Elon Musk believes that direct brain interfaces will help people better transmit ideas to one another in addition to just allowing thought-to-text generation. But there is a fundamental problem with this idea. Let’s take Hubert Dreyfus’ conception of the way meaning works as being tied to a more holistic view of our social interactions with others. Hilary Putnam would probably agree with this perspective, though now I am speaking for two dead philosphers of mind. We can certainly conclude that my mental states when thinking about the statement “snow is white” are, borrowing from Putnam who borrows from Quine, different from a German person thinking “Schnee ist weiß.” The orthography, grammar, and pronunciation are different to begin with. Then there is what seems to transpire when I think about that statement: mild visualizations of white snow-laden rocks above a small stream for instance, or, just now, Joni Mitchell’s “As snow gathers like bolts of lace/Waltzing on a ballroom girl.” The centrality or some kind of logical ground that merely asserts that such a statement is a propositional truth that is shared in some kind of mind interlingua doesn’t bear much fruit to the complexities of what such a statement entails.
Religious and political terminology is notoriously elastic. Indeed, for the former, it hardly even seems coherent to talk about the concept of supernatural things or events. If they are detectable by any other sense than some kind of unverifiable gnosis, then they are at least natural in that they are manifesting in the observable world. So supernatural imposes a barrier that seems to preclude any kind of discussion using ordinary language. The only thing left is a collection of metaphysical assumptions that, in lacking any sort of reference, must merely conform to the patterns of synonymy, metonymy, and other language games that we ordinarily reserve for discernible events and things. And, of course, where unverifiable gnosis holds sway, it is not public knowledge and therefore seems to mainly serve as a social mechanism for attracting attention to oneself.
Politics takes on a similar quality, with it often said to be a virtue if a leader can translate complex policies into simple sound bites. But, as we see in modern American politics, what instead happens is that abstract fear signaling is the primary currency to try to motivate (and manipulate) the voter. The elasticity of a concept like “freedom” is used to polarize the sides of political negotiation that almost always involves the management of winners and losers and the dividing line between them. Fear mixes with complex nostalgia about times that never were, or were more nuanced than most recall, and jeremiads serve to poison the well of discourse.
So, if I were to have a brain interface, it might be trainable to write words for me by listening to the regular neural firing patterns that accompany my typing or speaking, but I doubt it would provide some kind of direct transmission or telepathy between people that would have any more content than those written or spoken forms. Instead, the inscrutable and non-referential abstractions about complex ideas would be tied together and be in contrast with the existing holistic meaning network. And that would just be gibberish to any other mind. Worst still, such a system might also be able to convey raw emotion from person to person, thus just amplifying the fear or joy component of the idea without being able to transmit the specifics of the thoughts. And that would be worse than mere gibberish, it would be gibberish with a convincing heart.