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Notes on software and processes for collecting, analyzing and acting on data |
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Working Notes: Current Working Notes These notes are the contents of a whiteboard in Tinderbox that I'm using to map out my (more . . .)
Nothing New Here: There are no new discoveries or paradigms on this site. It's a public notebook that's a product of my investigations (more . . .)
Embodied Abstraction: I've started another of Lakoff's books on how cognitive science informs philosophy. If the biological substrate of thought determines the (more . . .) About this siteSyndication available
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Communicating knowledge about complex systems to others is a daunting task. A mental model of some kind exists within one brain. The model must somehow be transferred into the brain of another. Obviously, the transmission occurs though the senses, mostly hearing and vision, either with or without words. The layout of a city or a room in building might be most efficiently transferred via a map. Alternatively, through conversation it's possible to sequentially build the spatial map within the mind of another. Perhaps you start off with the kind of room and its shape and then describe where furniture is located, the type of furniture and the color of the walls. There are ways to map social organizations and means to map the operating principles of a hard disk drive. Simulations from a complicated mathematical models can be documented in flow diagrams and their behavior summarized in graphs and tables. The outcomes from unpredictable systems are sometimes best summarized as scenarios, i.e. base case, best case and worst case outcomes of a decision made under conditions of uncertainty. These are all analytic tools for communication. There's an emotional dimension to complex systems that these don't capture. They lack the interpretation that leads to action. Metaphors engage the mind in a way that reaches the feeling parts of the brain. When I characterize the increasing behavior of a system as explosive, a mental image of sudden force, somewhat dangerous, is evoked. Much of cognition is metaphor as the brain uses behavior of the real world to represent abstract concepts. Stories are more extended structures to involve others in communication. Metaphors can be extended to build a larger cognitive structure for the listener, a context that creates a greater common understanding between them. |
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Copyright 2003 by James J. Vornov |