It’s an important distinction between what people can and cannot do.
People can observe and describe, subjectively, like the story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant, each touching parts of the elephant and reaching very different conclusions about it.
People can also subdivide things into their component parts, but if those things are dynamic: alive or changing, then when they are reassembled they are not the same as the original thing. Take apart a person then reassemble them, and they are no longer a person. They are a dead person. Frankenstein’s monster only came alive with science fiction magic, as it were.
People can also combine things into a greater whole, at least in their imaginations. If one violinist is a maestro, then an orchestra of one hundred novice violinists will, as a group, be even more expert.
And then, people can create any number of abstracts that describe things. But even back in caveman days, people confuse the abstract with the reality. Often this is done with the mood of “sympathetic magic”, that is, if a picture is made of stick figure hunters shown killing an elk with spears, it will somehow *cause* their hunting of elk to be a success.
As poet Joyce Kilmer noted:
“Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.”
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