, experiences, fantasies and other thoughts which we can
think but can't verbalize.  Visual and tactile images would be simple
examples.  Even linguistic thinking doesn't always map successfully
into words -- how many times have you had a thought "on the tip of your
tongue" but been unable to verbalize it? 

Furthermore, some of the "scarier" potential applications of this
technology might be easy to thwart, given a concerted effort to do so. 
If communities of speakers have managed to come up with cant and jargon
to avoid being understood by outsiders in the past, it should be even
easier for an individual to purposely obfuscate the language used for
his or her internal monologue. 

Reading the abstract you posted, one thing jumps out at me: I doubt
that the system described would be more "natural" than keyboard or
speech interfaces because it would avoid the drawback "that human
thoughts be transformed into overt actions in order to be recognized by
the computer."  In fact I suspect that at best it would contain all of
the problems of current speech recognition systems -- limited
vocabulary and an ability to handle only an artificial subset of speech
behavior.  If this were the case, in order to use the interface people
would have to *overtly* control their "covert oral behavior."

--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of Shriners Burns Institute.
--- riddle@woton.UUCP  {ihnp4,harvard}!ut-sally!im4u!woton!riddle