Words have a number of serious problems:
1. The mind does not work in words.
Our basic mind which we have inherited from our animal ancestors, has evolved over millions of years as an “instant answer” mind. It takes current sensory input and past experiences and subconsciously comes up with an instant answer that obviously passes the “survival of the fittest” test or we would not be here. Humans have added two things to this very capable mind, conscious reasoning which we can use to overrule the subconscious answer and language to allow us to communicate both the instant answer and the reasoned answer to others and to collaborate on a collective intelligence answer.
What does the mind work with? If you read this blog and a short while later, I ask you what it said, you will not use the words that I used, you will para-phrase, using your own words. Your mind stored the ideas in some format other than words and then you put your own words to it. How did your mind represent the ideas? How often do we struggle to put our ideas into words? If we could discover the idea objects that the mind uses and then devise a way to represent them using the digital technology we have invented, we could make thinking and sharing much more efficient and meaningful.
Our conscious thinking of course is with words. We must have symbols to represent the things we think about and words and images are the only symbols we have, no matter how ineffiecent they are. If we had a much richer set of symbols more in tune with the objects the unconscious mind uses, our thinking and reasoning might be much improved.
2. Words are sequential
You must listen to words from beginning to end in the order the speaker chooses. This is both inefficient for the listener and it gives the speaker too much power. In contrast, a blueprint allows the reader to self navigate quickly to the areas of interest and drill down to the level of detail desired.
Most words are vague and generic so we add sequential words to add precision to the thought. Unfortunately, the added words have their own “fuzziness”so they require more words to “pin them down” until we drown in words and the meaning is still not precise as we would like. Sequential symbols also require some very complicated rules of grammar to pin down the meaning.
There is an interesting analogy with early sequential computer programming languages They became a dead end box canyon which severely limited what we could achieve with computers. A new paradigm called Object Oriented go ux out of the sequential rut and allowed the complex programs we produce today.
3. Computers can’t understand words
A hundred thousand years of evolution of our mind allows us to understand words, as far as they can be understood. Computers have not reached that point although many, like Ray Kurzweil, in his book “The Singularity is near” predict this will happen soon.
I believe we are very fortunate that computers cannot understand words and I hope they never will until we have a blueprint like language. Imagine billions of computers struggling with us and each other about what a set of words really means.
On the other hand if computers cannot help us work with the meaning of ideas, their usefulness to us is severely limited. The smart phone can only help us mange text and audio symbols, record keeping, not collaboration. It puts a limit on what our marvelous digital technology can do for us.
A blueprint like language would solve all of these problems. It would focus on unambiguous meaning. Our minds are lazy and like to deal in generalities because that is how we deal with a complex world. However we cannot build a skyscraper in generalities and we cannot solve complex social problems with generalities.
Blueprintspeak 