[scrollaway]

Who's to say that there isn't translation to do from thought to thought?

Kind of like we have different voices, accents, speech patterns, languages and manners of speech, I can't imagine our thoughts, even our most accurate representations of the simplest picture (eg "think of a white square"), aren't similarly different.

[angus-prune]

Feynman had a party trick where he could time a minute in his head by counting the seconds and count up the number of lines in a newspaper article.

A friend of his tried and couldn't do it, but was able to hold a conversation while timing a minute, which Feynman couldn't do.

They realised that while Feynman was counting the minute, he was counting verbally (but silently), while the friend was visualising a counter - or Feynman was using the speech centre, so could do a visual task at the same time, while the friend was using the visual centre, so could do a verbal task.

Something as simple as counting in their head was done completely differently.

[ddrdrck_]

That is an extremely interesting experiment, I had never heard about it before. Searching for it, I found the original article by Feynam (.pdf scan) : http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf

[ontouchstart]

His visual thinker friend is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tukey

[menacingly]

Agreed. Furthermore, thought has linked layers and context. Even if you could perfectly transmit an island idea from one person to another, it's unlikely that it would happen to contain the rich subjective context to make it nearly as useful to the recipient.

This is why learning and maturation take so much damned time.