Episode: 1336
Title: HPR1336: The Rosetta Dream
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1336/hpr1336.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:42:14

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Hello.
My name is Julian Neuer.
I am a computer scientist and amateur linguist and writer.
You can find some of my stories at my WordPress page at corianderpause.wordpress.com.
I'll read a short story of mine called The Rosetta Dream.
At the end of the podcast, I give more information about the subject that inspired me to write it.
I also include this information in the show notes.
The Rosetta Dream by Julian Neuer
People can be forgiven for over-rating language.
Words make noise or sit on a page for all to hear and see.
But thoughts, thoughts I trapped inside the head of the thinker.
Steven Pinker
A few hours after end learns of the archaeologists' discovery, the dream comes.
As usual, the sounds and visions in the dream are vivid, not in the least dream-like.
For want of a better word, we refer to Anne's experience as a dream, although Anne himself
would probably object.
Actually he would object to any word that we might choose because he does not use words
at all.
Anne's mind, if we may call it a mind, but this is the very point of this caveat, to fully
appreciate Anne's experience, we must learn not to place too much value on words.
Anne's mind deals in pure concepts and nonverbal mentalies and the stuff of ideas themselves,
much higher on the abstraction scale than sound waves emitted by the respiratory tract
of animals or ink markings strewn on sheets of dead vegetable tissue.
The experience that we refer to as Anne's dream is in fact a process that we would find
unimaginable.
A process whereby Anne's mind communicates freely with hundreds of thousands of other intelligent
minds, now in the same mental state as Anne.
The state we have agreed to refer to as a dream.
In such a state, concepts, not words, remember, flow instantly from individual to individual,
ideas germinate, grow and reproduce, and the ecology of the collective subconscious unfolds
according to laws and principles that we, poor babblers of verbal gibberish, would liken
to telepathy or just plain magic.
Well, a few hours after Anne learns of the archaeologists' discovery, the dream comes.
As usual, the sounds and visions in the dream are vivid, not in the least dream-like.
At the beginning Anne finds himself in a vast savanna at the center of a flat world with
equidistant horizons.
He looks to the side and sees columns of white smoke rising up to the blue sky in irregular
patterns.
Anne now realizes there is a logic to the patterns.
What he sees is a very primitive means of communication, and is sure that the smoke signals
mean something, but he does not know what, nor is he really interested.
Anne is startled by a clap of thunder that booms all around the savanna.
The sound, however, does not die out as proper thunder should.
Instead, the continuous roar gradually changes into a rhythmic, quick tempo beat.
After a while, another beat emerges, lower in frequency and slower in tempo.
The two oral threads combine and revolve around each other in hypnotic fashion.
They are puffs of sound, so to speak.
Like the smoke signals, they elicit in Anne the same certainty.
Someone is using these primitive instruments to communicate.
Anne does not know what the meaning is, nor is he really interested.
Now the sound of the log drums rises in pitch and the tempo quickens, so much in fact,
that the drum beats now sound like a succession of beeps, all equal in tone but varying in duration,
a rapid firing of tedious tweets like a flock of brainwashed birds.
But Anne, for all the vast arsenal of pure concepts available to his collective dreamer
mind, has no idea what brainwashing of birds are and would be at a loss to grasp the
simile.
Anne does not know what the beeps mean, nor is he really interested.
The savanna disappears and Anne wakes up.
His brain quickly switches to the wakeful network, where the collective mind is still
discussing the object the archaeologists found yesterday.
More accurate descriptions of the object are available today.
It is obviously artificial.
A desk whose core made of silicon contains myriads of intricate micro patterns etched on
its surface, protected under a metal coating.
There are thousands of rectangular micro patterns printed on the disk, with even smaller patterns
inscribed in them.
Anne learns that the object has been dated at over 9,000 years in the past.
This is an impressive time span, even for the advanced collective mind that Anne is
part of.
The disk comes from an error long before the collective mind started to evolve.
From a time when humans had to store and communicate information using physical media located
outside their minds and their bodies.
Anne and the collective mind remember the primitive concept of electronic computers,
and the even more primitive concept of verbal communication, an artificial, unreliable
layer of arbitrary visual and oral symbols intended to convey ideas, but whose ultimate
effect was to obfuscate the very concepts they were supposed to express.
The verbal condition seems primitive and ridiculous to Anne and his telepathically connected
fellow minds.
He can't help thinking of the creators of the disk as inferior creatures.
The collective mind briefly considers the possibility that the creators of the disk
did not even belong to an intelligent species in any present sense of the term.
Then the collective mind concludes that the patterns on the disk are verbal symbols and
obviously means something, but their meaning is of no great importance and the disk is
quickly forgotten.
The Rosetta Project, RosettaProject.org is one of the many fascinating activities
of the Long Now Foundation.
You can find information about the Long Now Foundation at longnow.org, and you can
find information about the real Rosetta disk at the URL rosettaproject.org slash disk slash
concept.
In his book The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond defends the thesis that the advent of verbal
language among humans played a decisive role in what he calls the Great Leap Forward,
the stage in human history about 60,000 years ago when innovation and art at last emerged.
We can conjecture that a future switch from words to nonverbal mentalese for human
communication will usher in an equally drastic leap forward, a linguistic singularity,
so to speak, at the cost of language as we know it today.
The epigraph is an excerpt from the chapter titled Mentalese in Stephen Pinker's book,
The Language Instinct.
Attribution for the music and sounds used in the soundtracks is in the show notes.
This is Julian Neuer.
You can find more stories by me at corianderpaws.wordpress.com Thank you for listening.
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