Human intellectual progress can be understood, in large measure, as a history of compression. The most powerful compression strategy ever developed is abstraction: the extraction of invariant structure from diverse and concrete phenomena. To abstract is to discard incidental detail while preserving the relations that matter for reasoning, prediction, and transfer. In this sense, “three sheep” and “three apples” are compressed into the number 3; land measurement and celestial motion are compressed into geometry; and recurring patterns of inference are compressed into logic. Long before silicon chips and digital computers, human civilization had already developed remarkably sophisticated forms of conceptual software, executed not by machines, but by the biological architecture of the human brain.
Dongsheng Xiao (Mon,) studied this question.