- New horizons created by a new language -
In the beginning of the twentieth century the German philosopher Carnap proudly announced the creation of a new philosophy where meaningless sentences would not be allowed. He took meaningless to include everything that does not have an empirical reference. For instance, we can speak of a Mozart's Piano Sonata K.332 in empirical terms: it uses a piano, it has a specific number of notes, they should be played in this order, each note can be described by its set of frequencies, etc. all this is "objective", it can be observed by different observers, always in the same way, it can even be checked by instruments.
However, when we speak of it's joy, sheer happiness, rebelliousness, etc, then we cannot be entirely sure that we are speaking about the same things. How do we know that we are talking about the same feelings when we speak about Mozart's music? These feelings are intimate, hidden from view except to the one that feels them. You cannot feel what I feel when I hear Mozart's music, neither can I feel what you feel. This invisibility of feelings is more visible when tastes widely differ. For instance I had a friend who enjoyed Mahler, Shostakovitch, Schoenberg and others very much but had a certain despise for the classics (Mozart, Bach, etc). I tried to understand the richness he saw in Mahler's music, but it was very difficult for me. The same happens with poems, paintings, and everything with which we try to communicate our inwardly rich but invisible inner life.
There are, of course, other ways of communicating feelings, lovers communicate through kisses and hugs, and we all know how a simple handshake may transmit a sensation of warm friendship or cold despise. But the fact is, words need references to make sense. And if we can't point to a reference we will not be sure about the word means.
All this will change when we are able to communicate directly, from brain to brain. Our interfaces may be as tiny and unobtrusive as a hair band or tiara, or more complex, as in this Kagaya picture:
But they will allow us to communicate what words can only allude to: our inner experiences. It will be possible to feel what a musician feels when he sings on stage, or to check the vision of a mathematician looking at tensor field.
One advantage of this new language is that it is interspecies, you can actually feel what the fish, seagulls and crustacean live. More importantly, it will be easier to have fair trials, wars will become more difficult, for the enemy's pain will now be easier to feel, through our mass media feelings distributors.
Actually our current Tower of Babel will dissolve into a sea of understanding and sharing. The "official language" will cease to be important as there is no more need for artificial languages. After this we can speak directly - brain to brain, heart to heart. In a sense, deceiving will no longer be possible (except perhaps self-deceit) and I wonder how skeptics and religious people will be able to get along.
All this openness, on the other hand, will certainly reinforce the need for more efficient ways to guarantee privacy when one needs it. We need to be able to lie, because that is a way to maintain our persona, our mask, in the social world. Without it, we would be jusk like a drop of water in the sea, engulfed by all the feelings around us.