“One of the most terrifying of the deceptions of language and conception we suffer due to our cruelly impoverished education in its natures and dangers is so obvious that it is nearly impossible to detect. It is that the same word or concept can ever recur. No two words ever spoken can be identical with other instances of their emission — most shockingly, even if the words are emitted by a machine.

The reason is simple, yet deceptive to our common thinking. A word is an act or mechanical production. When an act, it contains the intentions of the one uttering it, and the context and recipients which may or may not receive it. In any case, and in all possible cases, the purpose of emission and the context, and the recipients… are all unique in time and space. It is thus formally impossible, even for a machine, that any two emissions can ‘be the same’ except in a very superficial sense. The problem is that we take this superficial sense for the real fact.

While this seems a technical or modest truth, it is absolutely essential to overcome it, because it obscures the fact that time and context, intention and the states of minds, are never the same twice. Even if I simply say “rat rat”, both emissions are unique, both meanings are unique, their sum is unique, and that to which they may or may not refer is unique in each instance. I am transformed in both cases, and by the sum, I change when I begin to utter, speak, and have finished, and so on.

The reason it is crucial to understand this is that if we do not, we will believe that similar instances of something “are the same thing”, when, in fact, they are radically different — much more different than they are or can ever be the same. We think when we see one sparrow or car, and then another, “that these are the same thing”, but the degree of their similarity is merely categorical, and neither reality nor our minds are actually like this: every single moment or situation is far more unique than it is similar to some other, and so too each person, animal, tree, or pencil. We are deceived by the likenesses and categories of language and, over time, this severely deprives us of experiential intimacy with reality, intelligence, discovery and knowledge.”

— an intelligence agent