It has come to my attention that the majority of human kind lacks fundamental logical skills that I have taken for granted my entire life.
Ultimately, anything anybody does must have some sort of explanation – not how to do it, but why they do it. This applies to any small facet of human existence, because it would take a true drone to spend 16 hours awake and active every day without questioning anything they spend their time on.
A small child may ask his father, “Daddy, why do you go to work?”
His father replies, “To earn money so you and your mother can get things you need, like food.”
“Why do we need money to get those things?”
“Because those things are owned or produced by someone else, and we have to participate in this complicated system of indirect trade via currency…”
Stop.
Right now, what’s happened is that the young child has forced his father to admit that he has a theoretical model of existence upon which he predicates his actions.
Read on to discover what a theoretical model is, how and why they are used to benefit the human thought process.
I. Reality, Perception, Thought and The Theoretical Model
One common school of philosophical thought dictates that there is a reality above and beyond the human self in which we all take part. That reality is infinitely complex and incorporates all truth and knowledge. For example, the field of physics is a study of predictable behaviors of matter and energy as we discover them, but there are vast (possibly infinite) sums of physical knowledge that are not yet known. That’s the kind of thing True Reality is made up of. Not only does Capital-R Reality contain all of the yet undiscovered scientific information in existence, but all of the secret and unseen things in existence. If ghosts or deities or souls exist, they are contained somewhere within Reality, beyond our perception – along with the predestined winning lottery numbers for next week.
The thing about Reality is that it can’t be perceived directly. Instead, it can only be perceived indirectly through our physiological sense organs. We are limited to what we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell. In fact, the philosophical school known as Empiricism asserts that we cannot know that anything is true unless we directly perceive it – that is, the universe might not even exist behind your head because you cannot see it. That isn’t good enough for most practical situations however – what if you are a cro magnon man, walking along a cliffside looking for a cave or hollow to spend the night in, and the cave you are about to enter contains one very large short faced bear? You cannot directly sense this information, yet it would be very valuable information to have. In fact, your continued existence depends on it!
So what do we do?
We human beings have two main weapons in our arsenal, allowing us to extend our knowledge far beyond our direct empirical perception – thought and communication.
- Thought
We may not perceive directly that “hey, there is a bear in this cave.” We humans also do not typically have sharp enough senses to easily hear or smell a bear from outside a cave. We can however look for additional information in the environment – snapped twigs, claw marks on trees, blood on the ground anywhere, footprints, droppings, etcetera – and conclude that there could be a bear in the cave. The process of thought is describable as the ability to analyze primary perception and have secondary perceptions as a result. Science is an example of thought described this way. Scientific data typically will only indirectly demonstrate a principle. The discovery of the diatomic nature of oxygen is an example of something concluded indirectly. Never was the oxygen molecule directly perceived to be a diatom, but various experimental results of the chemical reactions of oxygen were directly perceived, with such logical relation that the diatom was a sensible conclusion to draw. - Communication
One human being can have a primary sensation via their senses and communicate it to others in codified form. Using the medium of hearing or vision, a person can say to another, “I saw tracks and scratched up trees.” If a person is blind, the same can be accomplished using braille. Theoretically, if it became convenient to produce smells as desired, a person could communicate with another via scent. Humans do not do this but animals do it all the time, especially among sea life.
So now I want you to observe what has happened.
Via pattern recognition, the humans have spotted a connection between claw marks on trees and the presence of bears. More rapid pattern recognition, or the recognition of more intricate and complex patterns, is diagnostic of intelligence. (As an aside, IQ tests are constructed so that a person’s IQ score represents their quantified ability to recognize patterns – this is why so many pattern completion problems are found on Stanford-Binet IQ tests, as well as why the tests are timed.)
So presumably what took place is that the most intelligent humans were the first to spot the pattern between bear sign and the presence of bears. Then, this information was communicated to other members of the human tribe – the concept of bear sign, specific known bear sign to identify, and bear sign that may or may not have been spotted near this cave the tribe intends to camp in.
We have now created a theoretical model.
As explained earlier, reality is dauntingly complex – far too large to be perceived directly with a human’s limited senses as well as far too complex to be perceived with a human’s limited mental faculties. Thus, it is much simpler to create a simplified form of reality in the form of a mental model. The advantage of a theoretical model is that it has predictive power. If our conceptual understanding of the behavior of bears is correct, we can determine whether or not bears are enough of a threat that we should worry about them without needing to go to the trouble of directly perceiving them. We can be safe from bears without having to even see one!
If our theoretical model is incorrect, i.e. that we believe the bear print in the ground is actually the result of a small deer sitting on his haunches periodically to leave impressions in the dirt and then scratching claws next to it as a measure of artistic license, then we might get ourselves eaten.
In order to simplify reality enough to make a theoretical model of it, you have to make certain assumptions, such as “bears leave characteristic paw prints in soft earth,” and “deer do not create false bear prints to screw with you.” If these assumptions line up with Reality, your theoretical model will have greater predictive power. If we have done a good job as thinking human beings, we can organize these sensory perceptions into some kind of mental framework that correctly predicts outcomes to situations 100% of the time. If this is possible then reality is understood. Since that has yet to happen, humanity does not yet understand reality by very definition of understanding. It cannot be predicted without flaw, therefore our understanding is only as sophisticated as the error term in our predictions.
II. The Relationship Between Science and Philosophy
It is probably appropriate at this point to discuss the relationship between science and philosophy.
Science is but one of many children of philosophy. Its ultimate foundation is in that very same school of philosophy I mentioned earlier; empiricism – the belief that only that which can be observed can be construed as “real” without question. Science was built logically upon that assertion into a less philosophically pure but more useful method of acquiring knowledge, i.e. “the scientific method.”
The most hardcore empiricists would assert that perhaps I can’t even know if the country of Norway even exists because I have not been there before. Another example of extreme empiricist thought is that perhaps I cannot know if one billiard ball striking another “causes” it to move, because I only observe the one striking the next – the mechanism of causation is unobservable to me, and so by empiricist doctrine I cannot “know” that the causation exists. It is possible that once in a million years, or possibly just under the right circumstances, a collision of billiard balls could take place that would completely vomit in the face of Newtonian mechanics, thus even though I can clearly see that every time I strike two billiard balls together there is a recoil and transfer of momentum, the most pure empiricists would assert that perhaps Newtonian mechanics are not true because it is impossible to observe every collision of billiards and measure them all.
Science clearly is not so purely empiricist as the thought processes I have described. When a pattern is well established by virtue of statistical analysis, science will cautiously acknowledge that the pattern exists and the deviation is merely an error term, such as in any of the hard sciences.
However, the hard sciences and even the scientific method itself constitute merely one of many methods that exist for testing theoretical models against reality.
The child above couldn’t avoid prodding his father to explain sociological models such as humanity being a collective in which labor is divided, concepts of indirect bartering via currency as an intermediate and so on. Few ever realize it, but these things themselves constitute mental models with hypotheses and predictions to be scrutinized, thus they can be evaluated by testing them against reality just as science can.
For example:
- The model of society as a financial collective with divided labor is asserted by many as more productive, safer and happier than a society of individuals fending for themselves, but that is contested by neoprimitivists, hermits and some who misrepresent themselves as “anarchists.”Test this by examining two societies, one in which an economy exists and one in which there is functionally no trade of resources or cooperative labor of any kind.
- The model of currency as a necessary financial intermediate basically asserts that without the intermediate of currency, nonequivalent trades would prevent much finance from happening via bartering. If you have a surfboard to give up and you want the power tool your neighbor has up for trade, you rely on the neighbor desiring your surfboard or else risk being unable to acquire the power tool. With currency, this problem is alleviated – you set a value for the items in terms of universal trade tokens. Your neighbor can never be unsatisfied with an offer of universal currency, because that can be traded elsewhere for anything he wants.Test this by comparing bartering-based economic systems against currency based economic systems.
The problem that will always prevent this kind of analysis from ever becoming “real science” is that the large scale behavior of human society is so complex that it’s extremely difficult to determine that any theory about mankind is “true.” Based on my definition above, that knowledge is only as sophisticated as the size of its error term, humans still functionally know nothing about themselves because every single rule has exceptions.
Still, assumedly there is an underlying True Reality that dictates every pattern in nature, including human interaction on a large scale. The single correct theory of human behavior most certainly exists, it just has yet to be discovered by humans. So long as Reality exists in a cause-effect relationship, human behavior can be modeled and predicted with increasing accuracy. These predictions and the results of experiments based on these predictions are simply hard to verify in any way that would please a particle physicist.
III. Theoretical Models And You
Realize, reader, that theoretical models are a fundamental part of the human thought process – so fundamental that, like the child, you can’t ask “why” more than twice without running into one.
The child asks his father why currency is needed to acquire things and INSTANTLY his father must explain an entire social theory in which humanity is a collective in which labor is divided, the concept of indirect bartering through a medium of currency and so on.
These mental models take many forms, and although not all of them are even remotely “scientifically testable” or “falsifiable,” mental models still derive their truth from their predictive power. If you have a theory about certain bear sign indicating the presence of bears… Whether or not something is “scientific” makes absolutely no difference in determining the validity of a mental model. You need no science to know without a doubt that a goofy looking kid who behaves awkwardly and attracts a lot of attention will get picked on in a public school, you’ve seen it confirmed too many times. That is, you’ve formed a mental model of the criteria which cause a child to get bullied in a public school environment and observed those conditions being tested out in reality. If your pattern recognition abilities are up to snuff, you were probably pretty good at predicting who will get picked on at the start of every school year. You derived “truth” entirely without science!
The ultimate point of this entire article, other than making the reader aware of what a theoretical model is and why it is useful, is to make the reader aware that ALL THOUGHT occurs through this process by definition of what a “thought” is. Therefore, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly viewing our world not quasi-directly via perceptions but indirectly through mental models of reality.
I urge the reader to ask themselves several questions:
Through what theoretical models do you view the world?
Do you know?
Are they accurate?
How do you know?
These are questions all thinking human beings should ask themselves constantly.
Go to it.
Right By Definition 