Mental Models XII

"It has become increasingly evident in recent times, however, that nature works on a different plan. Her fundamental laws do not govern the world as it appears in our mental picture in any very direct way, but instead they control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture without introducing irrelevancies." (Paul Dirac, "The Principles of Quantum Mechanics", 1935)

"The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form - the one of the particles, the other of the waves - are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases." (Werner Heisenberg, "The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory", 1949)

"We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea." (Willard v. O Quine, "The Journal of Philosophy", 1950)

"A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place." (James B Conant, "Science and Common Sense", 1951)

"Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics; we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged." (Willard van Orman Quine, "From a Logical Point of View", 1953)

"Mental pictures offer us an opportunity to practice new traits and attitudes, which otherwise we could not do. This is possible because again - your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience." (Northrop Frye, "The Educated Imagination", 1963)

"Information is recorded in vast interconnecting networks. Each idea or image has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of associations and is connected to numerous other points in the mental network." (Peter Russell, "The Brain Book: Know Your Own Mind and How to Use it", 1979)

"Perceptual interpretive processes are applied to mental images in much the same way that they are applied to actual physical objects. In this sense, imagined objects can be 'interpreted' much like physical objects." (Ronald A. Finke, "Creative Imagery", 1990)

"Imagining the unseeable is hard, because imagining means having an image in your mind. And how can you have a mental image of something you have never seen? Like perception itself, the models of science are embedded inextricably in the current worldview we call culture." (K C Cole, "First You Build a Cloud and Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life", 1999)