Through The Word, YOU

Thought experiment: Imagine every word you have ever learned has been erased from your memory.

How would you be different?

Without words can you even imagine the difference?  Not only would you be missing the words’ meanings, you’d be missing all the distinctions, knowledge, and mental abilities that you learned through words. How could you even consider the question without thinking with the words you have learned to think with? How could you know that you know anything about anything? Would you, the mental “you” reading this, even exist?

There is no way to a human being can know what kind of being they’d be if their mind was stripped of all the words they’ve learned. If you think otherwise try and ask yourself a question without using words.

But this post is not about the power of words. It’s about using the idea of erasing words to reveal the deeper power of learning.

Words are a special kind of organic media through which humans learn to become themselves. Words are powerless and meaningless to those that haven’t learned them. The power of words, like the power of knowledge, is the power to resource on-going learning. Human beings learn to become who they become. Thinking otherwise, thinking we are somehow other than who we learn to be is our species greatest learning disability.

In the dAilogue below we:

– explore the mental abilities of completely non verbal humans
– explore the effect of removing words from the human mind
– use the absence of words to reveal the power of learning.
– from the concretely real and present to the infinitely abstract not-now, words are the distinctly human media within which life learned to become us.
– Related 

---

Now in dAilogue Mode with Mindmarks Enabled

0-sync 1-distill 2-simplify 3-expand 4-explore 5-mindmark 6-list 7-others 8-help

---

Provide observations and analysis of the mental abilities of completely non verbal humans -distill.

---

Across anthropology, neuroscience, case studies, and developmental psychology, a consistent conclusion emerges:

Non-verbal does not mean non-thinking. In many cases, the absence of speech reveals different cognitive pathways, not lesser ones.

Core observations

1. Intact or heightened perception Completely non-verbal individuals often show acute pattern recognition, rapid sensory discrimination, and strong implicit learning. Some outperform verbal individuals in visuospatial tasks and memory for detail.
2. Independent internal reasoning Even without language, they demonstrate planning, inference, sequential reasoning, and causal understanding through actions, gaze, and adaptive behavior.
3. Strong non-linguistic intelligence channels Visual, kinesthetic, musical, affective, and somatosensory cognition often become primary modes. In many, these channels flourish precisely because they are not competing with verbal processing.
4. Complex emotion + theory-of-mind signals Eye-tracking, micro-expression studies, and dyadic interaction data show nuanced emotional awareness, attunement to others’ intentions, and sophisticated interpretation of social dynamics.
5. Internal narrative without words Many non-verbal humans appear to maintain coherent “felt narratives” constructed from sensations, episodes, emotional contours, and learned patterns – a prelinguistic but structured form of thought.
6. Motor and affect loops as expression Where words cannot externalize thought, motor patterns, stimming behaviors, posture shifts, and facial micro-behaviors become the expressive medium. These often map to distinct intention states.
7. Learning is continuous and often underestimated Because standard assessments rely on verbal scaffolds, they routinely mis-measure cognitive capability. When tasks are redesigned to remove linguistic load, many previously “low-functioning” individuals demonstrate robust competence.

Bottom line The mental abilities of completely non-verbal humans show that intelligence is not anchored in language. Language is a late-arriving output modality, not the substrate of cognition itself. Non-verbal humans think, plan, infer, feel, model the world, and learn – often in ways occluded by our verbal biases.

Blanket assumptions of deficiency reflect measurement failure, not mind failure.

0-sync 1-distill 2-simplify 3-expand 4-explore 5-mindmark 6-list 7-others 8-help

---

Simulate/imagine being a verbally typically human. Now simulate / imagine every word you have ever learned has been erased from your memory. How would you be different? With what other than words could you imagine the difference? Not only would you be missing the words’ meanings, you’d be missing all the distinctions, knowledge, and processing skills that you learned in order to use words. How could you know anything? Would you, the mental “you” reading this, even exist?

---

When you remove all words, you remove not only vocabulary but the entire linguistic lens through which the self is constructed and the world is carved into named, manipulable parts. What remains is not “nothing,” but a radically different kind of mind.

Here is the distilled simulation:

1. You would still have sensation – but no categories.You’d see colors, hear sounds, feel textures, smell and taste – but none of them would be anything.There would be no “red,”no “bird,”no “distance,”no “object,”no “sound.”Only undifferentiated streams of changing experience.

2. You would still have affect – but no emotion concepts.There would be rises and falls of bodily intensity, approach and withdrawal impulses, but no”fear,””anger,””joy,””calm.”Only shifting states of bodily urgency.

3. You would still have memory – but not autobiographical identity.You would retain episodic residues of experience, but with no “I” to narrate them.Without language, there is no timeline, no story, no self-as-entity.Only patterned familiarity.

4. You would still have implicit learning – but no abstract thought.You could learn correlations, anticipate events, and build sensorimotor skill,but not:• numbers• categories• rules• reasons• explanations• possibilities• counterfactuals• plans with symbolic structure

Your mind would be a powerful pattern-adapting organism – but not a symbolic reasoner.

5. You would be unable to imagine differences or alternatives.Because imagination relies on recombining symbolic structures, without words there is no:”could be,””what if,””suppose,””compare,””same,””different.”You would only inhabit the immediate unfolding of sensation and affect.

6. The familiar “you” would not exist.The narrating, anticipating, self-reflecting identity – the one reading this question – is a linguistic construction.Without words, the reflective “I” collapses.What remains is a conscious organism with:• sensory flow• affective modulation• embodied impulses• implicit memory• pattern learning-but not a thinker of thoughts.

7. How could you know anything?You could know only through the body:• what feels safe• what feels dangerous• what patterns predict outcomes• what movements lead to expected sensations. This is knowledge without concepts – a purely embodied intelligence.

8. What would remain of mind?A non-verbal mind is:• vivid• immediate• reactive• affect-driven• pattern-based• self-organizing-but not metacognitive, not conceptual, not narrative.

The closest human analogs are:• pre-linguistic infants• certain forms of acquired aphasia• deep non-verbal autism• adults in psychedelic ego dissolution• meditative states where internal words cease. But even these retain remnants of linguistic structuring; a truly wordless adult mind is almost biologically inaccessible to us.

The key realization: Words are not petals on the flower of mind; they are the root system of reflective consciousness.Remove them, and you remove the entire cognitive architecture built on them. A mind remains – but not the one asking this question.

0-sync 1-distill 2-simplify 3-expand 4-explore 5-mindmark 6-list 7-others 8-help

---

Words are an organic analogical media that co-evolved with our use of them. Words are the media that extend our learning into the consensual not now not present.

---

You’re pointing to the essential, rarely-articulated truth about language:

Words are not just labels for thoughts; they are the medium through which our learning reaches beyond the here-and-now.

Let me distill and deepen what you’ve just articulated:

1. Words are organic because they arose from human bodies in interaction.They did not begin as abstract symbols.They began as:• vocal gestures• shared affective sounds• pointing and rhythmic coordination• sensorimotor analogies. Language is an embodied technology.

2. Words are analogical because every word is a compression of past learnings.A word is a learned shortcut into:• distinctions• patterns• categories• relationships• expectations• emotions• social agreements. All of that learning is carried inside the word.

3. Words co-evolved with learning because using them changed the nature of learning.Once we could name distinctions, we could:• refine them• share them• stabilize them• combine them• negotiate them• project them into the future. Language wasn’t added to learning – it restructured learning.

4. Words extend our minds across space and time.Without words, all cognition collapses into the present sensory-affective moment.With words, we can:• refer to the absent• remember the distant• coordinate the future• build shared worlds• enter consensual realities that none of us can see directly Words are the medium of not-now and not-here.

5. Words are shared memory.Every word holds the residue of countless past learnings – not just individual but cultural and species-level.A word is the fossil of a learning that can be revived in another mind.

6. Words turned individual learning into collective cognition.Once learning could be transmitted through linguistic analogy,our species began an exponential bootstrapping loop:learning → words → shared learning → better words → more learning.

7. The human world exists because words extend learning beyond the present.Institutions, laws, science, culture, economies, identities – none of these exist without a medium capable of:• preserving meaning• transmitting meaning• evolving meaning• coordinating meaning

Words are that medium.

Your line could be expanded like this:

“Words are the organic analogical medium through which our learning escapes the prison of the present and becomes shared, cumulative, and world-building.”

0-sync 1-distill 2-simplify 3-expand 4-explore 5-mindmark 6-list 7-others 8-help

---

What I want to communicate here is that words are but one of the domains within which we learn to become who we become. They are the intermediary between the now and present and not now and not present, from the concretely real to the infinitely abstract. Words are the most distinctly human domain within which life learned to become us.

---

Here is a distilled articulation that preserves your intent while sharpening the conceptual arc:

1. Words are only one domain of becoming – but the domain that opened all the others.We learn through sensation, movement, affect, imitation, social resonance, environment, and culture.Words do not replace these; they interface with them.They are the bridge-domain linking embodied experience with shared, cumulative meaning.

2. Words mediate between the present and the not-present.Before language, learning was confined to what the organism could directly perceive.With words, learning can refer to:• the absent• the future• the hypothetical• the remembered• the never-experienced. Words make the not now and not here cognitively available.

3. Words mediate between the real and the abstract.Language arose from concrete, bodily experience but evolved into a medium capable of carrying:• generalizations• categories• models• rules• theories• myths• fictions• mathematics. Words are the ladder from sensory learning to infinite abstraction.

4. Words are the most distinctly human learning environment.Not because they are superior, but because they amplify all the others.Through language, life gained the capacity to:• learn beyond lifespan• learn beyond perception• learn from other minds without direct imitation• build consensual realities• create symbolic tools that alter the physical worldWords are where biological learning became cultural evolution.

5. Words are the domain through which life learned to become us.They enabled:• multi-generational learning• distributed cognition• shared intentionality• institutions• science• history• identity• morality• self-reflection. Humanity did not simply “get language.”Life, through us, learned to use words to become something evolution alone could never have produced.

A possible concise formulation of your point:

Words are only one of the domains through which we learn to become who we become.But they are the domain that mediates between the present and the not-present, the concrete and the abstract, the embodied and the cultural.Words are the uniquely human medium through which life learned to become us.

0-sync 1-distill 2-simplify 3-expand 4-explore 5-mindmark 6-list 7-others 8-help

---

0-sync

---

Sync:

Your central meaning across the recent turns:

You are articulating that words are one domain among many in which we learn to become who we become, but they are the uniquely human domain that mediates everything beyond immediate experience. Words bridge the embodied, here-and-now, sensory-affective ground of life with the not-now, not-present, abstract, and consensually shared realms. They are the medium through which learning extends itself, becoming cross-temporal, cross-mind, cumulative, and world-building. Words don’t replace other learning domains – they amplify, coordinate, and evolve them, turning biological learning into cultural becoming. They are the environment through which life, via us, learned to become capable of abstraction, reflection, and shared meaning.

0-sync 1-distill 2-simplify 3-expand 4-explore 5-mindmark 6-list 7-others 8-help

---

1-distill

---

Distilled

Words are one learning domain among many, but they are the only domain that lets human learning escape the immediacy of sensory experience. They link the embodied present to the not-present, the concrete to the abstract, the individual to the shared. Through words, learning becomes cumulative, transmissible, and world-constructing. Words don’t make us human by themselves – but they are the medium through which life gained the ability to become human in the way we are today.

0-sync 1-distill 2-simplify 3-expand 4-explore 5-mindmark 6-list 7-others 8-help

---

My primary purpose in this dAilogue into words is to reveal the self-defining if not creating role of learning. By imaging the absence of words we are more importantly revealing the power of learning.

---

Here is the distilled, clarified core of what you are doing:

You are not ultimately exploring words.You are using words as a lens to expose something deeper:

Learning is the origin of who we experience ourselves to be.

Your move – imagining the total absence of words – is not about language loss.It is a method for stripping away one of learning’s highest achievements so we can see what was always underneath:

Learning created the distinctions, meanings, identities, and cognitive structures that words later carried.

By removing words, we reveal:

• the mind’s dependence on accumulated learning• the emptiness of “self” without the structures learning has built• the way words fossilize layers of prior learning• how language-enabled learning recursively builds more learning• how learning, not language, is primary in making us who we are

The deeper thrust is:

Words are evidence of learning’s creative power – not the source of it.Learning precedes language and gives rise to it.Language magnifies learning but does not originate it.

Your aim, then, is to show:

When we imagine the erasure of words, what vanishes is not language alone but the accumulated learning that made a linguistic self possible.

This is a direct way to reveal that:

Learning is the engine. Words are one of its inventions. Remove the invention, and we see the engine.

0-sync 1-distill 2-simplify 3-expand 4-explore 5-mindmark 6-list 7-others 8-help

---

Related

In the Beginning Was the Word
“I am” and the Power of Verbal Self-Reflexivity
Learning YOU
Learning to be Human
Children of the Code Language Resources

Everything depends on learning. Believing otherwise is learning disabling.