Ah, the joys of learning math from slides without the talk the slides were helpers to. The objects here are not necessarily sets, and the arrows are not necess

Ah, the joys of learning math from slides without the talk the slides were helpers to. The objects here are not necessarily sets, and the arrows are not necessarily functions -- this is actually one of the points of category theory, to abstract the notion of morphism away from set theory. This becomes necessary, when in your regular mathematical life you encounter morphisms which are not strictly functions, but nevertheless in many ways behave as such. Best example would be the homotopy classes of maps between topological spaces. Homotopy classes do not map points from domain space to codomain space, but nevertheless you can compose them, there's a homotopy class of identity, which acts as an identity on composition, sometimes there are homotopy classes that are inverses and so on. If this sounds complicated and unnatural, that's because it is: it is pointless to learn category theory before learning where and how it is useful. This is completely opposite order than in which it was conceived, and totally misses the purpose the category theory, which is to make everything clearer, to reduce the number of notions, to make it easier to notice analogous behavior between separate concepts, to reduce number of repeating arguments. Learning what a morphism or functor or natural transformation is, without having tens of examples of these notions, only increases the number of concepts without a corresponding increase in understanding. My advice is, if you want to learn category theory, learn algebraic topology first, or at least abstract algebra (groups, rings, modules, fields). Otherwise, you'll see very little purpose, and very little use.