Encodings usually embed a “fuller” structure into dimensions of relation in a more meager one. Consider a binary array of length n. If we want to record an index of n things, we can just correlate each thing with a position in the array, and store the index at that location. This will give us a sequence of indexes to the objects. But this is a merely linear storage mechanism. Instead, we can associate each distinct entity with a combination of bits, and this will let us encode 2^n distinct entities, greatly increasing the number of individual entities we can distinguish. But we buy that increased capacity by sacrificing the ability to encode information about the sequence or order holding between those entities.

I suspect this is a general dynamic and that, in general, reification trades structure for enumeration. I suspect individuation consists of something like natural transformations collapsing parallel subsections of a continuum into phenomenological singularities.