Complications

Classifying everything that exists is a lot more complicated than it seems. The branches of the tree get really intertwined. The thing I've come to realize is that things aren't always, or even very often, connected to other things by single, simple lines. They are often connected by many lines to many different things, in many different types of relationships. So it seems you can't really have a simple family tree. Take human relationships, for instance. I am descended from my mother and father, and their parents before them, and so on. But I am also connected to many other people, both through genetics and through social association, and I am connected to all these people in many different kinds of relationships, from friend to brother to coworker to random stranger passed on the street. Reality seems more like a big net than a tree, with the lines crossing every which way. This makes the whole project of classifying things infinitely more complex than it might seem at first glance. In a typical library classification system, each book has a definite place in the scheme, which corresponds to its physical location on the shelves. In a network (essentially, like the way the Internet is ordered), there are multiple links to and from any given entity, so its location in the scheme is relative rather than absolute. It's challenging enough, in this light, to trace all the relationships of just one thing, let alone everything that exists. I'm starting to wonder if maybe I've gotten in over my head.