Chocolate

If you entered an alternate universe in which chocolate didn’t exist, how would you describe it? I know it seems like a silly question, but in a way it reveals a profound truth.

There are things whose existence we take for granted, yet which we cannot adequately describe. For all of our human communicative power, for these things we fall back on shared direct sensory experience.

We don’t spend time thinking about the impossibility of adequately describing these shared sensory experiences. We simply say the word “chocolate”, and everybody knows what we mean.

I wonder what it would be like to be a sentient species that did indeed have a way of adequately communicating such things. Such beings might look at our poor impoverished human language, and wonder how we ever manage to get through the day.

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