I’m certainly no Pratchett, so I can’t speak to that. I would say there’s an enormous round coin upon which sits an enormous giant holding a magnifying glass, looking through it down at her hand. When you get closer, you see the giant is made of smaller people gazing back up at the giant through telescopes. Get even closer and you see it’s people all the way down. The question of what supports the coin, I’ll leave to others.

We as humans, believing we know ourselves, inevitably compare everything around us to us. We draw a line and say that everything left of the line isn’t human and everything to the right is. We are natural categorizers, putting everything in buckets labeled left or right, no or yes, never realizing our lines are relative and arbitrary, and so are our categories. One person’s “it’s human-like,” is another’s “half-baked imitation,” and a third’s “stochastic parrot.” It’s like trying to see the eighth color. The visible spectrum could as easily be four colors or forty two.

We anthropomorphize because we’re people, and it’s people all the way down.