Mental Models
I’ve been giving much thought to this thing everyone calls ‘mental model’. I don’t think anyone really knows what they are talking about. Contrary to my usual practice, I’ll disregard what’s been written on the subject and proceed with what I believe will help get a better understanding of this.
The Limit and Extension of Ideas
I’m inclined to suspect that a great part of our mind operates in a reactive fashion. Our senses give us information about the world that surrounds us, and the mind seems to be wired to give some sort of shape to this information. When a particular shape arises numerous times, we might refer to it as knowledge.
After some time being alive, we are exposed to vast amounts of information, some of which is turned into knowledge and some remains undecidable. This creates a pool of brewing things deep in the subconscious; something like a soup, where everything is revolving around. At times, we are able to focus on one of these things, which makes the thing go up into our conscious mind. But that doesn’t mean the other things stopped revolving.
While we observe the world thereafter, we receive new sensory inputs. My sense is that these clash with the soup, and a peculiar output comes out of it, namely a thought. This doesn’t actively require us to do anything, it just happens. Sometimes, thoughts seem to not even need a trigger and simply come out of the soup themselves. Thoughts are singular. They are an individual piece of an ethereal substance. Thoughts may be us trying to get new knowledge out of available information.
Once we’ve had a number of thoughts, all of which try to reflect a part of reality, we come up with ideas. Now, ideas are interesting. These are attempts to explain reality. They have massive potential and are tested against our own preconceptions. Many times, ideas are rapidly discarded as they contradict something we know, or that we think we do.
Other times, ideas make sense. We cannot find logical flaws in them and proceed to test the ideas against phenomena, mostly natural. When we see that this idea helps us get a better grasp of the phenomenon, it evolves. After facing nature, the idea grows legs and arms, it becomes more precise and its reach is better understood. That’s when the idea becomes a concept.
What I previously thought is that once we have a lot of ideas, pieces of knowledge, and concepts all over the place, we channel them and come up with frameworks to explain a series of observations. Frameworks that acquire a certain structure become hypotheses. When hypotheses are tested against nature and survive, they become theories. Theories have fully explanatory capacity, telling what causes what and why.
The purpose of scientists and thinkers is to push thoughts through the chain until they reach a state of theory, helping us make a better sense out of the world. However, I noticed there are some astounding frameworks which seem to have high, but not fully, explanatory power of lots of phenomena.
This area is where I think mental models are. A mental model might be a very legitimate framework that helps you better understand a complex phenomenon, but its explanatory power is not 100%. Due to the lack of cause-and-effect relations in many systems, there’s little possibility of things becoming theories. The chain would therefore look like this:
Although they don’t tell you what will happen, your intuition gets trained to an extent where you get the feeling of how it might go. Not precisely where the event will fall, but some sort of how the distribution of events might look like. This feature is ridiculously powerful and should not be overlooked.
Final Remark
I suspect a very useful output can come out of giving proper thought to how some ideas like these interplay with Jung, Freud, and other psychologists’ work. It’s not my intention to do exhaustive analyses in these articles, but I hope you get the grasp of why I claim this. Furthermore, I hope you find this useful for thinking purposes.