Everything is just a low resolution representation of a thing. The so-called reality we supposedly have access to is at best a small number of sound waves and photons hitting our face. So I don't buy this argument that symbols are categorically different. It's a gradient and symbols are more sparse and less rich of a data source, yes. But who are we to say where that hypothetical line exists, beyond which further compression of concepts into smaller numbers of buckets becomes a non-starter for intelligence and world modelling. And then there's multi modal LLMs which have access to data of a similar richness that humans have access to.