Are words really just pointers? If you want to refer to objects which you’ve visualized, they indeed are. But people even do some peculiar “arithmetic” with words, forming sentences, which has nothing to do with meanings.
For example, when I’m sleepy (half sleeping state), sometimes I notice that whole sentence structures are running through my head, without the words filled in, but I know where the sentences begin and end, and how they are connected. Even specific words show up time to time, but the whole stream has no sense at all. But if you don’t visualize and use concepts… it just sounds right.
So I think words as stand-alone things (with their sound and syntactical role) also have an important role for connecting those things in a more abstract way, whose connections can’t be inferred only by visualization. (Think of a linked list of pointers: the position of the pointers in the list can be as important as the referenced object itself.)
Roko: FOPL is similar to the taxi driver who never visualizes anything. (It never dereferences the pointers.) I don’t think the solution would be a much better symbolic system (although FOPL is not really designed for dereferencig), but to connect a visual cortex to the symbol manipulation system. So the similarity of two symbols could be checked by simply visualizing them.
Unknown: What do we mean by “chance”? That it has a very small a priori probability… The evidence is given: the two sequences are similar. We can also assume that the evolution theory has a bigger probability a priori, than the chance to get that sequence. These insights were all included in the post, I think. So applying Bayes’ theorem we get the fact that the evolution version has much bigger a posteriori probability, so we don’t have to show that separately.
There are a lot of events which have a priori probabilities in that order of magnitude… But we also should have strong evidences to shift that to a plausible level. But a lot of people think: “there was only a very little chance for this to happen, but it happened ⇒ things with very little chances do happen sometimes.”