[satvikpendem]

Indeed, it reminds me of the movie Arrival (and the short story upon which it's based) where the heptapods are able to show a complete sentence and story within one glyph. I thought it was interesting just how much the movie focused on linguistics, which is rare to see in Hollywood films.

Something else that's interesting about language is it's just a form of compressive medium for thoughts; I think of a concept, then I put it into words (compression) that you the listener then have to interpret and understand (decompression) and then fit your brain state to the new data you've received. It's overall a very lossy medium compared to what brains can do. It would be much easier to beam my thoughts and images and videos in my mind directly to you.

Unless you or I have aphantasia, of course.

[ilaksh]

Right and I would go so far as to say that most types of intelligence are a type of functional compression also.

There's definitely room for direct transfer of concrete unrolled information. But at the same time we would still need some forms of abstraction in many cases.

I think the biggest issue with the compression of natural language is that the loss is different for each person, since everyone's "codec" varies. In other words, people often interpret language in different ways.

But suppose that humans or AIs or AI-enhanced humans could have exactly the same base dictionary or interpretive network or "codec" or whatever for a (visual or word-based) language. Then we could get away from many of the disputes and misunderstandings that arise purely from different interpretations.

[arketyp]

I wonder what the limits are to such a universal codec. From what I've gathered about synaesthesia (e.g. from V.S. Ramachandran, or Galton earlier), it varies quite significantly between persons. I believe it's said that some 3% of people have aphantasia for instance. That means entire modalities would be excluded for some in a latent space glyph language. Unless, I suppose, one could find ways of stimulating the synaesthetic connections artificially too.