What is 4 oranges + 5 mangoes?

I just got out of my computer system architecture class. Today's discussion revolved around floating point arithmetic. After seeing how computers actually go around floating point math, I couldn't help feeling "How the heck can that ever get me anywhere close to the real answer". The number of assumptions and simplification to the really complex problem of real number arithmetic makes it look impossible for computers. But well, I suppose we can live with the approximation. Currently, there are many sophisticated algorithms for carrying out the math (check the bc tool in linux). It seems as if we had the perfect tool for doing all the math we could think up of. Unfortunately, the world around us does not seem to follow the laws of arithmetic. For instances, what is 4 oranges + 5 mangoes? What is a collection of 4 random people called? Why not use the same word when referring to me and my brother collectively? Instead we are called siblings. There is a huge amount of symbolism in human communication. This symbolism is simply the random assignment of names to various things in the world. (If there is any logic to this assignment, I would love to know about it). This makes life very hard for us computer folks. Actually, it makes it very hard for us to instruct the computer system what it should do when someone tells it "please turn off." which is exactly same as "switch off." !

Can we ever conquer this army of symbols? The ever changing, contextual implication of combination of words, combined with background knowledge (which we can never guarantee if we ever have). I don't know. But it sure as hell would be useful, if we had programs which could crawl the web, look at this blog post's title and reply "9 Fruits".

What makes people so dogmatic?

I have a little story to tell. A few years back, we came to know that a person we knew quite well was in into drugs. I tried to speak to him on which he retorted "Its my life. Let me do what I want." Not able to press the matter further, I let it go. A month or so later, we came to know that a party gone bad put him in rehab and a close friend of his had died. The point I am trying to make is that what makes people so rigid. Why do people have to 'stick' to meaningless pillars of illogical support. What makes people 'stick' to what they think is right, when they know they are doing is wrong, or do they? What makes people never leave their "safe house" and take a look around and maybe do something different. Why are people so 'religious'? You don't have to be revolutionary all the time. Just take a short walk on a path that you have never seen before.

Here is my question to you: What do you think is the reason for this? Why do you think people are afraid to step out of the shoes of what they always do and do something even trivially different from what they are 'supposed' to do?