Thank you, Vishal, for your interesting comment. I think some of our discrete distinctions are innate, like the good/bad distinction that you mentioned that babies make. And our ability to make new such distinctions is probably also innate, but many of the specific ones that we make are learned, such as ideas of discrete countries like Ukraine and Russia.

I like your idea of cognition as a kind of lossy memory compression. Our languages provide tools for communicating the compressed information, but each of us decompresses it somewhat differently, often resulting in conflicting understandings.