Most of reality is comprised of continua, or attributes which vary continuously between possible values. Examples could be distance, weight, age, or confidence. Constructs which humans create, on the other hand, are discrete, meaning they exist in categories. Discrete corollaries to the previous examples are far versus near, heavy versus light, old versus young, and confident versus unconfident. One hypothesis as to why we think this way is that, to analyze a phenomenon, it’s easier to reason about things which fall under a category (a binary inclusion or exclusion of any datapoint) than things which fall on a continuum. We can look at objects which are heavy and observe that all of these fall at the same rate, while light things, like feathers, sometimes fall slower, even though we on some level recognize that light and heavy are discontinuous constructs we created over a continuous underlying reality. It’s also easy to observe from after the fact that the theory over constructs is less accurate than the theory over continua, i.e. that we can calculate the force of drag in relation to the force of gravity on any object given its weight and shape, and use that to determine its rate of acceleration. However, without the discontinuous theory, it would be hard if not impossible to develop the continuous theory, as the continuous theory would have to be created out of whole cloth with no logical or observational intermediates—a kind of analytic immaculate conception. So we play out this charade in developing discrete theories, where we find a concrete observation (things at this section of the spectrum perform this way, and things at this section perform that way), with the common knowledge that that is likely the product of some underlying function over a continuum. Then, once our discrete theory is validated, we extend it into the space which better represents reality. This Discrete Charade must be properly understood as a valuable step in the development of new theories, with the common understanding that this scaffolding will likely be obsoleted later by a more precise continuous model.