|Sep2-09, 07:55 AM||#1| What do human beings do when they
communicate? Strangely enough, given that this is something we
all do all the time, the nature of human communication seems not
to be at all well understood. Here’s my take on this – Other
animals “communicate” in a certain sense – that is, they make
noises or other signals that affect each other’s behavior. In
the same sense, we could say plants “communicate” with insects.
But what humans do with each other is clearly something
different from that – though certainly it does involve making
noises that affect behavior. Computers “communicate” with each
other, in another sense – they copy data from one machine’s
storage-unit to another’s. And there’s an aspect of human
communication that’s clearly like this. We tell each other
things, mainly through language, which is a very highly evolved
and remarkably flexible means of encoding all sorts of
information. But again there’s a very basic difference, because
when humans communicate, data certainly is not j