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We could just put all the books in one, big room, just aisles and aisle of shelves, everything numbered sequentially. We could even build a library as one long hallway -- one single line of books.

But we choose to divide our buildings up into rooms. We choose to create that hierarchy.

Edit: I suppose, though, that our minds evolved to operate in physical space. Go hunt some zebra, go climb a tree... things like that...

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Even if you put the books on a single long shelf, chances are you're going to make the numbering system based on the content of the books, like say, the Dewey Decimal system. That's a hierarchy of at least two layers, right there. If you assign random identifiers, you'll probably end up creating that same hierarchy in the index instead, unless you do something more tag-based which is actually likely to be better.

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