Conceptual Accordion

The last course-related spew helped me out so much I've decided to do another one. (And for some reason I'm enjoying the counterpoint between very verbose academic ideas and my limited attempt to couch it in as informal terms as possible.) Here's cognitive science in a nutshell if it were the conversation between two gino-ghetto-fabulous "dudes" (A. and B.) just chillin':

...
A: I'm not following you, guy. How do we begin to approach how the mind works?
B: Oh, it's real simple. We gotta break complex cognition down to its components and then formalize it somehow and feed it to a computer.
A: That's awesome. Totally awesome. How far have we got?
B: There's the problem. It's hard to get below complex cognition. It's like we tried a bunch of approaches, and we keep running in circles. Like, when we tried to start from categorization and work from there we kept running into all these philosophical quandaries, guy.
A: Wait a second: couldn't it be possible that we're, like, epistemically bound, that we can't explain our own minds? Like when I'm macking a chick, right, and I like her, but I can't explain that to her. It just comes out as the same bulllshit gibberish all the time.
B: That's totally a reasonable skeptical doubt, guy. but we gotta do something, right? We can't just sit around and wring our hads all the fuckin' time, right?
A: Right.
B: So we gotta start somewhere, and all these smart psychologists were saying "how about categorization?". 'cause it's easy to do and it totally codes our regular experience, reduces cognitive load, allows inferences and shit.
A: O! How could it be any other way, Socrates! (I mean: "yeah".)
B: But you can already see a problem, right.
A: No, not really.
B: Yo man, taking an uncritical attitude toward explanatory concepts is so gay.
A: You're gay!
B: Your mom's gay!
A: Well played, pilgrim.
B: STFU, n00b
...

(Discontinuity.)

...
B: So anyway, now that you've calmed down, I'll tell you what the problem is.
A: (Aside, to humself) Fuck you.
B: How do we determine what belongs in a category? Some people say we classify on the basis of similarity. But there's a problem here. A hidden assumption, if you will. We assume that similarity is just out there in the world independent of how we think about it.
A: I don't get it.
B: It's simple. Let me break it down for you: any two things are infintely similar and infinitely dissimilar if we pick the right features.
A: I don't get it.
B: Here's an example: a plum and a lawnmower both weigh less that five tons; both are made of atoms; both are not composed of predominantly helium, neither would make an effective weapon, etc.
A: But those aren't relevant to plums or lawnmowers.
B: Exactly! So how do we choose what relevant features are to make things similar or dissimilar.
A: We just do, guy.
B: You've just hit on one of the really annoying problems of Cog. Sci. Just because something is obvious doesn't explain shit. It just means our theories need to account for that in non-cognitive terms, which is a fucking pain in the ass.
A: Your has a pain in her ass from last night.
...

(Discontinuity.)

TO BE CONTINUED

Consider: "If you beat someone with a bag filled with soap, it won't leave a bruise."