Dreaming Beyond Language
Living Make-Belief, Chapter 14
I’m spending a few months analyzing the ideas in Jim Dator’s new book Living Make-Belief, along with related works. The introduction to this project can be found here. All entries are listed here.
“Oh Lord God, deliver us from this prison…of paper, pen and ink, and of a crooked, broken, scattered and imperfect language”
We made it to the end! If you’ve been with me on this whole journey, I applaud your stamina. Dator’s final chapter explores transformative futures by speculating about communication beyond words to images, beyond all media and substrates of thought representation, directly to the electrochemical basis of thought. His hope is that this would remove the frustration and harm caused by misunderstanding as intent and referent objects are translated to and from representation in words. He cites research on intelligence in plants and slime molds as evidence that thought predates language and even neurons, and would be just fine without it. This connects closely to my friend and colleague Karessa Torgerson’s explorations of emerging radical empathy, and some weak signals are starting to show up.
Last year, it just so happens, I wrote an essay arguing that language might not be the container of thought1, with links to explore. It has some writing I’m proud of, such as observing “human brains are just squishy little networks of cells that bleep-bloop electrical-chemical data back and forth” and speculating that the writing of a “p-zombie homunculus…might still be better than the average LinkedIn post”. But this shows the limits of Dator’s wish to transcend language — language is fun! It’s frequently maddening, I often feel misunderstood, but it’s a giant playground where arbitrary abstraction and games are possible that only make sense in a lexical world. Maybe this is like the people complaining about the printing press, and I’m an old man yelling at clouds.
Where does this leave us? After reading the book, I had many unanswered questions. At the very top: how can an individual thrive in a Dream Society? I want to spend a few weeks exploring these and alternative conceptions of how society is shifting. Expect to see these interspersed among the normal summer fare over the next few months. Let me know in the comments what you think needs a deeper dive, or any futures-relevant media you think I should explore this summer.
Though, if we’re communicating thought via signal, even an electrochemical signal is a sequence of action potentials and neurotransmitters; isn’t that isomorphic to a simple language?