Signal-to-symbol transformation and vice versa: from fundamental processes to representation

It is a trivial but true statement that although the physical world in which we and artificial agents exist is continuous and is perceived or sensed as a continuous signal, our reasoning is performed on symbolic entities. All natural and artificial sensors first detect continuous signals. Classical physics, chemistry, and biology describe some processes and behaviors, at least at a certain level of granularity, using continuous mathematics. Symbolic information processing, on the other hand, utilizes discrete mathematics. One way of looking at the problem of signal-to-symbol transformation is as a problem of quantization. Hence, we believe that to understand knowledge representation fully we must fh-st understand this transformation from signal to symbol and vice versa.