Language-sharing can happen arbitrarily between highly interested parties. What I mean isn’t really language-sharing, it’s mind-to-mind communication, and this is a peculiar subfunction of it which I believe was involved in our original uptake of representational language as infants and children.

Leaving the broader topic of mindsharing aside for the moment, I now recognize that the presence or felt presence of those in whom we have great interest or hold in high regard (or feel reverence toward) is at least one of the catalysts that potentiates a form of demonstrable mind-sharing involving language or statement composition, transmission and reception — and, specific technical features of each of these elements.

I have just experienced an astonishing and accidental encounter with this ability, which I previously experienced an analog of during extended states of reverent ethusiasm.

In this case, I was (with subtitles) able to nearly understand French, and could clearly hear word and phrase boundaries, in a film I have watched 5 times previously hearing nothing more than nonsense in the background. But I could also intuit the meanings of idiom with which I had previously been unfamiliar in a language I do not understand even superficially. Frankly, that should be impossible.

This is because I was watching it with a French friend, over skype (simulwatching). The connection with my friend informed my ability to hear and understand not only distinct features of the dialog, but also vocal characterizations and vocal music — it was like having an experience from science fiction. I very nearly understood French. As if I had had the aid of an extremely intelligent helper-mind. And I did. My friend (who happens to be a language teacher).

What I want to communicate here is this: in states of reverence or deep mutual agreement, our minds are capable of sharing and greatly magnifying the individual faculties of participants, in a way that creates and sustains what I will call ‘a relational superposition’. Each participant uniquely informs and activates this position, and as it is sustained, it acquires new potentials. In effect, it learns.

This is the nature of our mind. It is not magical, but it seems in my own experience divine. Diversity in participants creates entirely new ways of seeing and being. Originally, I think, a ‘mind’ was never something locally held — it was something highly distributed, and we participated in and with and as it — rather than, as we (very strangely) imagine — possessing it.

I invite you to explore these and related matters, most particularly with animals, insects, and living places… and most definitely with those you love or hold in reverence. The idea that mind is a local possesion is wrong and crippling. More: it inhibits most of what minds actually are and may become together, creating a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ of materialistic and scientistic ‘individuality’: a context in which everything is dead and separate, and intelligence is just a localized commodity destined for competitions for survival.

The whole idea of possessing a mind or intelligence is wrong. And it will force us into its image if we do not assert something more true, accessible, beautiful and intelligent: all minds are participations in distributed intelligence. What this means is more useful, fascinating, and profound than our entire history with technology. Let’s discover it. Together.