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A pile of 10,000 bricks for example.
No matter how often you dump them down with your bulldozer, it will stay a pile of 10,000 bricks (if you don't break any of them) (do you have a bulldozer?!).
But when you place them carefully and according to a build-a-house plan, they can together become a shape we recognize and call a "house".
The number of bricks is still the same, but to us it's not a pile of bricks anymore.
The bricks don't care... I think the bricks don't care... OK, I'll ask them.
The "house" is just another combination of these bricks, but it's not a random combination any more. Because a pile is useless to us, we call it "nothing", and when the collective shape becomes recognizable and useful, we call it "something".
So, only the combinations we can recognize & label are "something" to us.
"fdrine" is a five letter combination that you'll skip as being nonsense, but the same letters can also spell "friend".
Most combinations of letters and figures, much more than 99 percent, don't mean a thing to us. 6NJ n˛I‚àµx BOS~úP ûß •”«(„¬) ÚÌVsü,≤‚6¬ú ∂ÀQÒ◊Áfl¶„2u ˚•G≠G^ Á¶)K flÛÓ3ˇ
Down here are two images. Both have 1757 white and 743 black pixels, but you'll probably say the first one is "nothing" and the other is "a face".
Giesbert Nijhuis
v2003/02/14
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