A Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures

“Unit economy enables human cognition to reduce a vast amount of sense information to a minimal number of units, and the unit becomes the link between mathematics and reality.”

“WORDS VERSUS CONCRETES. This “algebraic” flexibility of a word encapsulates the essence of something while leaving unnecessary concretes out. A photo doesn’t and can’t. Further, a word offers enormous flexibility in terms of input/output. It can be spoken, thought, gestured (as in sign language), written, grammatically combined with other words, or stored with very little memory. A photo can’t. Words are altered by syntax and grammatical endings. A photo can’t be modified in this way, other than the temporal sequence in which a series of photos are viewed. As Aristotle proved in the Organon, words can be logically combined into propositions, arguments, premises, and conclusions. Finally, a word can be metaphoric, thus opening up mental “portals” and integrating elements through induction. A photo can’t.”

“If a person is asked to give details on a particularly vivid memory, it becomes quickly clear he is not examining a mental photograph accurately retrieved pixel by pixel. A simple question, “What is the shape of the frame of your memory?” turns out to have no answer. The image has no frame, no boundary, exactly as if its elements were conjured up from words rather than a certain number of rows of pixels. If the memory is a dynamic one, and the person is asked at what point does the film stop and replay, again, there is no basis for an answer. Nor can the person give a consistent response to the spatial relationship between remembered elements.”

“The handprint stencils found on so many cave walls may have been the first attempts to articulate the pronoun “I,” a crucial concept on the road to consciousness.”