Mental Models LV

"To imagine - to form an image - we must have the numerous relations of things present to the mind, and see the objects in their actual order. In this we are of course greatly aided by the mass of organised experience, which allows us rapidly to estimate the relations of gravity or affinity just as we remember that fire burns and that heated bodies expand. But be the aid great or small, and the result victorious or disastrous, the imaginative process is always the same." (George H Lewes, "The Principles of Success in Literature", 1865)

"The degree in which each mind habitually substitutes signs for images will be, CETERIS PARIBUS [with other conditions remaining the same], the degree in which it is liable to error. This is not contradicted by the fact that mathematical, astronomical, and physical reasonings may, when complex, be carried on more successfully by the employment of signs; because in these cases the signs themselves accurately represent the abstractness of the relations. Such sciences deal only with relations, and not with objects; hence greater simplification ensures greater accuracy. But no sooner do we quit this sphere of abstractions to enter that of concrete things, than the use of symbols becomes a source of weakness. Vigorous and effective minds habitually deal with concrete images." (George H Lewes, "The Principles of Success in Literature", 1865)

"The steps to scientific as well as other knowledge consist in a series of logical fictions which are as legitimate as they are indispensable in the operations of thought, but whose relations to the phenomena whereof they are the partial and not unfrequently merely symbolical representations must never be lost sight of." (John Stallo, "The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics", 1884)

"Myths and science fulfil a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible." (François Jacob, "The Possible and the Actual", 1982)

"Many people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our consitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world." (Francisco Varela, "The Embodied Mind", 1991)

"The seemingly stable scene you normally see is really a mental model that you construct - the eyes are actually darting all around, producing a retinal image as jerky as an amateur video, and some of what you thought you saw was instead filled in from memory." (William H Calvin, "How Brains Think", 1996) 

"[…] the 'reality' that we perceive is based on mental models in which things don't usually change their shapes or disappear, despite their changing appearances. We mainly react to what we expect - and tend to represent the things that we see as though they remain the same as we move atomic." (Marvin Minsky, "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense thinking, artificial intelligence, and the future of the human mind", 2006)

"We all construct mental models that describe our various mental states, bodies of knowledge about our abilities, depictions of our acquaintances, and collections of stories about our pasts. Then, whenever we use our models of ourselves, we tend to use terms like conscious - when those reflections lead to choices we make, and we use unconscious or unintentional to describe those activities that we regard as beyond our control." (Marvin Minsky, "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense thinking, artificial intelligence, and the future of the human mind", 2006)

"We solve easy problems in routine ways, scarcely thinking about how we accomplish these - but when our usual methods don't work, we start to 'reflect' on what went wrong and find ourselves to be switching around in a network of 'models', each of which purports to represent some facet or aspect of ourselves, so that we end representing ourselves with a loosely connected collection of images, models, and anecdotes." (Marvin Minsky, "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense thinking, artificial intelligence, and the future of the human mind", 2006) 

"Why must those models be simplifications? Each model must help us to focus on only those aspects that matter in some particular context; that's what makes a map more useful to us than seeing the entire landscape that it depicts. The same applies to what we store in our minds. Consider how messy our minds would become if we filled them up with descriptions of things whose details had too little significance. So instead, we spend large parts of our lives at trying to tidy up our minds - selecting the portions we want to keep, suppressing others we'd like to forget, and refining the ones we're dissatisfied with." (Marvin Minsky, "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense thinking, artificial intelligence, and the future of the human mind", 2006)