The light plays across our eyes creating a landscape of shapes and colors that are given context by our experiences. That simple image to the left was just some light creeping in through sliding glass doors across my ceiling. Light, shadow, all of this comes to that bundle of synapses, gets flipped as our mind builds it out in 3 dimensions. It’s a wonderful trick, we believe, even considering how much we do not see. We are blind to large parts of light, and so we don’t really know what we’re missing, but based on the light we have seen we have figured out a lot of things about things we can’t see.

Hearing, touch, even taste are much the same. Our senses are limited, only developed enough so that we can manage to shove food in our mouths and find mates. Life was more complicated before to get us evolved to wear fancy underwear and have digital devices, but we have these abilities because of throwing rocks and jumping over things.

Things, oddly enough, that kids still do before they grow up to wear fancy underwear and wield digital devices. Well, now they might be dressed in fancy underwear and throw digital devices, but in my era we threw rocks and jumped a lot.

The point, though, is that we miss things. We have our limitations which we rarely acknowledge, much less accept, and when we communicate with each other either in person or through the tomes of words we have left laying about on various medium, we communicate in a language of senses which has gained abstraction because like us, language evolved.

Where we once got together and maybe banged on makeshift drums around a fire to keep predators away, we tap away at different interfaces to each other based on that same language. And these words feed algorithms.

And yet we have these gaps, even in the abstract.