The driving vision behind this section has been shaped by my viewing years of portrayals of in sci-fi media - robot communications.
Since early comic books to the first sc-fi films of the 1930's, through Stanley Kubrik's 2001 and 2010 in the late 1960's and to the modern slew of films and TV shows featuring computers and humans in verbal dialogue, it has been a dream to develop machines with which humans can communicate in a human manner.
In order for this to truly be achieved, as science-fact rather than science-fiction, it is my proposition that a form of simulated awareness is absoultely essential.
Without a sense of context and means of accurately creating and describing the picture of "mental understanding" within "the mind" of the machine, misunderstandings and non-sensical communications will undoubtedly be the result.
One of the "essentials" for machine awareness, would be the ability of the robot or computer to "explain" its reasoning, logic and perceptions, in order that the people attempting to communicate with them, can understand and diagnose "faults and errors" in thinking.
Tied-up intricately with language, is the concept of "consciousness" as the collective awareness of a people, as encapsulated in a means of communicating common experience - it is said, for example, that the Eskimo peoples have 15+ different words for snow - our life experiences shape our perception (conscious awareness) of life, and our conscious awareness shapes and develops our communication and language.
Almost all the world's languages, for example, have complex grammar and tenses to describe the common human experiences of time: thinking about the past, planning the future, whether real or imagined...it's clear that elements of our experience shape our language and vice versa.
Watch this space for more developments in the exciting field of robot-communications...