I asked: "How can an image be a number?", when I should have asked instead: "How can a number be an image?" To use the verb to be in this scenario, I demand a

I asked: "How can an image be a number?", when I should have asked instead: "How can a number be an image?" To use the verb to be in this scenario, I demand a one-to-one correspondence between numbers and images. If a number y can represent two distinct images x1 and x2, then we can't use "is", we can only use "can be".