This Steven Pinker interview hit me like a tuning fork. His core ideas are simple and explosive. We don’t think in words. We think in structure. He called the mind’s internal code mentalese, the language of thought that exists before and after everything we speak.
Words are a translation layer. These are ways of pushing private constructs through noisy channels into someone else’s head. This lens reorders the way you look at everything from poetry to politics to protocol.
Pinker’s paintings are clear. Thoughts can be visual, auditory, tactile, or completely abstract. It is a mesh of propositions and relations. Signs in the mouth and on the page are lossy export formats.
I can feel a gap every time I’m told that’s not what I wanted to say, or every time I struggle to coin a term to fit an idea that’s already formed. Meanings are available under English, Japanese and other languages so translation is possible.
This is why it is difficult to translate literature with its rhythm and meter intact, but it is still possible. There is a common ground that both sentences point to. Its substrate is Mentalise.
This idea eliminates the old fear that language cages the mind. Babies understand things before words. Deaf people can reason about money and fix locks, even if they don’t know formal sign language.
Vocabulary pursuit follows insight. Experts create jargon because they have already sliced the world into smaller pieces. If a model requires a label, one creates the label.
The speed with which teenagers create slang for “brain rot” is enough to baffle even a 28-year-old like me, not because their thinking has suddenly changed, but because their social worlds demand new exports of old concepts.
Language still matters. A finite grammar is forever recursive, so a sentence can grow infinitely. Partial vocalizations act like a scratchpad that expands your working memory. But the scratchpad is not the mind. Stabilizes the plate while the actual structure is locked in place.
Once we accept this, we begin to see two levels everywhere. There are things themselves, and there are stories about things. There is awareness and there is communication.
There is a reconciliation, and a promise that someone might reconcile later. This is an example of how this idea bridges to Bitcoin.
Most modern finance functions more like language than thought. It lives in negotiated meanings, soft promises, and third-party interpretations. Once you wire the funds, it will show as available. Your bank says “cleared”. The card terminal will display as approved.
These are words that attempt to describe a condition, but they are not a condition. Layers of prose and policy attempt to proxy for final decisions. These are powerful and useful, but human systems accept them, which allows for ambiguity and delay.
Meaning changes depending on time and context. If you ask five agencies what a settlement means, you’ll get five different answers shaped by compliance and legal departments.
Bitcoin reverses the order. It takes a core payment idea and writes it in a grammar that machines and humans can parse in the same way. Signatures consume certain output. Nodes validate spending against a shared rulebook.
Miners publish blocks that most nodes accept as the next line in their history. Finality is not an affidavit. This is an event in a public state machine that anyone can review from first principles.
This is more like a mentalese than a speech. It’s structure first and words second. The value is encoded where ambiguity is not tolerated.
Think about cash. When you give someone 20, there are no outstanding promises. There are no pending flags. There is no call center to interpret the transactions.
Settlement is equivalent to transfer. Bitcoin can offer its properties across distance and time with auditability that cash does not have. It gives a cash-like feel with ledger memory and compiler logic. This is not a text about payment. It’s the payment itself.
This is why this white paper reads more like engineering literature than a bank copy. This idea probably first appeared in Satoshi’s head as a structural model. A way to bind timestamps, incentives, and validation into a single game without having to trust participants.
A white paper is a translation. Code is regular text. A running network is a living grammar. People discuss words on forums. Nodes accept or reject state transitions without discussion. Consensus is not a mood. A parser with teeth.
When we bring persuasion and language back into the frame, the comparison becomes clearer. Pinker points out that language does not limit what we think, but it does give content to our minds and guide our social lives.
Framing and metaphor are levers. Ideas are food, debate is war, and time is money. By controlling your framing, you can attract attention and sway judgment.
This is why large language models like chatGPT are so powerful. LLM is a pattern machine that works with public languages. Once you learn the metaphors and rhythms that people already respond to, you can manufacture frames at scale.
They can flood the channels with phrases that exploit our common interpretive habits. They are very good at the surface of stories where persuasion lives.
The antidote is not silence. The antidote is structure. A strong system anchors meaning in a verifiable state rather than a slogan. Bitcoin does it for money. It reduces the room for words to sneak in in special supplications.
Either the signature matches the script, or it doesn’t. Either the UTXO is unused or it is unused. Your block either extends the chain that most peers consider valid, or it doesn’t.
This does not exclude human judgment or culture. They are included. This makes contracts between strangers smaller and clearer. This is exactly what is needed at the heart of a value network.
Cognitive science adds another layer that strengthens the analogy. Pinker’s mind is modular. Special parts are calculated based on special expressions. Its power comes not from raw connections but from compositional structures.
Good thinking is all about how symbols fit together and retain meaning when nested. Bitcoin reflects this. The smallest unit of meaning is not a formulaic paragraph. A spending condition that is combined with other conditions.
From that seed we get multisig, timelock, and more expressive templates. Layers are built on top of layers. Lightning Ride is based on the basic syntax of Bitcoin. The new code scheme defines intent without asking the committee for its blessing.
This is the same compositional spirit that makes language productive and thought portable across media.
One steady breath helps explain the whole picture. Mentalise holds the model. Language packages it for other minds. Human systems rely on language and are prone to delays and ambiguity.
Bitcoin encodes core financial actions in a grammar that converges without interpretation by third parties. Cash has given us finality in physical space (aside from the fact that the Fed can print an infinite amount of cash).
Bitcoin gives us finality in a shared digital space with the addition of a memory palace. Banking today often feels like we’re talking about payments. Bitcoin often feels like payment itself.
This hope comes with a caveat. The more persuasive our language machines become, the more valuable it becomes to anchor our most delicate interactions in a system that doesn’t care about rhetoric.
Framing can be used as a weapon. You can’t sweet talk full nodes. You can win in a TV debate. You cannot charm a signature to match another key. It’s not a bug. That is moral hygiene in a networked world.
Thought is a structure. Speech is its export, an irreversible transformation from its internal representation to a signal that can be transmitted. The closer the distance between the structure and the world, the more realistic things become.
Bitcoin is not just about value. This is a value and is rendered executable.