Thanks for the this long comment. I had a similar thought the other day and your remarks reminded me of it, so I'll share. It was something like this: the way w

Thanks for the this long comment. I had a similar thought the other day and your remarks reminded me of it, so I'll share. It was something like this: the way we categorize and conceive of objects in the world is very much influenced by our overall cultural/civilization worldview. We seem to be very tied to this Platonic ideal/form of what something is inherently and then building the world up from there, rather than other ways of categorization; i.e by our emotional reaction to the object, or our sensory experience of it. For example, both an orange and the Sun are round, orange-colored objects. If our primary way of organizing the world were based on pure visual perception, we might group them together in a fundamental way as orange things or round things. But since we're concerned with what oranges and stars are as concepts, we don't group them together at all. Instead oranges are fruits and the Sun is a star, which in biological/physical terms have essentially nothing to do with each other. Our metaphysical structure of the world has separated them entirely, but this is only because we've built it upon a foundation of concepts rather than direct sensory input. I'm not sure if that made any sense, or if I've simply had too much coffee today. I think you're essentially saying the same thing RE: whales. How we categorize them as mammals or fish is more-or-less completely arbitrary.