Everyday Miracles

"Look! . . . and I will show you a miracle."

Watch this:

It may be that extraterrestrials will show up here some day with the power in some degree to read minds, and yet be totally flabbergasted that we have developed symbolic communication. We will think mind reading a miracle; and they, our system of writing and reading,¹ because it requires no proximity either in time or space in order to share a few thoughts.

See! The writer just makes these marks. Then, later, the reader knows what was being thought when the marks were made. Tell me that's not a miracle.


1) writing and reading:
"Any reader easily retrieves a single meaning out of at least 50,000 candidate words, in the space of a few tenths of a second, based on nothing more then a few strokes of light on the retina."

Dehaene, S., 2010.
Reading in the brain:
The new science of how we read.
New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 42.