Numbers carry no meaning, nor do the magnitudes arbitrarily assigned to meaning. The map is not the territory.
No, not fabricated, but inferred from a structured corpus of information generated by other semantic processes (humans).
> Numbers carry no meaning, nor do the magnitudes arbitrarily assigned to meaning.
Prove it.
> The map is not the territory.
Except if the territory is information, in which case the map is literally the territory. Knowledge is information, is it not?
Numbers can mean anything. A multitude of numbers as voltage potentials and ion gradients sufficiently describe your brain.
Biology manifests this arrangement as a brain, without which this arrangement would also be similarly meaningless.
Your argument against deriving meaning from statistics completely ignores that the brain also works this way.
> Your argument against deriving meaning from statistics completely ignores that the brain also works this way.
The brain is not predicting it's compressing.
Compression requires prediction, therefore your brain requires prediction.
If you meant this as a comparison to machine learning, then a predictive coding model closely matches.