The human mind necessarily uses conceptual models in order to represent and understand reality. These models are logical and linguistic constructs using language, either ordinary or formal. Understanding how such models are constructed (structure) and how they work (function) has emerged as a central theme in philosophy and logic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it became dominant theme in the mid to late 20th century.
This post is good summary of the basic idea of the way the mind-brain models reality in order to reduce complication and complexity to simpler and more tractable terms through abstraction, similar to the way attention focuses on the important and essential in perception and relegates the rest of the "blooming, buzzing confusion" (William James) to the background (distinguishes signal from noise).
Short and worth a read if you are not trained in philosophy.
Nick Johnson
No comments:
Post a Comment