On the Role of Modelling

When we make a tool we project ourselves onto the world. We create something which fits a mental model of the tool to achieve some goal, from turning over a large piece of rock with a stick used as a lever, to creating a mechanism in metaphor with which we can manipulate and represent our idea (eg. our idea of ourselves).

We seem to want to be able to explain the world in terms simpler than the operations of the world, i.e. reductionism. The models we use will in general be the latest or the most acceptable depending on how conservative we are. We need laws, spiritual or temporal to fix our relationship with the world and nature and God, if we consider the latter to be necessary. With the rise of a mechanistic description of the workings of inanimate nature, new models of how animate nature might work can be generated and thus the models of the animal as a machine.

"A machine being a man-made contrivance, to call a living organ a machine implies that it is mechanism humanly intelligible. The whole man being organs the implication is that the whole man is mechanism humanly intelligible." [Sherrington, 1940, p.186].

Perhaps here lies the key to the mechanistic modelling, it is the urge to understand and the opportunity offered by modelling which drives the whole process. The spiritual/religious explanation denies the option of actually understanding the processes of nature while the mechanistic starts with the view that nature can be understood.