Big projects and education require copying ideas from one brain to another. Language is a good medium for doing that, much better than improvised gestures. But

Big projects and education require copying ideas from one brain to another. Language is a good medium for doing that, much better than improvised gestures. But words and ideas must be different things, or nothing read could ever be misunderstood, and no one would ever be at a loss for words. When I imagine a tree, I get the image and the feel and the scent, the qualia. Hearing the word “pine” for the first time did not make me smell anything. I had to learn to associate those syllables with my memories of pine trees, and they only work between me and other people who have done that.