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So, what is Beyond Symbols? It’s natural to ask: Why on earth are we using words (symbols) to talk about something that’s beyond symbols? It’s complicated, but I’ll try to explain it anyway.
Beyond Symbols is one of the most fascinating things I’ve come across in my research on natural language understanding and through reflections in life. Explaining this concept is quite challenging. I do not know any communication technology to illustrate this concept in its real form, but I can give my best shot at describing it verbally. What do we generally do when we want to communicate something very complicated and difficult to explain? Imagine, if you will, you’re attempting to talk with a machine, or an alien. What is the most fundamental challenge we’d expect in this situation? Have you ever felt the need to describe something but lacked the right kind or amount of words to be sure they got the right meaning? That is what I mean by Beyond Symbols here.
So, it is a phrase, a sequence of words, that points to things that cannot be described with words (without compromising the quality of communication). It is a funny feeling to use this concept for the first time — a symbol to refer to something that cannot be described using any symbols! It feels counterintuitive at first. Why do we need a symbol to describe…
