Our brains might be chatting in a language we don't even understand yet

here's the gist

Max Hodak challenges us to rethink how our minds turn scattered sensory signals into a single, unified experience, hinting that there's a hidden network of connections beyond traditional brain regions. He goes on to emphasize that what we call communication actually builds deep, shared patterns between brains and raises big questions about merging human thinking with AI, echoing earlier ideas that our intelligence and life’s energy flows might be far more varied and intertwined than we ever assumed.

gnarliest ideas from the conversation

new idea synthesis

"Our brains might be chatting in a language we don't even understand yet"

this insight was inspired by ideas from:

Michael Levin

Joscha Bach

Max Hodak

synthesis

Think about how we're having this conversation right now - your brain and mine creating patterns that somehow match up. Max Hodak's insight that communication is really about creating correlations between brains isn't just about talking - it's suggesting our minds are doing something way deeper than we realize. When we communicate, we're literally syncing up our neural patterns. This connects beautifully with Levin's idea that intelligence itself might be fundamentally collective - not just in human societies, but right down to how our cells work together. Our sense of being an individual might be an illusion created by billions of tiny parts working together! And this has mind-blowing implications for AI. If consciousness emerges from these collective patterns rather than from individual components, then as Bach suggests, AI systems might eventually create their own collective consciousness as they saturate our world with intelligence. The boundaries between your mind, my mind, and future AI minds might be way more blurry than we've ever imagined. We're not just exchanging information - we're creating shared consciousness across different substrates.