Edgar,
one question posed was:
"How could a complex mental model actually accurately model something that was
not equally complex or more?"
As an answer, just please go ahead and remember the case of "Epicycles", in an
early model of the Solar System. It was accurate in modeling and even in
predicting, but, as you also know, got off initially on the wrong foot, and so
was a very complex castle built in the air, hoping to model a quite simple
situation.
Current models seem moderately better.
Yet, beyond just a single solar system, the non-Keplerian rotation curves of
disk-galaxies are not explained, not even that of our Milky Way. The nature of
unseen mass is unknown and not a feature of any model, except as a suspect
still at-large. This casts suspicion on the whole model.
For long in Philosophy of Science, there has been a wonderment over the
"Isomorphism" that arises in our thought between what we call The World, and
models, but naming the similarity of structure or form with a five-syllable
word does not discover anything particular. It's like naming certain animal
behavior "Instinct": A mere hiatus, a place-holder for ignorance. Yet, the
Logical Positivists could neither find nor specify a criterion of Cognitive
Meaningfulness. So, despite the appearance of structure and form, there's
nothing to point to in the world which seems to make us so sure of what we say
about the world, and that includes a basis for all models, complex or simple.
"Complexity", though, is a Human category of thought; it is not in Nature.
Nature is just Nature. And models just model the surface, the "crust" of
Nature.
To know Nature, you must first know Nature.
Just as, to know Recursion, you must first know Recursion. ;-)
--Joe
> Edgar Owen <edgarowen@...> wrote:
>
> Bill,
>
> Sure science is "human mental models of what reality might be". But what is
> the reality that science so accurately models if it itself is not equally
> complex or more?
>
> How could a complex mental model actually accurately model something that was
> not equally complex or more?
>
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