“Part of the reason people get in trouble with words, is that they do not realize how much complexity lurks behind words. Can you visualize a “green dog”? Can you visualize a “cheese apple”? “Apple” isn’t just a sequence of two syllables or five letters. That’s a shadow. That’s the tip of the tiger’s tail. Words, or rather the concepts behind them, are paintbrushes—you can use them to draw images in your own mind. Literally draw, if you employ concepts to make a picture in your visual cortex. And by the use of shared labels, you can reach into someone else’s mind, and grasp their paintbrushes to draw pictures in their minds—sketch a little green dog in their visual cortex. But don’t think that, because you send syllables through the air, or letters through the Internet, it is the syllables or the letters that draw pictures in the visual cortex. That takes some complex instructions that wouldn’t fit in the sequence of letters. “Apple” is 5 bytes, and drawing a picture of an apple from scratch would take more data than that. “Apple” is merely the tag attached to the true and wordless apple concept, which can paint a picture in your visual cortex, or collide with “cheese,” or recognize an apple when you see one, or taste its archetype in apple pie, maybe even send out the motor behavior for eating an apple . . . And it’s not as simple as just calling up a picture from memory. Or how would you be able to visualize combinations like a “triangular lightbulb”—imposing triangleness on lightbulbs, keeping the essence of both, even if you’ve never seen such a thing in your life? Don’t make the mistake the behaviorists made. There’s far more to speech than sound in air. The labels are just pointers—“look in memory area 1387540.” Sooner or later, when you’re handed a pointer, it comes time to dereference it, and actually look in memory area 1387540. What does a word point to?” (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality)
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