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.
The Signal Under the Sentence
We live in a world that has optimized words to death.
We have:
real-time translation
zillion-word language models
global networks where half the planet can shout into the same feed
We have more syntax than any civilization in history.
And yet clarity is collapsing.
Public discourse feels less like a conversation and more like a swarm of parallel hallucinations. We don’t just disagree about conclusions; we disagree about reality. The more language we have, the less it seems to do what we thought language was for.
Something else is going on.
Beneath every sentence—before every sentence—there is a structure of thought that gives it birth. A private architecture of associations, expectations, fears, hopes, accumulated beliefs and raw impressions. That architecture isn’t made of nouns and verbs. It’s made of something older and more primitive.
It’s made of waves.
This isn’t poetry. This is mathematics.
At the ground floor of mind, every thought you’ve ever had can be described as an interference pattern of waves, made up of three simple properties:
frequency: how fast it oscillates, the tempo of the thought
amplitude: how intense it is, the felt strength of it
phase: how it aligns with other thoughts, the relationship between them
If that sounds technical, imagine music.
Pitch, volume, timing.
You don’t need to know the lyrics to hear that a note is sharp or that two instruments are clashing. You don’t need to decode meaning to know when something is off.
The mind works the same way. Long before a belief crystallizes, long before a sentence finds words, the psyche is composing in a language of frequency, amplitude, and phase.
Ontological mathematics takes this seriously. It treats mathematics not as a tool we use to model reality, but as the deeper language reality expresses itself through—the structure beneath every other structure. From that perspective, thought isn’t merely described by mathematics; it is living mathematics. Mathematical thought isthe actual fabric of reality itself.
The soul appears as an extraordinarily complex waveform, a living interference pattern of meaning and intention. The brain becomes the local instrument through which that pattern is rendered into embodied experience.
Coming Next…
If language is failing us, it’s because the real structure of thought lives deeper than words. To understand how minds become distorted—and how they can become clear—we have to look beneath sentences to the waves that generate them.