Life After Language

Language is a clunky means of communicating. Clunky is meant in the sense of its dependence on context. In that well-known exchange in Alice In Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty said, “When I use a word . . it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less,” to which Alice questioned whether he could make words mean so many different things, with Humpty Dumpty responding, “The question is which is to be master – that’s all.”

False choice. The real answer is that humanity has been stuck in a linguistically constrained phase of evolution for far too long and that a future beyond language is imaginable – the working hypothesis of our focus piece Life After Language.

We might first discuss whether language is even necessary for thought. After all, your dream last night was not some audio-book in English. You might later describe the experience in linear words but the dream itself was a collage of images and emotions – in a way like your internal thinking process.

Then retreat into your own, largely wordless solipsistic state in which the world is as it’s defined in your own mind and ask what informs those thoughts. The traditional direct-experience modes (including, yes, those that are language-based) remain but augmented by those other cultural inputs such as those delivered via screen media.

So the first step down Alice’s rabbit hole is an acknowledgement of the role played by the whole panoply of these cultural inputs in shaping a richer and more meaningful contextual state of mind. Gpt-4 has already demonstrated an uncanny ability to assimilate a wide variety of text, visual, and auditory information into digital form. Might that not be the basis of a homogenized postverbal AI-developed meta-language, a kind of universal mind meld?

The adoption of a universal language, digital or otherwise – a lingua franca – is only useful to the extent it is accessible by the respective participants, the so-called last mile connection. It is here we might invoke a piece of our MM 11/30/20 Media Bias discussion with the observation that, when it comes to the internet (in that particular case one of social media), it knows more about you – from your searches, your communications, those intrusive public databases – than you consciously know (about) yourself.

So there it is, AI translating all the world’s information, in whatever form, individually accessible by you (and by your counterparts) as essentially an I/O node in accordance with your own tailored idiosyncratic context – every word, every visual, every thought precisely contextualizing what you mean, “neither more nor less.”

Consciousness revealed. Consciousness communicated.