Its been a wild ride thinking about this. Start paying attention to how many times you use spatial relations to talk about abstract things that seemingly have nothing to do with physical reality. Even in programming we often use language like "Run x THROUGH y, if it COMES OUT as z GO BACK to...". One can imagine a visual representation where x,y,z are just differently colored balls representing some other structure in space/time, with the x ball going through the y ball, and coming out as some other ball which moves back to something in the opposite direction.
Everything that happens happens in space and time, so it makes total sense that we have this common denominator of reasoning spatially that ties together images, written language, and sound.
I don't make a distinction between "reality" and the mental conception of reality. By all pragmatic takes, my mental experience IS reality. Anything beyond the means of observation may as well not exist.
Now as to the question of whether language can represent any mental conception, I am not so sure, but merely being enough to represent any physical system is plenty, and of this ability I am sure. Surely if I show you a video of any random thing happening, you can describe in some words EXACTLY what is happening such that another person can recreate that state perfectly. Without any abstractions you could give a description of every single object/pixel in your view, and with "higher" level abstractions like "everything is moving" you can create a lossy representation (which is often enough depending on as depending on the purpose, we don't always care about the actually state of the exact state of system, but rather that it possesses some property. "Something is moving" vs "nothing is moving").
Everything that happens happens in space and time, so it makes total sense that we have this common denominator of reasoning spatially that ties together images, written language, and sound.
I don't make a distinction between "reality" and the mental conception of reality. By all pragmatic takes, my mental experience IS reality. Anything beyond the means of observation may as well not exist.
Now as to the question of whether language can represent any mental conception, I am not so sure, but merely being enough to represent any physical system is plenty, and of this ability I am sure. Surely if I show you a video of any random thing happening, you can describe in some words EXACTLY what is happening such that another person can recreate that state perfectly. Without any abstractions you could give a description of every single object/pixel in your view, and with "higher" level abstractions like "everything is moving" you can create a lossy representation (which is often enough depending on as depending on the purpose, we don't always care about the actually state of the exact state of system, but rather that it possesses some property. "Something is moving" vs "nothing is moving").