It can be said that “we have imperfect information about what’s really going on ‘out there’ in the non-mind universe”, or it could be said that we have perfect information of what’s going on in the mind. Beginning with the latter, as we all would have done before any notion of the former was ever conceived (the “non-mind universe” ‘out there’ conceived in the mind no less), the issue with the latter is that we have less useful predictive power relative to the usefulness in predictive power of the former. The difference therefore is in utility, and the inversion of mind with “non-mind” such that “non-mind” replaced mind as more fundamental was because of utility. Reality is thus a social construct that would not exist or occur to the mind of somebody born into no social contact. You are not far off at all in your mention of spoken language as the foundation of what we now casually deem to be the reality beyond the mind: the source of all the goings in within our mind.
This is the riddle I’ve been exploring, and the solution I’ve been considering for a long time now. Not that it might quite easily be very misguided. I even seem to remember a reference to the construction of such things through language alone by my favourite philosopher, Nietzsche, somewhere in The Gay Science. I can try and seek it out if you’re interested and if you’ve not already read it.
Consider not only air, but all that we experience either side of it. “Where” do they occur? The useful conception is to suggest they originate from reality out there in space, but even the study of “out there in space” reveals that all our experience is only of our interpretations of the data we sense from “out there in space”. The spatial element of our experience is then to be reconsidered as originating in our brain - so where is all of everything then? Out there or in the brain? In the mind? What then of space at all? If you’ve seen Joe Rogan’s interview with Elon Musk, Elon similarly raises the point of “space” and “where” any thing actually is if everything is already virtual reality. For these mind bubbles I’ve suddenly interested myself in, as a concept, the fact that the supposed spatial locations of things in minds overlap with what others say doesn’t mean that the minds themselves are spatially overlapping, or even that minds occupy any space at all - or at least that they don’t conform with Materialist notions of space. “Air” is only really a placeholder to account for the time it takes for the first things we seemingly experience “over there” to meet with things “over here”, and the feeling of resistance that occurs with wind or moving fast. It’s not quite so strange, then, that interactive virtual 3D representations so closely match our experience despite their 2D format. Has the mind been tricked by the 2D, or is the 3D a trick?
What is software? Software is the “intangible” information that tells the Hardware what to do, right? Well no, software is all physical too. Every key stroke and mouse click or movement is the change in electrical current through hardware. It results in very specific light shows on your monitor practically incidentally. The “rift” between hardware and software is better said to be the mind’s reaction to these light shows etc., between the hardware of “reality” and the software of the mind. But just as it’s all hardware “in reality” it’s all mind: the computer hardware, the electrical current changing due to inputs, the display of the monitor and the associations of the brain that result in various different outputs of the mind interacting with other elements of the mind that aren’t deemed “self”. Of course, you’re merely creating an analogy, and all the computer would be doing is condensing more complex information that can be much more easily summed up and communicated on an abstract level without details, more efficiently translating meaning (that which we respond to most) than if every detail were specified.
Note that the computer would not be communicating anything if it didn’t change the type of the information that it used to communicate. If it changed nothing, it’d just be functioning as normal: the type of information used to communicate has to be different in order for it to be information. A “complete description of the brain” is no description if a brain is simply working, it has to be translated into something else so that an association can be made - such is the mechanism of the brain itself e.g. the association of one group of neurons with another through electro-chemical stimulation in order for brain activity to occur at all. I can’t simply present “mind” and expect information to happen, it is required - through language - for a different type of substance to be invoked to be associated with mind such that the mind can understand it. This manifests in sensory creations such as “the brain” that works in this very convenient way to represent the mind, within the mind, so that the mind can think it has understood something new. It would never have been able to do this without the brain in this way, not because the brain is of a more fundamental substance.
How’s that for hocus pocus?