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 … - Douglas Hofstadter

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.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

Do you remember your first sip of beer? Terrible! How could anyone like that stuff? But beer, you reflect, is an acquired taste; one gradually trains oneself — or just comes — to enjoy that flavor. What flavor? The flavor of that first sip? No one could like that flavor! Beer tastes different to the experienced beer drinker. Then beer isn't an acquired tast; one doesn't learn to like that first taste; one gradually comes to experience a different, and likable, taste. Had the first sip tasted that way, you would have liked beer wholeheartedly from the beginning!