Why models?
Mike at WorD posted this excellent quote from Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie. It’s a cogent analysis of how we can allow our models of the world to blind us to the world.
Why models?
Well, in an effort to cope with the incomprehensibility of infinite reality, we ever-curious, ever-pondering, compulsively controlling Homo sapiens create theoretical models. These models are ingenious beams of speculation that we use to penetrate and define the dark mysteries of boundless existence. Sometimes elegantly structured, usually self-confirming, our models are like the headlights of a car, designed to light our way. Whatever is illuminated becomes our truth, and we organize our lives around it. But this light we create can also blind us. Too often we are blinded into believing that our models are the whole reality, forgetting that they are simply useful fact/fantasy coping devices.
The more fully we believe a model is reality, the more rigid the model becomes. And the more rigid it becomes, the more it confines us. There is a sense of security in this, the sense of security that comes from being contained by the “known” and thus shielded from the threat of the unknown. So the mixed blessing of models is that while they can generate a sense of coherence through a groundedness (in “knowledge”), they can also, if used without mindfulness, become addicting anesthetics to the pain of an inscrutable universe and further insulate us from full reality, which is the realm of infinite possibilities.
pax et bonum
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