Language is Telepathy

What if you could project your thoughts into another person's mind? Sounds cool.

If you wrote science fiction or fantasy novels, you might make up rules for how this works in your world. The person receiving thoughts might need to be cooperative, but not always. Locality is important but projection across distances is possible. Success might depend on some sort of mystical distance between the sender and the receiver. The shorter this mystical distance the greater the likelihood of success. There might be other rules appropriate for your world.

We have this! In this real world! It is language.

In talking to people in a room, a person might mention a red banana. Listeners would likely form similar images in their minds. This even works should this be televised with closed captions. The receiver might even get the message by Morse code through audio or touch.

The images in minds might be similar, but the concepts might not be. Some understand a banana from the Red Dacca variety (musa acuminata aka ‘Red’ or ‘Red Jamaican’). Some might think of a fantasy banana, a whimsical juxtaposition.

Suppose the speaker said, "a bunch of red bananas" instead. There can be a breakdown here in addition. One might picture a bunch as being the unit found in the grocery store in America containing 4-9 individual bananas. Another might look to the finger-hand-bunch jargon of the banana business and picture a full 40-pound cut from a plant as shown above.

That image shows a red banana bunch in the middle. Not green. Perhaps a fellow with red-green color blindness would not see much difference between the middle bunch and the one on the right. How we see the world can impact what we imagine. Even so, within a community, persons can build a concept around what is not directly perceived. A color-blind physicist might be savvy in colors.

Communicating thinkers connect by language. Humans have language wired in.

Language as thought projection can fail, as shown. The words might not mean the same for the sender and for the receiver. This can be funny.

Ah. But this can change and become serious.

Tribalism makes this worse. Failures are not funny. Attempts of this telepathy from a person of one tribe to another of a different tribe can fail disastrously.

What do you think of this telepathy? Comment below.

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