>hierarchy is the only mechanism that the human brain has for dealing with complexity. A few people balked, they don't like 'trees' or what have you but nobody

>hierarchy is the only mechanism that the human brain has for dealing with complexity. A few people balked, they don't like 'trees' or what have you but nobody could come up with an alternative. None of you could think of anything better because you're engineers, not psychologists or philosophers. The "human brain" deals with complexity through: * causation * hierarchy * chunking * association * ordering Complexity in general is managed using all the tools of analysis: * drawing distinctions * drawing similarities * making definitions * transforming concepts using other concepts And this is all off the top of my head. It's been years since I took psychology of memory and philosophy of mind. But suffice to say your "top engineer" commenting on stuff outside his specialty and using the stupidity of undergrads to bolster his amateur argument is not convincing and is a pure expression of bathos.