LOL “Perhaps it was built from the certainty that my words mean the same thing to you that they mean to me.”

The irony is not lost on me as I write this. I am stacking more words into the air, hoping they can bridge the gap. I know they cannot. I am almost certain I will be misunderstood. Yet I throw these words into the space between us anyway.

Perhaps that is the dream of the Tower. Or perhaps it is simply what human beings do.

I know words fail…. Language is imperfect…. I know that no tower can overcome the mystery between one human being and another. And yet I keep speaking. I keep building. Casting fragile symbols into the space between us, hoping that now and then something deeper passes through: A glimpse, A recognition, A moment when two people look at the same moon through different windows and somehow know they are seeing the same light.

Thank you all so much for these reflections. Anita, Roberta, Alessa… your responses beautifully illustrate the very mystery I was trying to point toward.

Alessa, I really appreciate you bringing in that traditional theological reading. You’re spot on: the dispersal in the original story served as a divine nudge to prevent hubris, cultivate genuine diversity, and force humanity back into localized, ground-level existence.

Where I see a possible “Yes, And…” to that story is in looking at what we are attempting to build today.

Perhaps I should try explain why Babel came to mind yesterday… to be candid I’m not wonder if I know or can… as this has been a kind of experiment.

I look around and see humanity once again attempting to build a universal tower. Not from brick and stone, but from information, networks, algorithms, and increasingly, systems capable of generating language itself.

The promise I think is familiar. Connect enough people. Gather enough knowledge. Remove enough barriers. Create enough shared language. Then misunderstanding will finally give way to understanding.

Only I am not convinced.

The foundation appears to be the same assumption hidden inside the original Tower: that reality can ultimately be captured, organized, and transmitted through through one common ‘speech’.

Yet every meaningful experience I have had points in the opposite direction. We do not struggle because there is too little information. We struggle because life continually exceeds our descriptions of it.

Love exceeds the word “love.” Truth exceeds the word “truth.” A human being exceeds every category used to describe them.

That does not make words useless or less wondrous. But it does make them insufficient.

What concerns me is that we increasingly treat the accumulation of words as though it were the accumulation of understanding. We are building higher than ever before on a foundation that I suspect has always been sand.

In the old story, the Tower failed and the people dispersed. There was still wilderness beyond the city. Still distance. Still silence. Still places untouched by the project. I am less certain those places exist today.

Perhaps that is why Babel no longer feels like an ancient story to me, but a mirror, to the hubris of tower humanity is building today…

Thank you, Alessa. I appreciate your point about tools saving time, and you’re right—behind much of this tech is simply profit and the race for market share. But I think the dilemma runs even deeper than corporate intent. It touches the very nature of thought itself.

Coming back to this thread after a week, I realized I was speaking in metaphors because trying to use language to point at the limits of language feels a bit like trying to write on water. Perhaps that’s why stories, myths, and parables keep appearing wherever humans wrestle with these questions. I played the fool… and this post I play the prophet, perhaps the greatest fools of all…

The problem of language, or perhaps duality itself, seems to have accompanied us from the moment we first began naming things. Can duality be separated from language, or does language create it? I don’t know. What I do know is that nearly every philosophy, psychology, and wisdom tradition eventually finds itself standing on that same shoreline, staring into the same mystery, or crashing upon its rocks.

Jiddu Krishnamurti named the issue this way:

“Thought is verbalized sensation; thought is the response of memory, the word, the experience, the image. Thought is transient, changing, impermanent, and it is seeking permanency. So thought creates the thinker, who then becomes the permanent; he (thinker) assumes the role of the censor, the guide, the controller, the molder of thought. This illusory permanent entity is the product of thought, of the transient… till this false is seen as the false, truth is not.”

I tend to see thought and language as inseparable, or close enough to make little difference.

That is why I find myself concerned as Large Language Models become the foundation of a new Tower.

They take our transient, impermanent words, freeze them into statistical probability, and package them back to us as authoritative “truth.” By automating thought at scale, we aren’t solving the problem of language, we are automating the illusion. We are widening the distance between the thought and the thinker, collapsing the nuance of human experience into a false certainty of binary (either or) outputs and algorithmic consensus.

This is not because the technology is flawed, but because the foundation itself may be.

Alessa, you spoke of hope in human adaptation and in future generations finding their way through these challenges. I think hope exists as well. Only I don’t see it in building a better system, a more aligned algorithm, or a more perfect set of words.

The hope lies in noticing the problem itself.

It begins when we see the false as false. When we recognize that no model, no ideology, no technology, and no collection of symbols can capture the living reality of a human being.

If that sounds pessimistic, I mean it as the opposite.

It begins the moment we see the false as false… Because the moment we stop demanding certainty from our words, we are freed to meet one another directly. Not as categories, outputs, identities, or abstractions, but as human beings. As Thomas amazingly shared.

We comfort ourselves with the belief that awareness is progress. I am no longer sure that it is. The builders of Babel were not fools because they lacked intelligence. They were fools because they mistook intelligence for wisdom.

The builders of Babel did not lack intelligence. They possessed so much intelligence that they confused it for wisdom. We call our latest tower Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps the name itself reveals the assumption. (Talk about a Freudian slip. 🙂 )

We still believe that if we gather enough knowledge, enough information, enough language, enough processing power, the mystery will finally yield.

I am not convinced.

The prophet warns: “The tower is out there.”
The mystic says: “The tower is in here.”
Zen Master asks: “Who is the ‘here’ that contains the tower?
Silence… Yes

A question: When you read the word Yes, did anyone find themselves attaching other words to it? Acceptance, detachment, hope, trust, faith… Yes… and Babel begins