I found this article on language and cognition on Metafilter today, and as often happens, I started to compose a post in reply, and realized that it was a complete derail from the point of the post and the discussion already in progress. It was a classic GYOB comment, in the great Get Your Own Blog tradition.

Then I realized that I had a blog.

So, what I was thinking is that language is a kludge. We needed to share our thoughts with each other, and the only medium we had was sound, so over generations we developed sounds for objects, sounds for actions, sounds for states of mind, and all these sounds could do was give a vague idea of the ideas behind them.

What occurs to me after reading this (fascinating, well-written) article is that someday, we’re going to move beyond sounds. We’re moving rapidly toward the point at which we’re going to be able to use technology to read each others’ minds, and finally be able to do what we’ve been trying to do since we first started using language; share our thoughts with each other. When at last we do this, will we be communicating in language? Will the flavor, the reference points, the orientation that language gives us still apply? When we can communicate by sharing experiences directly, will we still have the need to describe them, and will that description still shape the perception of the experience?