Fields (e.g.

Fields (e.g. images) are hard to express in a linear stream (e.g. words).

"A picture is worth a thousand words."

Computers can do a formal description of the picture in a stream because they're very precise and infinitely patient.

Just streaming the pixels off left to right, top to bottom.

Maybe with some fancy math to do lossy compression.

Humans could theoretically do that, too.

But it would take an inhuman amount of patience and time.

So we generally distill the picture into high level descriptions: "a tree on a green hill and a blue sky with a labrador retriever puppy under it."

That's what makes it what Wittgenstein would call a field: quick to absorb, slow to describe.

Orders of magnitude difference between absorbing and describing.

Knowhow is also a field, a vibe.

Unlike pictures, it doesn't exist in some reified form to transcribe.

It is an amorphous, shifting blob that's hard to pin down.

Even if you're infinitely patient, it will have drifted to a new shape as you transcribe it.

At least an image will stay still for a computer to painstakingly transcribe. Knowhow won't.

Knowhow is a nebulous field, impossible to pin down to describe fully.