Reality includes creating every real connection and reference. - Douglas Hofstadter

It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.

We have a very hard time “seeing” our cognitive activity because it is the medium in which we swim. The attempt to put our finger on what counts in any given situation leads us at times to making connections between situations that are enormously different on their surface and at other times to distinguishing between situations that on first glance seem nearly identical. Our constant jockeying back and forth among our categories runs the gamut from the most routine behaviors to the most creative ones.

Thus our categories keep us well informed at all times, allowing us to bypass the need for direct observation. If we didn’t constantly extrapolate our knowledge into new situations — if we refrained from making inferences — then we would be conceptually blind. We would be unable to think or act, doomed to permanent uncertainty and to eternal groping in the dark. In short, in order to perceive the world around us, we depend just as much on categorization through analogy as we do on our eyes or our ears.