According to researchers, the body replaces itself with a largely new set of cells every seven years to 10 years, and some of our most important parts are revamped even more rapidly [sources: Stanford University, Northrup]. — Chris Opfer (of HowStuffWorks)

Is this fact evidence of our metaphorical nature? How would our society function if we were to have a completely materialistic view of each other? There must some cognitive mechanism that forces us to view our fellow peers as more than just material and more as anthropomorphized and objective souls. I think clinical psychologist Jordan B Peterson summarized this in his lecture 2015 Personality Lecture 13: Existentialism: Nazi Germany and the USSR (which is brilliant by the way):

[...] when I look at that coke can you might say I perceive the object and then make interferences about its use, and then I evaluate it and then I use it. That is not actually what you do. In fact, it's not obvious at all that what you perceive are objects. If you think about it, people weren't perceiving scientific objects until about 1500, 1450 A.D. There was no "objective object" before then. Obviously whatever we were perceiving was not precisely that because we would have been scientists right off the bat. George Kelly claimed that people were natural scientists that we're always investigating hypotheses and trying to disprove them and so on. It's an interesting theory and it's right in a sense but fundamentally it's wrong. We are not natural scientists, we're natural engineers. When we look at the world, we don't see objects and infer their use, what we actually see is the use. — Jordan B Peterson

Is this how we treat each other: by pragmatically categorizing and subsequently keeping a mind print which we associate with character and not mere material? I've been thinking about this all day, and I'd be happy to read your thoughts.