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in hopes of understanding things better.it's easier to know who you are if you know who other people are.
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Because our little noggins are always looking for ways to do things more efficiently (aka how to be lazier). Categorisation enables this process immensely.
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It's not so much that we feel the need to categorize everything, it's that our brains do it automatically. Categorizing things is most useful for individual cases we've never seen before. Like, if you see a cute, fuzzy animal and you know it's a dog, you already know a lot of information about it (wags its tail when happy, pants when hot, can learn tricks, etc.) so it allows you to focus on the specific things that make that dog different. If we couldn't do this, then every time we saw a dog we'd have to re-learn all the basic things about them. Which would be impossibly time consuming.
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It's not so much that we feel the need to categorize everything, it's that our brains do it automatically. Categorizing things is most useful for individual cases we've never seen before. Like, if you see a cute, fuzzy animal and you know it's a dog, you already know a lot of information about it (wags its tail when happy, pants when hot, can learn tricks, etc.) so it allows you to focus on the specific things that make that dog different. If we couldn't do this, then every time we saw a dog we'd have to re-learn all the basic things about them. Which would be impossibly time consuming.
Putting things in categories also helps with understanding behaviours which we might otherwise find baffling. Like, if you see a woman covered from head to toe in black, it could be pretty confusing. But putting her in the category of "Muslim" helps you understand why she's dressed that way.
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it has to do with how neural networks function. once something is encoded in a network, it only takes a fraction of the data to trigger it... like when you see an 1/8th of a stop sign peaking out from under a tree, you KNOW its a stop sign.
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It makes it much easier on our cognitive thinking. If we didn't categorize things or make any assumptions it would be exhausting to do anything or interact with anyone new.
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We think it empowers/protects us. If something is categorized, it is 'safe'. We think we can understand and predict it .
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We think it empowers/protects us. If something is categorized, it is 'safe'. We think we can understand and predict it .
But it can very quickly become a pathway of thinking oneself wise even while remaining lazily ignorant. For example, if we can successfully classify something as "a bird", we can stop thinking and considering and watching and pondering what else it might be. If we classify it as a "perching bird" we feel we gain even further 'control' over interactions between us. If we further classify it as "a sparrow" we're amazing. If we determine it's a Song Sparrow, we can feel we've exhausted the possibilities and now know everything there is to know about it and can now look away and never feel obliged to expending that degree of classificational scrutiny at it ever again.
But what does it eat? How does it forage? What are it's enemies? How does it defeat them? Does it mate for life? What does it do in the winter (besides just "fly south"!).
We can think we are the 'masters' of something because we have categorized it, and are justified in never really looking at it. We can think ourselves wise, while just finding an excuse to remain ignorant.
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i think we like order. patterns. life would be less interesting if we didn't have things to do.
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i think we like order. patterns. life would be less interesting if we didn't have things to do.
it's almost useless to resist.
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