"We take in some visual scene. But when we describe it in human language we’re always in effect coming up with a symbolic description of the scene."

Human mind works in a qualitative manner, we need symbols to translate qualitative perception into a quantitative abstraction. This started as an economic and social organization need (geometry), but later evolved into Mathematics and got to overcome the shortcomings of natural language to describe reality (philosophy became science).

Numbers are just symbols that map human perception to a reality that is inherently quantitative.

I fail to grasp what Mr. Wolfram tries to explain here, but it looks to me as if he is regressing into philosophy.