in order to see that what they did was “exactly the same thing”, one has to ignore almost all the details of the two situations in order to extract f… - Douglas Hofstadter

Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.

The perception of an isomorphism between two known structures is a significant advance in knowledge-and I claim that it is such perceptions of isomorphism which create meanings in the minds of people.

We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality.