Generalization

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it's a heuristic or a model that has predictive power over a range of content and circumstance.

Pointing a word (or other symbol) at more than one thing.

Quoting tim wood

I suppose that people then and before were capable of genus, species thinking, which is what Plato means, but that in practice they didn't.

Biologists constructing a taxonomy, ancient philosophers an account of nature's essence, prehistoric humans a spear, animals a nest, are these all analogous as conceptual or neural structuring, a cognition of particulars into functional kinds?

Perhaps some dynamic of neural or otherwise substantiated structuring exists that is common to all the most cognitive species, responsible for grouping of particulars into kinds as a basic conceptual phenomenon, in behaviors as diverse as mate selection, social stratifying, nest-building, technological inventiveness, naming, philosophical reasoning towards superordinate essences and fundamentals, scientific classification, theoretical modeling, and so on. Maybe the act of generalizing will one day be correlated primarily with tissues of the cerebrum, a brain structure which is unique to the biggest macroscopic animals, comprised of the most intricately interconnected and rewritable neuronal wiring and synesthesia, possibly responsible for generating an experience of so to speak “knowing what you are doing” psychically, the integrating of vastly dispersed perceptual phenomena via both more or less inferential reasoning and various degrees of self-awareness, a process of association-making that facilitates behavioral priming.

Do I know what I'm doing yet? lol