The Bottleneck is Words

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them… I destroy them.

— Ender Wiggin, Ender’s Game

Understanding one another

Breeding empathy and understanding one another is a pretty important part of the human experience. I’m sure most people (at least on some level) view relationships with other people as a source of meaning in their life.

It’s a universal idea that spoken language and in-person contact is the gold standard for creating this feeling of shared understanding and emotional intimacy. I don’t think anyone would prefer a long distance relationship (romantic, platonic) over something in person.

Text based communications like emails or messaging platforms are obviously very limited, so we create mediums like FaceTime or voice notes to allow a better connection over long distances. But in the end, nothing can replace speaking face to face.

Visual cues through eye contact, body language, coupled with the subtle rhythm of a real-time conversation, are something no screen can fully transmit.

In person communication is our current answer to breeding love and shared understanding

Problems with Words and Cues

But I’m going to put forth the argument that spoken language and visual cues are horrible at conveying feelings and fostering emotional intimacy.

Current language systems are horribly inefficient at conveying data.

  1. People have different conceptions of the same word (love, sadness etc)[1]
  2. Difficulty capture abstract feelings into a single words leads to different interpretations of words → inability to know for sure what i mean
    Words are mention to be high level abstracts over very complex feelings:
    i say i love you, u think you understand how i feel but youll never know
  3. complex concepts / stories take alot of words to convey, multiplying this ambiguity

We only think words are the best because its all we’ve known and its the only solution we have at the moment

So words and physical signals are the primary bottleneck for empathy and human understanding

Technological solutions seems cold, harsh and inhuman only bc current tech is even more inefficient than lang + visual references

Calling, email, texts, All are lower bandwidth than spoken words / signals

The Future

I believe that in the future we will discover new ways to bond with other human beings through technological progress

Tech in the future will increase this bandwidth by allowing us to bypass auditory lang → increasing human empathy and undersatnding

ideas:

Endgame (?)

Collective human understanding

RIght now human will is scattered on stupid goals like intra species warfare

Once we all understand each other deeply, we can make decisions with better more consolidated intentionality

Not sure if the outcome will be good or bad, but as a species we will become much more powerful

[1] humankind has attempted to solve this with more precise vocab → the more precise words for love can be: infatuation, adorable, affection etc. but inevitably you hit a ceiling where you cannot convey complex emotions with a single word (see point 2)