Paul,
Lets just explore the idea of thought without language a little more - because you do seem quite convinced that it does not exist.
I am not really musical, but if you talk to a musician, they do consider music to have meaning. I guess each small section has an emotion associated with it, and the succession of such emotions conveys some meaning. In a way, perhaps that just means that music is not really language free. I don't know, you can't really deny that a piece of music seems to have some meaning!
As to the meaning of Bethoven's 5th - it so happens that if my partner oversleeps, I sometimes wake her up with that very piece of music - it works rather well!
There is at least some evidence that some likes/dislikes get passed on when someone receives a heart transplant -
Inherited Memories in Organ Transplant Recipients
I find this extremely interesting because even if some information is encoded outside the brain, it should (according to orthodox ideas) be encoded as a neural network, which would be meaningless to another nervous system.
As regards Chiatin - the few extra bits to make the copy is hardly relevant to the discussion you were having with Ian (i.e. you still only need a few bits, even if you are copying gigabytes of information) - which is where that sub-thread started - I suggest we let that drop!
David