Maybe Zack_M_Davis’ Where to Draw the Boundaries? points at a potential answer to your question? The reason I think it’s relevant is basically this paragraph from that post, which builds upon Eliezer’s post you referenced:
A standard technique for understanding why some objects belong in the same “category” is to (pretend that we can) visualize objects as existing in a very-high-dimensional configuration space, but this “Thingspace” isn’t particularly well-defined: we want to map every property of an object to a dimension in our abstract space, but it’s not clear how one would enumerate all possible “properties.” But this isn’t a major concern: we can form a space with whatever properties or variables we happen to be interested in. Different choices of properties correspond to different cross sections of the grander Thingspace. Excluding properties from a collection would result in a “thinner”, lower-dimensional subspace of the space defined by the original collection of properties, which would in turn be a subspace of grander Thingspace, just as a line is a subspace of a plane, and a plane is a subspace of three-dimensional space.
Maybe Zack_M_Davis’ Where to Draw the Boundaries? points at a potential answer to your question? The reason I think it’s relevant is basically this paragraph from that post, which builds upon Eliezer’s post you referenced: