Language
Why is consciousness serial in nature?
It had taken Jessica many decades to focus on her fascination. She had written several Computer Languages.
How are could natural language be?
Somewhere along the way, an idea emerged about where consciousness might originate.
For years it remained an intuition—a collection of observations that seemed to fit together but had never been formalized.
These papers are Jessica's attempt to do that.
To define the mechanisms. Expose the assumptions. Follow the implications. And construct a theory of language and consciousness that is distinctly her own.
It is a theory, not a declaration of fact.
Agree with it. Disagree with it. Keep whatever survives inspection.
Take what survives your inspection.
“Jessica does not do narratives.
She begins with an anomaly, then tracks it wherever it leads. Sometimes she loops through associated subjects in different pursuits. She continually reappraises a subject through changing lenses.
Jessica wrote these papers to stand alone, so some background recurs. Conclusions may change as the investigation advances. Earlier terminology and conclusions are retained so their evolution remains visible.
These are not maps.
These are discoveries.”
MYTH MAKER
~5 minute read · Language · Consciousness · Serial/Parallel · Communication
What if consciousness does not make our decisions—but makes them communicable?
I had learned to trust answers that seemed to emerge from unconscious processing, which left me with an awkward question: if cognition had already done the work, what was consciousness doing? The mismatch between massively parallel cognition and painfully serial language suggested another job entirely. Perhaps consciousness turns an inexpressible computation into a story another human being—and the thinker herself—can understand.
THE WITNESS
~9 minute read · Language · Consciousness · Communication · Serial/Parallel
What happens when increasing the capacity of one brain becomes too expensive?
I began with a simple evolutionary constraint: an individual brain cannot grow forever. If cognition remains valuable, another strategy is to add brains—but distributed brains need an interconnect. Following that problem through speech, serial channels, receiver modeling, rehearsal, and persuasion unexpectedly led somewhere I had not intended to go: straight into the little internal voice we call consciousness.
HINDSIGHT
~12 minute read · Language · Communication · Shared Semantics · Reasoning
Once I have an insight, how do I get it from my mind into yours?
Having an answer and communicating an answer are different problems. I began examining what must happen after an insight already exists: meanings must be selected, assumptions synchronized, and a serial path constructed that another mind can traverse. That raised an uncomfortable possibility about reasoning itself. The logical road that seems to explain how I reached an answer may sometimes have been built only after I arrived.
SHARED SEMANTICS
~6 minute read · Language · Communication · Shared Semantics · Compression
What if communication is not primarily the transmission of meaning?
Language is far too slow to transmit everything one mind contains to another. Yet a glance, gesture, or two words can sometimes communicate enormously complicated ideas. I followed that discrepancy into handshakes, synchronization, shared context, semantic addresses, and compression. Perhaps communication succeeds not because we transmit so much, but because shared meaning allows us to transmit so little.
PROVE IT
~4 minute read · Language · Communication · Reasoning · Shared Semantics
If discovery does not leave a trail behind it, how can I prove my answer to someone else?
An insight may arrive through processes I cannot reconstruct, but “trust me” is not much of an argument. That forced me to separate discovery from justification. A proof may not reproduce the path by which one mind found an answer at all. Instead, it serializes enough shared meaning, premises, relationships, and consequences to reproduce the conclusion in another mind.