[Language is] really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. I'm sitting here making grunting sounds and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it.

Hillis marvels at language as a technology for transferring inner experience. The “messy, confused idea” emphasizes how private and inarticulate thought can be before it is shaped into words. Speech—reduced humorously to “grunting sounds”—is presented as a crude physical signal that nonetheless can prompt a listener to reconstruct a comparable mental model. The quote highlights both the power and the limits of communication: language rarely copies an idea perfectly, but it can create an analogous structure in another mind. It also gestures toward themes common in computing and cognitive science—encoding, transmission, and decoding—treating conversation as an information process with inevitable noise and approximation.