Yeah, but do you ever perform an operation on two hexagrams (addition, multiplication)? If not, each hexagram is just a bitstring, not a number in binary notat

Yeah, but do you ever perform an operation on two hexagrams (addition, multiplication)? If not, each hexagram is just a bitstring, not a number in binary notation. If not used as numbers they don't count as numbers. Words written with the standard English alphabet are not base-26 numbers until someone decides to interpret them as such. Dictionaries are lookup tables but the ordering is lexical not numerical. Maybe we are in agreement.