The Language Beneath All Languages: Part 1
The Philosopher Who Wanted Us to Stop Arguing and Start Calculating
Preface
This piece is the beginning of a five-part series. Each installment takes us one layer deeper into a key idea from my upcoming book, The Quantified Soul: that thought has a structure, that this structure can be measured and clarified, and that understanding it may be the key to understanding everything else—mind, coherence, conflict, healing, even what we mean when we say “soul.”
These essays aren’t meant as quick reads or broad summaries. They are the clearest public expression so far of the framework I’ve been building quietly for some time, the one that sits beneath my neurotherapy work and beneath the metaphysical architecture of my first book itself. Think of them as a map—not of the content of thought, but of the language beneath it.
The series moves in five arcs:
- the failure of language and Leibniz’s unrealized dream,
- the deep structure beneath thought,
- how minds align internally and with each other,
- what becomes possible when two minds learn to hear each other,
- and finally, the wider ambition—making the unobservable soul observable.
My interpretation won’t be perfect. Some edges may still be rough. But the core claim is already testable: we can train minds to become clearer, more coherent, more themselves. The frontier now is understanding what coherence actually is.
The Philosopher Who Wanted Us to Stop Arguing and Start Calculating
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had an indecently ambitious idea.
He looked at human conflict—religious wars, philosophical feuds, political stalemates—and saw not just malice or ignorance, but something more basic: a failure of language. If only we had the right symbols, the right structure, the right clarity, he thought, we could stop shouting past each other and do something radical.
We could sit down and say: Let us calculate.
Not as metaphor. As method.
His characteristica universalis was supposed to be that method: an alphabet of human thought, a symbolic language so precise that every concept had a clean representation, every argument could be formalized, and every dispute could be settled by calculation rather than rhetoric. In his imagination, philosophy would become something like engineering. Logic would be executable.
On the surface, it sounds like a nerd fantasy, the fever dream of a man who loved equations too much. Underneath, it’s deadly serious. Leibniz was saying: human beings will not stop tearing themselves apart until we fix the way we think.
Most people read that as a proposal for a better spoken or written language. A more exact Esperanto for scientists and philosophers. A more honest legalese.
But what if that’s the wrong layer?
What if the real universal language isn’t anything we can write in ink or type on a screen?
What if it’s the language your mind is already using before any words appear?
Because there is such a language. You use it every moment of your life. You’ve never seen it, but it has shape. It has structure. It can become distorted. And—this is the part that still astonishes me—it can be measured, mapped, and trained.
Leibniz wanted a universal language for thought. I’m interested in the universal language of thought.
And to be clear, I’m riffing here—following the spirit of his question rather than claiming to reconstruct his intent. I’m taking his dream of a language that could make thinking clear, and tracing it down one more layer, into the architecture that comes before symbols. The difference, I think, is the future.
