Monday, March 25, 2024

Mental Models

Three Minds
I've been engaged in productive philosophical discussions with Andrius Kulikauskas of Math 4 Wisdom (M4W), a set of partially overlapping study groups and other committees centered around a philosophical language known as Wondrous Wisdom.

Wondrous Wisdom may be grappled with as a stash of cognitive frameworks, ways of organizing core concepts to reflect workflows and progressions. I recommend visiting the Wondrous Wisdom Wiki for more details (visit Vocabulary). 

My frameworks here were influenced and inspired by the ones Andrius has come up with.

The All Seeing Eye represents the sense that we're being watched over or supervised or judged, and we extrapolate that sense to where "even Lucifer feels watched" i.e. no matter how high a demon or angel may consider themselves to be, there's always a sense they're being observed, perhaps by a yet higher consciousness.

The idea of God might be summarized by the meme "every being senses a super being" i.e. a sense of a yet higher self, up to final Self as an omega terminus (alluding to Teilhard de Chardin).

Those not subscribing to God talk may prefer to see Future Humanity as this higher consciousness i.e. future versions of ourselves with the benefit of a lot more hindsight. Others project higher intelligence in the form of ETs, or simply wiser folks, teachers of various kinds, saints and bodhisattvas.

The Unconscious is an endless cornucopia of raw material for dialectical debates, of constant back and forth, is a kind of battleground. 

How else could the ego star as a warrior if not against the backdrop of some polarized space of good vs evil. Without a gradient and a sense of "higher ground" there's nothing to fight for.

The "three minds" in this picture are: the unconscious (peripheral); the conscious (the focus: me within the world) and consciousness (the observer storyteller with its sense of a greater intelligence shining from "behind" or "above").  
Plato's Cinema
Plato's Cinema is of course Plato's Cave, wherein the observer is watching "the movie of my life" meaning some hero's journey in the Joseph Campbell sense. The star (focus) of the show is some "me" surrounded by a "not me" world (environment) that's nevertheless tuned in and therefore part of the world of everyday experience. 

The Unconscious the presently untuned and is peripheral to Conscious content and continually percolates inward, synergizing with existing content, sometimes in surprising ways. 

The Unconscious sometimes comes across as communicating intuitions from that higher self, as the All Seeing Eye is its source as well.

Sometimes and ego may feel overwhelmed by a welling up of unconscious material. The ego is akin to the captain of a ship on sometimes stormy seas, seas inhabited by deep-dwelling unknown creatures.

Making Models
How do we make mental models in the first place? They form in stages. 

What's new first appears as some "whatson" that needs to be turned in to ascertain its nature and reality, existence itself being a first attribute to test for. "Is this just a mirage?" is a beginning stage question, or "is it real?"  We need to know WHAT "it" is even was we figure out if it's real or not. 

WHAT turns to WHETHER.

Depending on WHETHER something is real (nonfiction) or not (fiction), we will look at HOW and WHY somewhat differently. 

Fictional motives (world domination) and posited mechanisms (anti-gravity engines) may be attributed to the fictional UFO UAPs, whereas a non-fictional Chinese weather balloon will generate more mundane reality-fitting explanations.

A main idea here is we're always updating and revising our mental models. By interrogating them and figuring out key ways to verify or invalidate various aspects of them, we feed an iterative process. 

Sometimes a mental model will go "pop" like a balloon, meaning it will become suddenly unbelievable. We can't always go back and make ourselves believe what we no longer believe.  Systems come and go i.e. they come with a half life.  

Every system is a ticking time bomb until its pull date, one might say. Some have lasted thousands of years, passed down from generation to generation. However, given their context keeps changing, it's usually difficult to claim a system has "stayed the same" even within a single generation.  Systems keep morphing, to keep up with the times they're in.