"No. I told you I need a lot more data. Also, beyond a certain point the analogy appears to get looser."
"Appears to! It's as loose as a goose!"
"Think a minute. Is it actually loose, or are we getting up into concepts that no human mind can grasp? That might be the case, you know."
"Oh.... You're quite a salesman, Clee, but I'm still not buying."
"Our galaxy is a bit of specialized tissue—part of a ganglion, maybe. Over here, see? I'll have to leave it dangling until we find some more like it."
"I see. But anyway, you haven't a tenth's worth of real material on that whole sheet. Feed everything you have there into a computer and it'd just laugh at you."
"Sure it would. The great advantage of the human brain is its ability to arrive at valid conclusions from incomplete data. For instance, what would your computer do with the figures you shot at me the day we started out? 'Thirty-nine, twenty-two, thirty-nine. Five seven. One thirty-five.' Yet they're completely informative."
"To anyone interested in that kind of figures, yes."
"Which includes practically all adults. Then take the figure three point one four one five nine. Compy would still be baffled; but, unlike the first set, most people would be, too."
"Yes. Perhaps two out of ten would get your message."