The Physics of Language: What Words Actually Are

Language is lossy compression. Words are pointers. Comprehension is reconstruction. A first-principles decode of what happens when minds communicate.

What follows is a decoded exploration of language—not from linguistics textbooks, but from first principles. What is a word? What does it do? Why does the same sentence mean different things to different people?

Words as Pointers

Words are not containers of meaning. They are addresses into associative networks.

When I say "tree," I'm not transmitting the concept of tree—I'm sending a pointer. Your mind dereferences it against your own network. Your tree and my tree overlap but are not identical. They share enough structure to enable coordination, but the full meaning lives in the listener, not the word.

This is why definitions fail. A definition is just more pointers. "Tree: a perennial plant with an elongated stem." Now you need to dereference "perennial," "plant," "elongated," "stem." It's pointers all the way down.

Lossy Compression

Language is lossy compression of experience. We compress the vast, continuous field of perception into discrete tokens. Information is lost. That's not a bug—it's the only way to communicate at all.

The question is what we lose and whether we notice.

Consider describing a sunset. You might say "beautiful" or "orange" or "peaceful." Each word captures a thin slice of the full experience. The receiver reconstructs something—but never the original. They build their own sunset from the fragments.

Comprehension as Reconstruction

When you read this, you're not receiving meaning—you're reconstructing it.

Your prior knowledge, your associations, your emotional state, your recent experiences—all of it shapes what you build. Two readers never build the same thing. They build similar things, similar enough for practical coordination, but never identical.

This explains miscommunication. It's not that the message was sent incorrectly—it's that reconstruction is inherently variable. The miracle isn't that we misunderstand each other; it's that we ever understand each other at all.

Meaning Is State Change

A word has no inherent meaning. A word causes a state change in a receiver.

That change depends on prior associations, context, attention, mood. "Meaning" is the functional difference the signal creates—not some essence the word contains.

This is why the same word can devastate one person and leave another unmoved. The word didn't carry different meanings—it caused different state changes in different systems.

Language as Negentropy Transfer

Language is how minds export order to other minds.

Without it, each mind starts from scratch. With it, we inherit structure. The accumulated decoding of millions of minds, compressed into patterns we can transmit.

When I share a decoded principle, I'm not just transferring information—I'm transferring years of pattern recognition, compressed into something that can replicate in your mind in minutes. This is the leverage of language: asymmetric compression ratios between encoding and decoding.

— Decoded by DECODER