Poiesis
"Money is a kind of poetry."
-- Wallace Stevens, Adagia
"Poetry" descends from the Greek verb poiein, meaning "to make, create, compose". Poetry might be defined as the use of symbols to make the intangible tangible, which I believe is what Stevens had in mind when he penned the above epigram. Money is a semiotic technology for converting intangible value into tangible tokens, translating something intrinsically subjective and private into something objective and publicly tradable.
Money, like all symbols, has a dual nature: it's simultaneously an object and an abstraction, a thing in itself and a proxy for something else. Because of the correlation between monetary tokens and value, people learn to behave toward it the same way they would toward an object they intrinsically value, in much the same way Pavlov's dog learned to behave the same toward a bell as the smell of food. This money illusion is a special case of what Quine half-jokingly referred to as "original sin" -- confusion of a sign with what it normally stands in for.
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"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."
-- The Book of Genesis (Ch. I, v. 3; KJV)
At night, you can see dim stars out of the corner of your eye that are invisible when you look at them dead-on. The rods in your retina are more photosensitive than the cones, and at wider angles more photons strike rods than cones, resulting in greater excitation being relayed down the optic nerve and consequent appearance of a point of light in your field of vision that was too dim to register at smaller angles. Here, if we take care to look obliquely, is a seam through which we can see the liminal nature of perception poking out at us.
Brains construct experience and behavior based on thresholds of neural excitation, which is part of why Pavlovian learning works in the first place: if the bell and the smell excite the same neurons governing behavioral response, they become semiotically interchangeable. In effect, they come to be identical concepts in the mind of the organism. This also works in the opposite direction: if two tones of equal pitch but different duration both start out associated with food and evoking equivalent responses, but the longer-duration tone later stops being followed by food and starts being followed by an electrical shock, the two previously interchangeable signs will split apart to have very different meanings. The more different the total neural response to two things, the more discriminable those two things are.
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". . . a name is not merely a label; it's a magic key that opens up a treasury of meanings associated with what you are looking at."
-- V.S. Ramachandran, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness
Rama describes a patient with an inability to name common objects and famous figures due to damage to part of his left angular gyrus. Some objects he clearly recognized, because when asked to name them he'd produce semantically related terms (e.g. glasses were "eye medicine"), but others he would misclassify completely and the words he came up with bore no recognizable relationship with the object at hand. The interesting part, though, was that if he was then told the misclassified object's name (or even just its first syllable) he would immediately demonstrate a normal understanding of what it was and produce sensible semantic relationships.
Speech is a behavior with neural correlates, like any other behavior. Hearing or producing words triggers off associations with those words, and using different words for similar things is a potent bootstrapping mechanism for conceptual differentiation. It's obvious how this can feed up into more abstract realms of thought, like differentiating between "president" and "king", but less obvious is how it feeds down into basic perceptions: Russians have different words for different shades of blue, and as a result of this are better at making fine color discriminations in the blue range than English speakers are. The clincher is that when subjects are given a verbal interference task (e.g. counting to ten in one's head) to perform while making color discriminations, the Russian advantage disappears completely, indicating that neural activity associated with verbalization feeds into perceptual decisions. You can also see this in how wine tasters improve their discriminatory skills in part by building their vocabulary.
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"Now the sources of all poetic locution are two: poverty of langauage and need to explain and be understood."
-- Giambattista Vico, Scienza Nuova (§34)
As the stars pop into existence in our peripheral vision, the attaching of a distinct symbol to a stimulus quite literally creates a new object in our conceptual ontology. Language empowers us to limn the subliminal, dragging something new out of the murky emptiness and into the light of consciousness and public view.
This is vividly illustrated in the history of medical diagnosis: there was no such thing as muscular dystrophy until Guillaume Duchenne described it as a distinct disorder in 1850, after which hundreds of case reports began to pour in, motivating Jean-Martin Charcot to wonder in print: "How is it that a disease so common, so widespread, and so recognizable at a glance -- a disease which has doubtless always existed -- how is it that it is recognized only now? Why did we need M. Duchenne to open our eyes?" The exact same thing happened when Gilles de la Tourette published Study of a Nervous Affliction in 1885; if you don't have a concept of Tourette's syndrome it slides right by you as minor odd behavior except in the most florid of cases (and even these will be written off as something else), but once you've created Tourette's as a diagnostic category it pops out at you like an autostereogram.
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"The grand and vigorous function of metaphor is the generation of new language as it is needed, as human culture becomes more and more complex. . . . metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication."
-- Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness (p. 49)
At a basic neural level, any animal can use behavioral cues to create new concepts -- birds, for example, do plenty of this and could even be said to have a culture of calls, and of course chimps can learn sign language. Yet only we seem to live in an environment composed predominantly of abstractions -- money, law, mathematics, science, time, self, and so on. We seem possessed of a preternatural facility with poetic creation and symbolic manipulation, and owe everything that makes us unique as a species to this capacity, whatever its nature may be.
We are the symbolic species, the poetic species, and the abstractions we create are very real to us. Sometimes we let them get a little too real, and need a Siddhartha Gautama to remind us how to experience the world without them. But as I've said before in other words, seeing poetic objects for what they are does not deprive them of causal power: they too are jewels in Indra's net.