@Roko: The visual cortex isn’t the only one thing we use. Other parts of the brain probably “cache” some of the insights gained by visualizing things, or trying / imagining movements etc., also common sentences, so we can use these areas for other things we’ve never seen before. These cached things are our concepts, I think.
You’re right, I won’t visualize every part of the thought “technology advances exponentially because technology feeds back positively on itself”. But I’ve seen a lot of exponential functions in math classes, plotted them on screen, and noticed that they can grow very big. Now I use this concept for understanding this sentence. It would be hard to explain this to a five year old, or to somebody who has never seen exponential functions: you can’t visualize so many things at once, without using any cache mechanisms. (That’s why inferential distances are so long in reality, I think.)
With only language and the cached thoughts (grammar / logic and rules in a symbolic system) we can get surprisingly far, but not far enough. (For us, even logic is a cached thought from the visual cortex, for it describes the connections of distinct things. This is a special feature of vision: try to imagine two songs at the same time...)
@Roko: The visual cortex isn’t the only one thing we use. Other parts of the brain probably “cache” some of the insights gained by visualizing things, or trying / imagining movements etc., also common sentences, so we can use these areas for other things we’ve never seen before. These cached things are our concepts, I think.
You’re right, I won’t visualize every part of the thought “technology advances exponentially because technology feeds back positively on itself”. But I’ve seen a lot of exponential functions in math classes, plotted them on screen, and noticed that they can grow very big. Now I use this concept for understanding this sentence. It would be hard to explain this to a five year old, or to somebody who has never seen exponential functions: you can’t visualize so many things at once, without using any cache mechanisms. (That’s why inferential distances are so long in reality, I think.)
With only language and the cached thoughts (grammar / logic and rules in a symbolic system) we can get surprisingly far, but not far enough. (For us, even logic is a cached thought from the visual cortex, for it describes the connections of distinct things. This is a special feature of vision: try to imagine two songs at the same time...)