Oddbean

@6aa62169 It's more than vocabulary though. It's perceived motive as well. When you hear someone talk, the signal is always attenuated by what you think they mean, or why you think they're saying it. It's not even that I assume people think I'm always lying, it's just natural that you won't interpret the same sentence from one person the same way you do from another and something is lost because of that. I used to think anonymous communication was the closest you could get to a "pure communication" for this reason but the problem with that is then you can never communicate purely with people you actually care about because the knowing has already put noise in the channel. But then it's awfully presumptuous to footnote everything you say with a list of exceptions - i.e what you don't mean. It just introduces even more noise than before.

@eidolon @6aa62169 language also gives you the capacity or non-capacity for certain thoughts - it's pretty fucked up, maybe all those people with no internal monologue are the based ones after all. Babel-17 is about that.

@cassidyclown @eidolon @6aa62169 how would you communicate without language? for thousands of years language has advanced but there hasn't been any new way of communicating your thoughts to others other than nonverbal communication such as tone/facial expressions(but they still complement language, not replace it). clearly there isn't really a way to just capture a thought process without compressing(converting? but lossy) it to some kind of given format: language. just think of it, even if we were able to somehow capture neurons being fired to transmit information to some person's brain, is there a guarantee it will have the same effects on another person? it's limiting but it's the best we have out there.