With regards to telepathy, read Daniel Dennett’s article. Is it possible to ‘think’ a complex thought without language? We don’t have the definitive answer to that question yet, but for now, it appears the answer is no.

It stands to reason that you can possibly transmit the image of a rabbit through telepathy to another person. It would also make sense that you can transmit feelings – anger, resentment, jealousy, sadness, happiness, lust – in the same way. But the more complex the concept, the harder it is to transfer so simplistically.

If you are thinking of the idea of transparency for example, you may picture glass in your mind, but you understand yourself as thinking of something else. Transmitting the image of glass would cause confusion in the telepathy – do you mean the glass itself, or its transparency? Transmitting the ‘meaning’ of ‘transparent’ would require the word ‘transparent’. Unless in telepathy, the image of a specific shape/color of glass becomes a standard for transparency – then that would be a language as well, since that that specific image would then be a word in the new language.

And if you’re trying to transmit/explain the meaning of differentiation/integration, or the space-time continuum…

In other words, it is within reason that anything you cannot ‘think to yourself’ without language is also impossible to transmit through telepathy without language.

Which would mean that telepathy would not be an enabler of intelligence on a human scale, but it would instead be a catalyst. The benefit of telepathy to intelligence would be to magnify the power of communication through language, apart from magnifying empathy, love and understanding as well.

Initially I perceived telepathy to be just another method of communicating ie wireless vs sound, which undeniably requires language to facilitate exchanges of abstract symbols and ideas. But what if you could see exactly what’s in my mind’s eye? Would you interprete my imagination in your own language? Or store those visuals as visuals in your own head. In other words, would you take a snapshot of my mind, write about what you see(in your own constructed mental language) or both? Do you require a language in all these instances?

Telepathy could perhaps become the second floodgate if and only if it pushes us in the direction of a joined conciousness.

Other than language, the only other thing which I would imagine to produce a similar floodgate effect is probably telepathy, but hmmm… maybe not. You need language to describe complex concepts, and even concepts represented in complex images is a form of language so telepathy probably needs a language as well.

I would contend however that the capability to develop language(ie abstract symbols etc) opens the first of many floodgates that enable not only the genesis but also the maintenance of a civilization.

Anyway good one old chap :). Shall we tackle the subject of memetics next? >:D

I think of language as more the tool that has let us escape the limits of random generate-and-test to switch to focused generate-and-test, which is basically saying that we switched from evolutionary development/advancement to scientific development/advancement.

Some how, I do sense that with our so called accumulated knowledge and wisdom we human species have turned into a sort of ‘perverted’ species, comparatively.