Mental Models XXXVII

"This world is finite, the other infinite, 
reality is blocked by form and image." (Jalaluddin Rumi, "Masnavi-ye Ma ‘navi" Vol. I ["Spritual Verses"], 1262-1264)

"There is nothing in us which we must attribute to our soul except our thoughts. These are of two principal kinds, some being actions of the soul and others its passions. Those I call its actions are all our volitions […] the various perceptions or modes of knowledge present in us may be called its passions in the general sense, for it is often not our soul which makes them such as they are, and the soul always receives them from the things that are represented by them." (René Descartes, "Les passions de l’âme" ["Passions of the Soul"], 1649)

"Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space." (Nicholas M Butler, "What Knowledge is of Most Worth?", 1895)

"Thus the essence of memory is not constituted by the image, but by having immediately before the mind an object which is recognised as past." (Bertrand Russell, "Theory of Knowledge" , 1913)

"The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye." (Shana Alexander, "Talking Woman", 1976)

"[…] new insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works [...] images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations." (Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization", 1990)

"I believe that philosophy is part of literature, and not the reverse. Writing is not possible without images. Yet, images don't have to be descriptive; they can be concepts […]. Concepts are mental images." (Paul Virilio, [interview with Louise Wilson] 1994)

"[...] images are probably the main content of our thoughts, regardless of the sensory modality in which they are generated and regardless of whether they are about a thing or a process involving things; or about words or other symbols, in a given language, which correspond to a thing or process. Hidden behind those images, never or rarely knowable by us, there are indeed numerous processes that guide the generation and deployment of those images in space and time. Those processes utilize rules and strategies embodied in dispositional representations. They are essential for our thinking but are not a content of our thoughts.” (Antonio R Damasio, “Descartes' Error. Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain”, 1994)

"Presumably, one can become a mathematical genius only if one has an outstanding capacity for forming vivid mental represen­tations of abstract mathematical concepts - mental images that soon turn into an illusion, eclipsing the human origins of mathematical objects and endowing them with the semblance of an independent existence." (Stanislas Dehaene," The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics", 2011) 

"We call it 'explanation', but it is 'description' which distinguishes us from earlier stages of knowledge and science. We describe better - we explain just as little who came before us [...] We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space - how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our image!" (Friedrich W Nietzsche)