Experience comes in many forms. Every first hand encounter with the world is an experience, coming from daily life, or from extraordinary events like going on tours, or participating in activities, like playing games.
One may also obtain experience through secondary means, such as from stories - both from books and the TV shows, and from school - the subjects taught at school expose students to many existing models of the world.
An experience is just an instance of the world.
Experiences and World Model
With these experiences, we build our world model. Some may be simplistic, like by retaining a set of common experiences as anecdotes to compare situations that pops up against. But over time, and as the set of experiences you would want to consider burgeons, it might not be so easy to crawl over whenever one tries to make a comprehensive decision.
So one might notice similiarities from the experiences and draw up a set of principles from which these experiences might be deduced. These principles might produce even more results than the experiences observed so far, and if it proves correct, it would serve to reinforce the credibility of the set of principles.
This almost sounds like the scientific method, but it applies quite generally as well. Afterall, scientific theories are but a model which people utilise to view the world.
A Coherent Model
A model has to be coherent, i.e. it has to be consistent within itself, otherwise it is confused, and will serve no purpose whatsoever. In maths, it would have proven itself false by the notion of contradiction.
For example, an inconsistent model could be one beginning with the notion that logic does not exist, hence it follows that nothing in the world can be explained.
There are more subtle and technical examples, but think I shan't bore the audience.
Domain of a Model
Beyond being coherent, the value of a model is derived from the domain of it's application. The more situations a certain model can explain, the more comprehensive it is. If one model can explain everything another model explains, and more, the second model will be superceded by the other.
Accuracy of a Model
And appart from the size of it's domain, the value of a model also comes from it's ability to predict outcomes accurately.
Monday, August 21, 2006
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2 comments:
What would happen if one had various experiences that were very similiar to each other in physical conditions (ie. Time, Venue, People and objects involved) , however, with different outcomes each time?
What would the one's model be like then?
well, a good model would recognise that, and provide a way to handle it, like by assessing the probabilities.
One good example would be quantum mechanics.
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