Mental models and the historical narrative

by PF

Reality, it turns out, is multi-dimensional. For now that term should be understood loosely, without regard to the precise delineation or number of these ‘dimensions’. As quickly as we can generate tools, thinking, and mental hardware to analyze reality, its observable facets and ‘dimensions’ appear to multiply in front of us: with each newly ground lens we discover that there is more to be discovered.

As human beings, we used to be quite content with the assembling of historical narratives which described a progression of facts: (1) Caesar crossed the Rubicon, (2) this initiated a civil war, (3) in which Caesar was ultimately victorious, until (4) he was assassinated. In creating these narratives it was possible, utilizing a method of ratiocination which Thucydides elucidated, to arrive at a physical description of facts which had incontestably happened. This is still possible.

However as we refine the lens through which we view our lives, more dimensions of experience emerge into view, for which it is not nearly so easy to arrive at any kind of overarching consensus. These include the emotional and probabilistic aspects of reality, which are in some sense even more important to the internal experience of reality than observable facts, yet which we cannot reach a discursive consensus on because our description of these areas cannot approximate the complexity of the things we wish to describe.

The Thucydidean approach cannot address the lion’s share of historical problems, which are rooted in questions of interpretation, perspectives, value judgments, and emotional context. In light of this problem it is necessary to add another tool to that of the factual narrative: the mental model. Human beings use mental models of experience constantly, most importantly for the prediction of future events. Factual narratives can be stored in memory, but models are the result of a process which involves the imagination. Mental models possess a number of advantages over discursive narratives.

Historical experiences can only distend to approximately accurate dimensionality – they can only become as big as the lived experience is for participants – when the thinker crosses the boundary from compiling a factual narrative, into creating a mental model in the imagination which can be used (however primitively) to ‘experience’ or imagine aspects of the reality. In this sense, narratives of history are “two dimensional” reconstructions which record the movement of entities in time and space. Imaginational models of history incorporate the probabilistic and emotional dimensions which action and experience actually do possess for human minds. A factual narrative cannot simulate experience until it is recreated within the imagination of the user – this process of imagination is therefore a necessary adjunct of historical investigation. There is simply no way to accurately reason about human action without entering into the consideration of the probabilistic, emotional and perspectivist dimensions of action, because these aspects of action determine the meaning the actions have for doers and observers.

The discursive processing of explicit factual information is inferior in terms of bandwidth, when compared with the intuitive processing that occurs when a model is reconstructed from facts within the imagination. If I tell you twenty five things about second-empire Germany, the processing of these explicit logic statements does not add up to any kind of cumulative experience in the mind. If they relate, then you can think discursively (e.g. compare, contrast, deduce and generalize) to arrive at a thesis. A thesis is a statement, and thus naturally lacks the dimension of an experience. Essentially discursive reasoning limits one to adding additional observations, and does not grant access to the experience which is the perceptual ‘truth’ underlying the narrative.

Models, on the other hand, describe a probability space of which a given narrative is necessarily one outcome. Even if the narrative includes supplementary information which would describe this space, this supplementary data cannot be modeled discursively in the mind; it cannot be modeled without using the imagination. Strictly speaking, there is no modeling without imagination, because imagination is the mind’s way of handling probability, uncertainty, and multiple outcomes. The chances of doing this with discursive algorithms is very low.

Actually this is a hack whereby one can use the imaginational processing power of the brain to back-translate established historical narratives into first hand experience, semi-accurately recreating the perspectives of historical participants and ‘deconvolving’ the over-arching summary perspective inherent in historical writing. This can be used to distill specific moments of historical events into ‘literature’, i.e. into the imagined vicarious experience of an event’s participants. It is a laborious process of breaking a compiled, summary ‘is’ modality down into individually splintered ‘is’ modalities and using these to reach inferences about ‘am’ modalities, to discover how reality really tasted to the sensory system experiencing it, not the late-coming sensory system cataloging its observable facets.

Why is this important? Because we are attempting to arrive at absolute truth about historical events, and at each stage of processing the human nervous system introduces artifacts which distort our perception of reality. The valuation of narratives versus mental models depends on what aspects of reality one is attempting to discover. If one is searching for the factual read-out of the ‘is’ modality, a historical narrative is very good. If one is searching for the more relevant read-outs of the ‘am’ modalities of participants, a historical narrative must be ‘deconvolved’ into the ‘literary’ perspectives generated within imaginational mental models. These alone can recreate, as best as possible, the splintered ‘am’ modalities which represent the true human knowledge of history’s rich pageant. For the purposes of looking at reality with the smallest possible resolution, which demands a knowledge of enough facts about the individual’s ‘is’ and ‘should’ to make inferences about his ‘am’, historical narratives are like hedge funds with stocks valued in a fiat currency, and the ‘deconvolved’ ‘literary’ ‘am’-perspectives are like the precious metals, commodities, manufacturing equipment and human capital on which these stocks’ values are based. ‘Am’-experiences convey information about the human condition which possess a value which persists irrespective of the speculation and shifting valuations of idea markets. It is therefore necessary to have tools in the truth search which allow the one to be abstracted from the other. As will be shown elsewhere, a perspectivist toolkit may have more practical applicability than is immediately apparent.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 04:05 PM in The Ontology Project
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