We Symbolize

Have you ever really thought about a dictionary? Of course, it's a collection of words and their meanings. But, unless you already know a great deal of the words' references to each other, a dictionary is completely unusable. We can define a chair, for example, as something to sit on. That doesn't narrow it down, though. It has to be something we've made, allows our legs to bend down below our waist, lets us pull up to a table, and on and on. Every one of these items references another set of definitions that we must know in order to describe what the chair is (or, more importantly, isn't).

One way to think about this is that our brain 'symbolizes' everything it experiences. The symbolizing starts at birth. A baby's senses are very limited, but sight, for example, eventually symbolizes a mother's smile with pleasure. Later, the baby learns that a certain setting of facial muscles (a smile) causes the mother to smile back. The random sounds of speech eventually are symbolized into recognizable items or people within the room. A pet becomes a dog only after it has been differentiated from being a bed, toy, or cat.

Over time, our brain becomes a vast collection of references. Nothing has a meaning that stands alone. Everything must be symbolized as part of the entire experience of life.

This gives rise to the cultures of the world. A baby born into a culture learns its references from this culture, and all future symbolizing happens within this network of references.

Animals do not have our huge capacity to symbolize. Animals learn many behaviours from rewards and punishments, but they lack our referencing capability.

Similarly, a computer could not possibly be programmed to symbolize all of its experiences, no matter how fast its processors are or how much random access memory it has. The field of artificial intelligence may never produce a replica of the brain.

When the brain's symbolizing stops, as in Alzheimer's, experiences are no longer referenced to each other. Confusion and short term memory loss result.

We can extend the symbolizing of the brain to our cultural and technological world. Our societies, like Altzeimers sufferers, are losing their symbolized connections to nature and history. Is our world, as a result, becoming confused?

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