The introjection of symboling into primate social life was revolutionary. Everything was transformed, everything acquired new meaning; the symbol added a new dimension to primate—now human—existence. An ax was no longer merely a tool with which to chop; it could become a symbol of authority. Mating became marriage, and all social relationships between parents and children and brothers and sisters became moral obligations, duties, rights, and privileges. The world of nature, from the stones beside the path to the stars in their courses, became alive and conscious spirits. “And all that I beheld respired with inward meaning” (Wordsworth). The anthropoid had at last become a man.

Let's be precise about the terminology here. When we talk about the computer “seeing” the differences between documents, that is not to imply that the computer actually understands those differences in a literal sense. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that the computer “registers” the distinction between The Shining and the Apple manual, because it can describe that distinction numerically. The numbers reveal something about the meaning of each document, even if that revelation is an oblique one, like a low-frequency tone shimmering in a puddle. The computer can't hear the meaning directly, but it can catch glimpses of it in its statistical reflections.

Instead of space, why not organize around meaning? Perhaps the whole idea of a document existing in a physical location—in a folder, say, or on the desktop—is just a hollow legacy carried over needlessly from the limitations of the real world. Perhaps we simply required those spatial coordinates to ease us across the digital frontier, and now that we've acclimated to the new environment, we can shed those old habits of thought like the space shuttle tossing off its solid rocket boosters after a successful launch.

Why do we call something a “number”?: Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name.

And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fiber on fiber. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of the fibers.

Improvements can take place [in products] through natural evolution as long as each previous design is studied and the craftsperson is willing to be flexible. The bad features have to be identified. The folk artists change the bad features and keep the good ones unchanged. If a change makes matters worse, well, it just gets changed again on the next go-around. Eventually the bad features get modified into good ones, while the good ones are kept. The technical term for this process is “hill-climbing,” analogous to climbing a hill in the dark. Move your foot in one direction. If it is downhill, try another direction. If the direction is uphill, take one step. Keep doing this until you have reached a point where all steps would be downhill; then you are at the top of the hill—or at least at a local peak.