Can we only think in language?
Many people criticize writing with AI, arguing that what comes out is not "your own thinking." But is that really true?
If thought itself is high-dimensional, and language is only its compressed format, then every act of expression is also an act of loss.
Inside a large language model, meaning lives in high-dimensional vector space; the words it produces are only the final compressed output. Perhaps humans work the same way.
In Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, the Trisolarans' thoughts are directly visible to one another. They communicate without language, and almost without misunderstanding. But they also have no secrets.
Compression is the price we pay. It is also the room we keep: to hide, to misread, to make poetry.
If it isn't written down, is it really not thought?
Bilibili: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1dGaz6JEja/
Visuals & sound generated by Claude Opus 5.5
Narration: synthesized voice