It is a human trait to organize things into categories. Inventing categories creates an illusion that there is an overriding rationale in the way that the world works.

Not surprisingly then, categories are everywhere.

As humans we like to put things into categories. It makes communicating and thinking easier. Scratch that. It makes communicating and thinking possible. Categories go hand in hand with words as providing us with crucial compression of reality.

(Now imagine this process happening in the exact same way for an object or location or whatever else. Take something as basic as an apple. Describe it: how does it look? Where is it? Is it doing anything? Even sitting in a bowl is an action.) After we categorize, we characterize. Now that we know what he’s doing or how he seems, what does that

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… we evolved pattern recognition and episodic memory as survival mechanisms, since they're necessary for crucial behaviors like learning and socializing. Once we were able to tie causes to events, we were better suited for reacting to stimuli in our environment.

We also turned into meaning-making machines, unable to shake ourselves from thinking in

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