“The words we have that aid us in understanding identity have roots in the seven (English) words we use to ask ‘questions’ — what, where, who, how, which, when, why.

Ordinarily, we think as if we ask these questions and discover answers in the world external to ourselves and our minds (as if such a world did, indeed, exist). Yet this is not so much what happens.

A significant aspect of the problems that arise emerge from the fact that our representational paradigms are only useful when they -actually function- as intelligent aids to perception, evaluation and understanding. Too often, they area actually doing something else.

As this relates to the matter at hand, this is due to the bothersome fact that nothing we encounter actually fits into (or exists as a member of) any these categories — except in a strange representational simulation that is at least half collective culture.

It is I who produces the experiential ‘match’ between (for example) some visual experience of a specific feline animal and the word cat. Similarly, it is I or some other person or group who may then examine my assertion and proclaim it extrinsic fact. Yet a bird is not a bird, except to a representationally cognitive human being.

‘What’ that thing is that slides lithely along the side of the buildings in the night is a matter of deepest mystery. Call it what you may, it will never be a cat — except in some description, and that’s already too smart by half.”

— an anonymous informant