QC

And then there's prose. Fuck. Just look at it. All those words that, if sung, might have actually meant something - might have actually carried some divine spark - casually flung onto paper or a screen. A torrent of little corpses.

There are important things that are profoundly beyond the capacity of words to express. I am trying, and necessarily failing, to express one now. What do we do about this? Short of abandoning words for something else (tempting!), it seems to me that we can do this:

Write prose that sounds like poetry. Write poetry that sounds like song. And write song that sounds like...?

We can use words to point to the way out of words, into everything else. Rumi remix: out beyond ideas, there is a field. I'll meet you there?

Are you pessimistic about neuroscience being able to do this definitively in some eventual future? i.e., it giving us a recipe for guaranteeing that when I “say” “Concept”, we can both know that you’re grokking the same thing I am?

(I have read it, and generally agree with the thrust), we might be talking past each other with different definitions of “same”. If I say “capitalism”, this necessarily ignites some constellation of neurons in your mind, informed by things you read, stories you’ve heard,etc ...

...and this pattern is structurally (syntactically) different than the pattern that fires when I say “puppy”. I don’t think it’s meaningless to ask “can I make the pattern of neurons that fires in your brain when I say ‘puppy’ look most similar to mine?”