michael_nielsen

What, if anything, lies beyond language? Are there modes of thought and communication that are strictly more powerful than language? Can we invent new forms as much more powerful than verbs and nouns (etc) as human language is more powerful than the communications of chimps?

This is a hard question to think about, or even to fully specify. It's particularly hard when one uses language to think about it.

This doesn't mean it's impossible, though. Mathematicians have figured out powerful ways of reasoning about infinity, using purely finite processes of reasoning.

Another analogy is to the way computer scientists have gradually developed more powerful ideas about programming languages: things like Lisp macros, lazy evaluation, higher-order functions, etc. These ideas were, in some sense, discovered, & can transcend earlier ideas.