I think it's a built-in cognitive pattern in the brain to create categories for sure. But organizing those categories into a hierarchy? I don't know. How I mod

I think it's a built-in cognitive pattern in the brain to create categories for sure. But organizing those categories into a hierarchy? I don't know. How I model it, personally, is that as we learn more about the world, or learn about more things, we can increase the resolution of our categories, i.e. have more of them at a finer level of detail. From this process, my personal mental model goes, hierarchies tend to emerge as kind of "meta-categories." It's our attempt to overlay some predictability. Mostly, it works okay, but when you hit a certain level of resolution, hierarchies get exposed as a very leaky abstraction. Busting out of that hierarchical mindset is, in my model, what happens when I "think outside the box:" Putting things which aren't "supposed" to be on the same level on the same level. In my experience, thinking through things in this way leads to interesting places.