Human models.

[ollypenrice]

Our grasp of anything external to ourselves takes the form of a conceptual model which we have made. Now, we have made this model with what we have available to us. This includes; 1) Our senses (nowadays extended somewhat by tools). 2) Our languages. I suspect there are two of these, verbal and mathematical. We think within these. 3) The things we think we know already. 4) Our brains, which work in a particular way.

If you try to whittle a model bicycle wheel out of wood alone you will be fairly successful much of the time but the compressed air and the bearing grease ane going to be a problem!

So my question is this; how can we usefully speculate about what might lie outside the range of our model making toolkit? Will we ever be able to make a model that is not, in the end, really just a remodelling of ourselves? (Just as a wooden model bicycle wheel really remains to a great extent just a tree.)

I think this thought simply because Cosmology takes us to the brink of what our toolkit allows us to create.

Olly

[kev 102 42]

HEAVY that hurt my brain..................kev

The tool is there we just havent grasped yet...........kev

[drollere]

i have three responses to this question.

1. the premise is false. we see, touch, hear, smell and taste; we have experience with the dynamical properties of our environment; we have invented thousands of specific scientific instruments with which to observe, measure, prod, tear apart and synthesize specific parts of the world. all of that is "phenomenologial", not conceptual. we don't just think, we experience: most important, we gather data.

2. the analogy is false. a wooden bicycle wheel is really a tree, and a conceptual model is just an idea? ... well, can you make a wheelbarrow and carry a load with an actual tree -- branches, roots and all -- as the wheel? if astrophysics are just an idea, how did the mars rovers and moon probes get exactly where they were going? was that just "mind control"?

3. what is your real question? actually, science has quite often proceeded by making a theoretical prediction that did or did not turn out to be backed up by data. relativity may be "just an idea", but it predicted gravitational lensing to within 1 part in 10,000 (as measured in the hipparcos survey, 90 years later). so i'm uncertain what you are driving at.

the crux is that science is not merely concepts. it's concepts, observations (measuring gravitational lensing), and actual interactions with the world (putting probes on mars). each of those activities may have its flaws, but science is the genius idea of putting them to work together.