Replying to LO29438 --
Dear Organlearners,
Terje Tonsberg <tatonsberg@hotmail.com> writes:
>A severe problem with using inferred MMs to explain
>behavior is that inference forces you to make assumptions
>that cannot be verified by observation. This is paradoxical,
>because the study of MMs is supposed to help one get rid
>of undue assumptions. It is better to stick to observing and
>manipulating observables. This is more true to sureness.
Greetings Terje,
Thank you Terje for highlighting the paradoxal thinking.
I agree with what you have written, but only so far as it concerns the
explicate (a-la D Bohm) side of a system. It concerns the essentiality
openness ("open-transfer") But what about the implicate side of it? Here
the observables can at most give us a hint of it, but never mirror it
exactly.
When i read what Mental Models (MMs) are supposed to be, i can clearly
identify several which i had in my lifetime. But i succeeded in resolving
each of them by incorporating them into my knowledge. Usually it was
additional information which made me realise that a MM was acting as a
"lone ranger".
The question now is -- are Mental Models explicate or implicate to the
mind? As for myself, i cannot give a conclusive answer. Of those which i
have resolved, some were explicate while others were implicate.
By explicate i mean that i have taken up in my thinking "parcels" of
information (coming from outside me) which i did not question seriously.
For example, up to adulthood i considered English as an enemy to my mother
tongue Afrikaans and my way of thinking. If i were to think in English, i
would become as bad as the English people -- snobs and imperialistic. Can
you believe it? Let me try to explain why.
I grew up among people who were victims of the terrible British-Boer War
(1899-1902) and what they said made me think so. But then i began to think
-- languages cannot be enemies of each other. Only humans can make enemies
of each other and they will even use languages to do so! I began to study
the history of the English language and eventually discovered that the
emergence of Old English and my mother tongue had much in common -- the
Lowlands regions of Northern Europe. Today, for example, when i want to
trace the etymology of an Afrikaans word, i usually find my way in
etymological dictionaries of English!
By implicate i mean that i have created a Mental Model self as the result
of erronous reasoning. One which i had is that there is a clear or
absolute distinction between the material and the mental worlds. They do
not overlap. It was LEM (Law of Excluded Middle) operating here.
I was not aware of anything belonging to both worlds and thus based all my
reasoning on this ignorance. But after i have discovered empirically that
LEP (Law of Entropy Production) acts in both worlds, i have become aware
of this MM. I will not be so bold as to say that i have fully resolved
this MM. But there are so many things belonging to both worlds that i
think twice before assuming that something belongs to only one of these
worlds.
For example, i am now very sure that my creativity belongs to both worlds.
In other words, my creativity has a material side and a mental side to it.
It is this creativity which makes the contact of the one world with the
other possible -- fruitfulness.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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