When I was a child, I played with toys. So do most children. There are many kinds of toys, and games available. When I was thinking about toys, games, and sports, and all things children enjoy for fun, a thought came to me. Play often simulates something from adult life. A child can pretend to be a mother or father, with baby dolls, or a truck driver with a toy truck. Play is a smaller simpler version of something big and complex. Children would find it very difficult to operate real machines or be a real parent in the adult world. Yet though play, they can experiment with a simplified version of responsibility, struggle, and achievement, in the adult world.
When children become adults, play continues; yet in a more sophisticated form. Examples of grown up play could be an appreciation of sports, theater, standup comedy, or collecting toys instead of playing with them. Play is an important part of learning. What play is good or bad is a big subject. I will not discuss the pros and cons of play, however it did lead me to my second thought.
Play seems like an example of how all human understanding is. Our mind will build a simplified version of something complex in our minds. This simplified version is what we call our understanding. Think about the logic of that. If you could not fit the famous Titanic ship inside a museum, because the Titanic is too big, and too sunk. An alternative would be to put a model of the ship inside the museum so visitors could see closely what the ship looked like. When things don't fit, just scale it down, until it does.
Now I want to ask you a question. Can most people imagine the Titanic in their minds? I'm thinking that you will say yes to that question, especially if you have seen it in movies. However, are you really imagining the ship with all his halls and doors, and all of structure and machinery? What I would like to point out, is the information in our heads when we think of this ship is really just a list of attributes of it.
Many of the attributes in our mind about the Titanic, can be shared with other ships. What a ship is, is a concept of a short list of attributes. In a sense, a mental miniature model of a ship can exist in our minds. We can refer to this mental concept, with all it's attached attributes when ever it needs to be recalled. Our mental model of a ship is so good, we can instantly recognize a new kind of ship we have not seen before. This mental model of what a ship is, can help us understand unique ships and normal ships. The Titanic with his history is unique, because it has attributes that other ships don't have. Like tragedy, and being new, and grand in size. My point is that mental models in our minds of the things we know, help us understand things. Like the subject of ships, and specific subject of a particular ship.
I believe that all intelligence comes down to data that is related to each other. In a computer database, data is only useful when some meaning can be assigned to the data. How that is done is simple. One piece of a data is related to another piece of data. So when the computer reads the data, it can also read the other related data too. Some pieces of data should be related to each other, and some pieces should not be. When all the relationships between data are setup, a database can return the piece of information and all its related data to be displayed together.
Here's an example. A school database keeps track off all the students attending the school. If in the database every student is listed by their name, and birthday, and a list of other important details. You could search for todays date, and it would return all the names of students that have a birthday on todays date. This is easy because the database has a relation between a persons name and the day they where born.
Our brain has created so many relationships that we can navigate this world. As we find something new that we don't understand, our brain will start making relationships with that thing. We may have to study what we don't understand, or play, or compare it to what we already know, but with time, we can build a list of attributes.
The universe is so big, and so complex. Our brains would likely need an infinite number of neurons to understand the vastness of the universe. So our brains employ a brilliant short cut. It simply makes a model in our mind, that is much simpler. Our brain wants our model to be as accurate as possible. So it's careful about getting the right attributes.
Here is my main point. We can believe, and know something, that is completely wrong. How? Because our models are limited. They have to be. We can only hope to improve them, not have them work without flaw.
Think about the game pool. A human can tap a ball with a stick, and that ball can hit other balls which hopefully nocks them into the pockets. A really great player can hit several balls in sequence, just as they predicted. A normal player will often need several turns to finish the game. We humans have limits to what we can mentally accomplish, and those limits keep us from truly understanding what is happening around us. Like pool, we just can't make every shot perfect, nor plan every shot perfectly. And if we can't be perfect, then what can we have? The answer is, we can have a limited model of the truth that at least partially replicate and predict the truth. A limited model may be correct at least some of the time. To become an expert we have to spend a lot of time failing, also known as practicing.
What our brain can do, is give us a model of what the universe is. Our mind, can't comprehend the number of atoms in the universe, or all the ways in which forces, matter and energy may interact. Even if we understood the universe fully, it would be impossible for us to calculate the interactions of the universe fully enough to predict the results of every action.
So rather then do the impossible and create a perfect model to represent reality, we create a limited model to represent what we understand of reality. Our limited model changes a great deal over time. Sometimes, we need experiences that help us improve our models, other times, we must rely on others teaching us from their experiences. Because it's a process, and not an instant success, this is what confusion, and cognitive dissonance, and conflicting ideas all come from.
Morality is so important, yet people have different ideas on what morality is. Scientists debate what is true and untrue about the universe. We each have our own models, and other people have theirs. Sometimes different people will have very similar models, and other times, different people will have models that contradict each other.
In fact what is more odd, is that two people with conflicting models may be useful in different situations. It is unwise to be so certain as to who has the best model. Some people will have a model that predicts one situation well, and another person's model may be capable of predicting another. Having a team of people with different models may make the team more effective, as where one person can understand a situation they may struggle with another.
This is how people can believe such different things, yet be so confident of their position. Our models can also have false data in them. Relationships between attributes that are not relationships. In fact I believe that our brains are supposed to have errors in these models. Why? Because to learn, getting messy is often necessary.
I'm not saying its good to have incorrect information in our mental models, but I am trying to say that our brain hazards possible bad data a lot. In the end, our brain hopes that most of this bad data will eventually be figured out as wrong, and removed. The brain does not want to risk being idol. It eagerly makes one idea related to another, using personal experience, and what others are teaching us, it does this so eagerly that incorrect ideas will eventually be fitted into our mental models of our understanding. To cope with these incorrect related ideas, our brain will often work on the model. This is part of the reason why we dream, to work on our models, to test them out within the dream simulation of our mind. Eventually in the laboratory of our mind, we may reflect differently on our mental models and change them.
A second way errors are removed is by copying mental models from others. As we come to know people that we trust and admire, we will consciously or unconsciously adopt their models. This is how people follow political and religious leaders.
I don't believe people are mindless robots, who follow others, and don't think for themselves. But I do think people have all the mental equipment in their heads to accomplish that.
As much as independent thought is a good thing, the truth I feel, is that it's hard to deny that people often have wrong conclusions. Gaining good working mental models from people that have put a lot of effort into fixing and updating their mental models, is a positive thing. I just hope we always pick people with good working models to follow, and not people with very wrong ones.
We should love natures shortcuts in our brain. Without them, I doubt that intelligence for us would be possible at all. What makes the human brain so different from other species may not be our brain size, but rather how well build these mental models.
What should we do with this knowledge? That is up to you, what it has done for my mind, is that it has given a reason why I should not be arrogant, and believe that I'm at the end of learning. Our models can't represent reality, their only ability is to approximate reality, as best as possible. May we stop thinking we have reached the finish line in learning, and build our mental models together.
