Symbols
Imagine you are stuck in a room with nothing but a limitless supply of paper and pencils. Not a hard scenario to imagine given the unprecedented times. Let’s say, in this bleak enclosure, you are also provided with a chute that can pass pieces of paper back and forth to another room where someone else is also similarly stuck. You are told that the only way you two can be released from this ridiculous scenario is by accomplishing the equally ridiculous task of being able to pronounce each other’s names. You are free to ask for any item you might need but can only communicate through the paper.
In the first case, you have a fellow English speaker and reader. You scribble your name down. They do the same for theirs. Ta-da! You are free!
In the second case, the person can neither speak English nor write in the Roman script that you are used to. Sure you can write each other’s name down and pass it along but the squiggly lines would mean nothing to the other person. So what do you do now instead?
Luckily, you are really smart. You decide to teach them the International Phonetic Alphabet. Of course, you can not exchange any kind of sound so you present them the symbols next to representations of sounds you know that they likely know. For example, you draw a goat, and next to it the symbols corresponding to typical goat bleating. Given enough examples, they can infer the correlation between the symbols and the sounds and thereby learn the alphabet. You exchange names in this alphabet. And voila! You are free once again.
In the third case, you are stuck with an intelligent alien from a totally different planet. Weirdly enough, they are physiologically exactly like humans but have never heard any Earth sounds. What do you do now?
This is a bit of a pickle, no doubt. The solution is tedious but you manage to find one nevertheless. You folks begin by first establishing mathematics. Two plus two is four anywhere in the universe but the problem is that they might not represent two as “two” or plus as “+”. Once again, you approach it by sharing some examples for addition using your symbols perhaps like “🌕🌕 +🌕= 🌕🌕🌕”. Then you go further and in a similar fashion, establish numerals, algebra, and graphs, etc.
Given the aliens are an intelligent, advanced species as humans here and your new alien friend is as smart and educated as you, they have also likely observed and quantified physical phenomenon (like gravity, electricity, and sound) but only represented them differently in whatever version of mathematics they had. Now that you have taught them your version, when you send them formulas regarding sound they are able to recognize them! Finally, you get an oscilloscope (remember you have access to any tools you want), record the waveform of your name being pronounced, and send over the graph with the axes labeled and formulas provided. The waveform effectively describes the sound and only needs to be input into a signal generator to be heard. They send a waveform back to you too and phew, you are done!
All three of the cases are slightly different but there is something common in them all.
You exploited shared knowledge with the other person to share more knowledge which could not be otherwise shared directly. Such shared knowledge was, respectively, the usage of English language, past experience with various sounds, or simply the understanding of the universal physical phenomenon.
Symbols were the medium in all three cases but they were useless unless they had a common meaning to both parties. Nevertheless, they were critical for conveying new knowledge. Similar knowledge between the two parties could only be exploited once it could be represented in a shared form.
Moreover, the very process of establishing common meaning for new symbols was dependent on either already shared symbols (using algebra to build a formula) or pattern recognition (goat sketch, addition example). In fact, pattern recognition itself can be seen as a symbolic process since it involves abstracting and generalizing intuitively recognized common features.
Phenomena like “knowledge” inside someone’s mind are intangible and have no fixed representational form of their own, making them impossible to convey except through symbols. On the other hand, symbols are tangible but have no meaning of their own except what is ascribed to them through experience or deduction. Therefore, through the social need for conveying our internal states arises the need for shared symbols.
Not only do we need to succinctly convey our internal states to others but to ourselves as well. This allows us to reason over them from a higher standpoint. Say, for example, if you are enlisting your friends in your head, you just think of them as their names. For this task, you don’t need to conjure up every single bit of knowledge or thought about every single friend, and doing so would make the task much harder. Just the name gets the job done and is easier to think about. Such symbolic abstractions are critical for our everyday reasoning abilities.
As contrived as the stuck-in-a-room scenario above sounds, it actually scales up to the average human experience. We are all trapped in the lonely rooms of our minds but, fortunately, have more than just paper and pencil to communicate. Over time, societies have developed shared symbols over vision, hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception. And these can be found extensively in the language, arts, and culture of every society shaping how we think and express ourselves.
And yet we continue to learn, forget, invent, and redefine such symbols every day, making us all a part of the social human symphony being played, written, and listened to at the same time.
