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Dear fellow residents of Babel On

Seeing the phrase "Tower of Babel" again earlier today had me remembering a favorite quote: "the words are mine; the meaning is you", which suggests - if not insists - our sum total of beliefs about reality and ourselves so utterly colors/filters/distorts the meaning of words that we essentially have little or no chance of understanding each other via the medium of words.

That doesn't mean we can't *believe* such isn't the case, of course, because who doesn't want to believe we're understanding each other because we use the same words. But it's unlikely that believing such actually makes it so save in the aforementioned cocoon of personal belief(s) about reality and self therein, which of course isn't the same as so-called consensual reality.

Of course, that's bad news for those of us that come to places like this in hope of reality-modeling alignment....

I suspect the situation improves in narrowly defined realities, e.g. a programming language. But even then, it's not hard to find significant disagreement about the meaning of, say, documentation verbiage.

But I would love the above to be proven incorrect.

Not that such could possibly be accomplished in words, of course.... ;-)