Nine Billion Minds in Song
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word gave us a way to cross the gap between minds. We carved marks in stone, we shouted across valleys, we strung wires that carried voices across continents. Every step in this long history has been the same story told in different forms: a desire to share what is inside with someone else who cannot otherwise know it.
Chomsky has spent his life in the world of words and pictures. He sees thought as something bound to language or framed as images in the mind. Within that frame, he is right: language is slippery, images are private, and thoughts cannot be lifted whole from one head and set down in another. But the brain is not a book and not a canvas. It is a circuit of electricity and chemistry, a living field of rhythm and pulse. Thoughts are not made of words and pictures alone. They are patterns, as real as the sound waves of a violin or the hum of a radio signal.
And like music or radio, patterns can be captured, translated, and replayed. We already do this on a small scale. A paralyzed person moves a cursor with brain signals. An AI system reconstructs rough images of what someone was looking at by reading neural activity. These are faint, early notes. But they prove the principle: neural rhythms can be recorded, turned into data, transmitted, and turned back into experience.
Scale this up, and the vision changes. A child who has never spoken might pour her thoughts directly into her mother’s awareness. A scientist could transmit an insight the way music transmits feeling, not as a formula but as a flash. A teacher could give not just knowledge but the shape of understanding itself, as if handing over a new pair of eyes. A musician could share memory, not notation. A mother could pass her love into her child not as words but as presence.
Now extend it further. Every human being, nine billion of us, linked in a chorus of thought. Joy multiplied across continents. Grief shared across strangers until it no longer feels solitary. Wisdom passed instantly, without translation or delay. Suspicion and misunderstanding cut down, because the interior world of another can be felt directly. Not a web of devices but a web of selves. Nine billion minds in song.
But every chorus carries dissonance. What can be shared can also be stolen. What can be replayed can be rewritten. Governments will want to measure loyalty before it is spoken. Corporations will want to shape desire before it is felt. Hackers will want to plant memories that were never lived. The channel that carries communion will also carry trespass. The dream will arrive entangled with the danger.
This is how it has always been. Fire warms and burns. The wheel carries harvest and carries war. Electricity lights the city and shocks the body. Radio broadcasts music and propaganda alike. Every invention delivers both liberation and control, both connection and manipulation. The same will be true here.
Chomsky cannot see it because he stays bound to words and pictures. His brilliance is undeniable, but his vision is narrow. Thought is older than words and deeper than images. Thought is pattern, and patterns can be read and shared. That is why this future is possible, and why it will come.
The choice before us is not whether thought-to-thought will be communion or trespass. It will be both. It will carry love and fear, freedom and control, gift and theft. Our responsibility is not to argue its impossibility, but to decide how to live when the song begins.
The dream is nine billion minds in song, and every note will carry both harmony and dissonance.
