>>30648065Yeah there's basically two psychological functions at play here.
Humans have a built in system to learn by imitating their peers, specially their parents (childhood), their peers (teenagers) and the top dudes in their hierarchy (adulthood).
The second one is how the conscious mind deals with concepts which are "avatars" of more broad, unconscious types. (like in platonic metaphysics where the ideal/unconscious object like say, "the ideal ball", would be the type, and the conscious/real object is the "real balls"). You could say the datasets being fed to visual recognition AIs like the captchas that ask you to identify a certain object are trying to reverse engineer the "type of X" by feeding it endless real instances of said object.
Types and imitation both go into the reason why mankind is religious and the influence of heroes (the ideal role model) and villains (the ideal anti-role model), and of course there's also the community aspect, and the selective pressure on memes and behavior because of the different levels of survival and reproduction fitness they each grant.
And types are compatible both with spiritual and physical metaphysics so it's broad enough for you to fit your metaphysics of choice.