We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest. - Douglas Hofstadter

Irrationality is the square root of all evil.

[M]eaning is part of an object to the extent that it acts upon intelligence in a predictable way.

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.