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Now, if I said that yesterday's eruption of ill-conceived drivel was a manifestation of a strictly temporary bout of insanity, would you believe me?
Good. Because I'm going to do it again.
Before I continue though, that "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think they'll hate you." quote is by Don Marquis, author, I believe, of the "Archy and Mehitabel" poems.
"There is nothing like an arbitrary set of symbols for fixing the operations of the mind." — And Chaos Died, Joanna Russ
So, how are interstellar communication, synaesthesia, and every human language related? I hadn't had a thought on the subject until one day when I picked up a thought I'd had some time ago, concerning digital radio. Digital radio, such as that used by digital cell phones, allows transmitting information using far less power, and with none of the distortion and noise that creep into analog communication, or less anyway. When this method was first being introduced, some people reflected, "Poor aliens, they'll have a much harder time figuring out what we're transmitting now." I thought, either at the time or shortly thereafter, "Poor aliens — poor us." If SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) needs to be looking for digital broadcasts, it may be a long time before we pick anything up.
Or it may be nearly forever. Information theory may motivate aliens to obfuscate their signals even more. One method used in radar astronomy (that's astronomy done by bouncing radar signals off things, only really applicable to nearby bodies like the Moon or Venus) to improve reception of the extremely weak radar reflections from bodies like Venus is to send not just a radar pulse, but a pattern of pulses, and to pick it up by effectively matching the pattern against the (apparent) noise at the receiving antenna. Various patterns of fixed lengths can be demonstrated mathematically to "autocorrelate" well, but as the length increases the specific properties of the pattern don't matter so much, and it's mainly important that it be noise-like, that is, that it is mostly random.
So it may be that we are awash in transmissions from alien civilizations that we can't pick up because we don't have the signal keys to decode them, and that the aliens can't be bothered expending a third of the energy output of a good-sized star (as I recall one estimate) getting touch with us when sooner or later we'll have figured out how to receive signals transmitted using a reasonable level of power.
Synaesthesia is usually described as the association of one sense with another; one sees sounds, hears colours, and so on. But when one asks people with synaesthesia about their perceptions, it becomes clear that something a lot more complicated is going on. Some associate colours with different decimal digits, or with names. Others perceive smells as having distinct (and quite complicated) geometric shapes. These associations are always the same, but there is no correlation between one person's set of association and another's. They appear to be random.
They also appear to facilitate memory. People with synaesthesia have much less difficulty recalling things (Tim Berners-Lee (I think that's who it is) has commented that associating colours with digits may make it easier for him to remember phone numbers.)) possibly because the different aspects of experience are tied together by synaesthetic associations, which, while wholly meaningless in themselves, are helpful in getting from one memory to another.
Which brings me around to natural language, more specifically to how a word ever got associated with a particular person, place, thing, situation, concept, etc. The generally-accepted notion today is that the association between word and meaning is random, having no meaning in and of itself. While a language may have rules of pronunciation (by which I don't mean rules for pronouncing written words (that'd leave English out, and Chinese for that matter) but things like what is and is not allowed in speech, such as multiple consecutive consonants (common in English, basically not allowed in Japanese) or extended vowels (just the reverse)), grammar, syntax and so on, there appears to be no rule explaining why "fork", "time", "doubt", "debate", for example, are associated with the concepts they are.
So, in a way, we are perhaps all synaesthetic, in that we associate individually meaningless sounds (or gestures, in the case of users of sign language) with objects, smells, colours, sounds, letters and numerals, and so on. The random pattern of our language forms a set of commonly-held connections which makes communication and perhaps even thinking easier. Speech is highly ordered, but language itself is noise-like.
As you can see by the quote at the beginning of this ream of blather, I am not exactly the first out the door with this realization. And Chaos Died was published in 1970, and has a lot of synaesthetic imagery in it, (and is a remarkable work generally, which I recommend to anyone interested in experimental fiction ("It's time for... difficult reading.")) and indeed this whole entry might be taken as a description of how I came to understand what that one individual sentence in the book was getting at.
And now I had better be off to work, and try to make some progress on this heinously difficult feature which has consumed the last month of my time, with no end in sight. Ah, the life of a programmer is so full of trials..