[dajomu]

It seems that he chose it exactly for that reason though. The desktop is an abstraction built upon successive abstractions to hide reality from us so that we can do what we need to do. Computers have 'evolved' to what they are today to essentially improve their fitness to their environment, even if that means that it is impossible for any one person to fully understand how they work.

In this case it kind of supports his idea that evolution would lead to a similar kind of model of reality in our heads. But the most interesting thing seemed to be the fact that if you remove objective reality from his models you can just build on successive layers of abstraction and the model still works. I know this metaphor doesn't hold up in all cases, but it seems like it's a pretty good introduction to this idea.