The language of thought

What is a thought, anyway? Science suggests thoughts are electrochemical reactions produced in the brain, arising from both external and internal stimuli—sensory inputs, emotions, memories, and even physiological states. Meanwhile, Eastern mystics see thoughts as transient fluctuations, illusions that bind us to the material world, clouding deeper understanding. Yet to the rationalist René Descartes, thoughts were the one certainty. In this view, thought is reality itself, the universe woven from thought.

But still, what is a thought? What’s it made of?

Like the soul itself, the nature of thought was something I never paused to question. Since high school, I’d been absorbed in software development and hacking, immersing myself in technology. Over the years, I taught myself a range of programming languages, each with its own paradigm. Some languages—like Java and C#—run abstracted from the computer hardware; they don’t “speak” directly to the machine. Instead, they rely on a virtual machine, a layer of software that translates code into something the computer can understand, regardless of the specific hardware. This makes them easy to learn, but not the most efficient since there are so many layers between your code and the hardware. Others, like C and C++, allow more direct interaction with hardware, enabling greater optimization and performance, though at the cost of increased complexity and a steeper learning curve.

As a hacker, I got exceptionally good at reverse engineering software. Whether exploiting software as a “black hat” hacker or repurposing it creatively as a “white hat,” the trick was to think like the original creator. By understanding the intention behind the design, I could begin to infer how it worked under the hood, hacking it to do things beyond its original scope. This was my life, and I loved it!

It was only in 2019 that I began studying quantitative EEG in depth, initially just to understand my own brain and mind. Quantitative EEG, or QEEG, is a science—and sometimes an art—of interpreting brainwaves. Starting with the tracings of electrical activity from the scalp, we use computational analysis to detect patterns too subtle for the naked eye. This data reveals the nuances of a client’s experience and helps us identify patterns potentially linked to specific symptoms.

At my first neurotherapy “boot camp”—an intense week of QEEG, neurofeedback, and neurostimulation training—I had a dream where I could visualize my brainwaves, untangling the complex signals into individual components. A kind of language emerged—one I couldn’t speak, but could sense. Imagine each frequency as an alphabet, forming words with the superimposed combinations of waves as sentences. Just as written language has syntax (structure) and semantics (meaning), thought too has its own measurable patterns (brain waves) and felt experiences (what those patterns feel like).

Shortly after that boot camp, I began studying Ontological Mathematics, which proposes that thought is a language “spoken” by infinite minds and expressed mathematically. This idea resonated deeply with me, aligning with my vision of brainwaves broken down into individual parts. The books describe this sinusoidal language of thought, where frequency serves as the alphabet, amplitude as the strength of a thought, and phase—how two waveforms rise and fall in synchrony or not—reflects the relationship between thoughts.

Imagine each thought as a colored thread woven into the tapestry of your mind. Simple thoughts are single threads, while complex ones are intricate patterns formed by many intertwined strands. Frequency gives each thread its color and texture, while amplitude defines its thickness and visibility within the design. Together, these threads create a larger picture, either blending smoothly into patterns or forming bold contrasts that give the tapestry depth and meaning.

I had never considered thought as a language before, but it made perfect sense. Language is a system of communication, and in any system composed of distinct parts, communication is inherent. If we exist as souls in a universe alongside other souls, then thought as a language is inevitable. In fact, that would mean reality itself is fundamentally linguistic. Our universe is not just woven from thought but crafted from language.

This got me thinking—can we learn to speak the native language of reality? Human languages, in a way, are like Java and C#: they don’t operate on the bare metal directly. At some level, programming languages must be translated into “machine code” to run natively on the CPU, just as human language must be translated into the mathematical, sinusoidal language of reality. Hockney suggests that while this “raw” language of thought is beyond our conscious minds, it’s within reach for our unconscious. Though he doesn’t say this outright, he implies that by learning ontological mathematics, we might guide our unconscious mind to speak reality’s language more directly. And like optimized programming languages like C and C++, perhaps this grants us greater power.

The great genius Leibniz (and by now, I’m starting to appreciate Hockney’s admiration for him) also explored the syntax and semantics of thought. In his Monadology, he uses the analogy of a mill to challenge the idea that consciousness could arise solely from material processes. He asks us to imagine a giant mill representing the mind or brain as a purely physical, mechanistic entity. If you could walk around inside it, you would only see gears turning, levers moving, and various parts interacting—but nowhere would you find perception, consciousness, or subjective experience.

If Leibniz could “see inside” the brain with today’s EEG, fMRI, and other imaging methods, I suspect he would still reference his mill to describe what’s happening. Brain waves—our brain’s electrical activity—serve as syntax, while the subjective experience of these brain waves—what we can’t observe directly—represents the semantics.

Certainly, we can point to biochemical processes throughout the body to explain how things feel. From a materialist perspective that might seem like the cause, but from an idealist perspective we see it as seconday—a side effect, an expression of the experience of the thought.

The hard problem of consciousness, as David Chalmers formulated it, challenges us to explain subjective experiences, the mystery of qualia. But in a mental, thinking universe, with thought as the fundamental language, we might understand qualia simply as the experience of a thought. This includes not just intentional thoughts or reactions to events—if the universe is made of thought, everything we interact with is made of thought, and we engage with it mentally. Qualia, then, becomes relatively straightforward to grasp. But what about the unconscious mind?

The real hard problem of consciousness is understanding why anything is conscious instead of unconscious. We say we’re conscious, but how conscious are we, really? What does it even mean to be conscious? Science often defines consciousness as self-awareness and awareness of the environment, linking it to “awakeness” and wakefulness, as opposed to being unconscious or asleep. The unconscious is often considered a “lower-level” cognitive process secondary to consciousness.

This type of thinking is, unfortunately, very binary, and consciousness is more complicated than that. What about all the processes in our minds that remain out of reach? This unconscious material influences us in countless ways, as Jung observed: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.”

In his groundbreaking and sometimes controversial work “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” Julian Jaynes offers a framework for distinguishing between sentience and consciousness, providing insights into the nature of conscious experience. Sentience, he argues, is a baseline for animals, allowing them to respond to stimuli and exhibit complex behaviors without self-awareness or reflective thought. Sentient beings can react to their surroundings and learn through unconscious processes without engaging in the introspective, narrative thought processes that define consciousness.

In contrast, Jaynes defines consciousness as self-reflective awareness, where an individual not only experiences sensations but also interprets and conceptualizes them. Consciousness, in this view, involves forming an internal narrative or “story of self” and deliberating on past and future actions. To Jaynes, consciousness emerged relatively late in human evolution, marking a shift from a “bicameral mind,” where behavior was driven by “hallucinated” commands experienced as the voices of gods, to a state of self-awareness and introspective thought.

In the “God Series,” Hockney expands on this, emphasizing that while sentience is tied to qualia and unconscious processing of the environment, consciousness represents a “meta-awareness”—the capacity to recognize one’s awareness, to think about thinking, and to conceptualize oneself as an “I.” In this sense, consciousness requires language and symbolic thought, allowing for reflection on sensations that a sentient being might experience but not interpret.

For anyone who has done serious personal development work, it’s clear that “conscious awareness” exists on a spectrum—and most of us sit fairly low on it. How often are we truly aware of the conditioning that drives most of our behavior? Rather than assuming ourselves to be fully “conscious,” it may be healthier to view ourselves as relatively early on the journey to becoming fully conscious beings, striving continuously to heighten our “conscious awareness.”

In our quest for greater conscious awareness, perhaps the key isn’t to escape language but to learn to speak reality’s native tongue. If the universe is woven from language, then understanding its code—ontological mathematics—could be our path forward. This isn’t about discarding thought; it’s about diving into the raw syntax of existence, learning to align with the universe’s “machine code” and speak it fluently.

By mastering this mathematical language and deepening our understanding of the mind, we may unlock the full spectrum of awareness. The task, then, is to embrace this journey, attuning ourselves to the frequencies of reality itself. In doing so, we don’t just become more aware; we become fluent in the language that underlies existence, moving closer to the truth of what it means to be fully conscious.