Mental Models
Idioms, practices, and the science of significance
People usually laugh when I hand them my personal card with the title “Phenomenologist” under my name. It may be because phenomena rolls off the tongue like The Muppet Show’s mahna mahna (which was pointed out to me by a circus contortionist I was sitting beside on a flight from Portland last year). Then again, it may be because the word conjures up images of phrenology or some other semantically mistakable quack sciences. As much as I love the former reason, I suspect the latter at times.
Phenomenology is a modeling language. Or, perhaps more precisely, it is a modeling through language. It is a way to think rigorously about everything. That isn't as boring as it might sound. In fact, if anything, phenomenology is the imaginative science of variation. A rigorous science of infinite variety. A variantology. It is a thinking that interrogates the unifying flow of measurements and meanings, the sciences and humanities, nature and culture. This unifying flow is that of sensibility. The gestation of validities. Sense-making in its purest form at work from the pre-theoretical to pure physics and the speculative metaphysics that portend it.
Learning to think phenomenologically is learning a life modeling language. Personally, phenomenology gave me an idiom to navigate extreme cultural difference growing up as a third culture kid in Pakistan, and a practice of structured inquiry capable of descriptively engaging whatever I was amidst.
Mental models are just this: idioms and practices that are produced from and catalyze a certain life in the world that is then crystallized in some meaningful sense in a structure that exemplifies the whole. Mental models themselves morph and adapt with us. Phenomenology, as the science of significance as such, is always about the work of clarifying the details of and differences between the pure phenomenological structures of perception and the infinite variety of the perceived. In this way we can all be phenomenologists, with a little effort, as we are always already the unfolding of its domain of inquiry. Making the autopoietic intentionality that we manifest descriptively explicit opens up everything to phenomenological analysis and provides an embodied, intersubjective approach to reality where the dialectical meets the correlational. An approach that respects the infinite tasks of encountering the complex systems that are the living manifestation of the cosmos.
That is why I am a phenomenologist.
Mahna Mahna.
Over the summer I took one of my mental models and made it into an infographic. It was used in a talk I gave at Harvard. For me, an image can often be the spike that brings about a moment of dawning comprehension amidst a sea of prose (which is definitely the workplace hazard of a descriptive science like phenomenology). You can see the 1.0 version of this model on my Academia.edu profile (which, tellingly, only hosts pictures at the moment).
(Pop) Cultural Miscellany
Phenomenology’s influence on Neil Stephenson’s Anathem http://www.nealstephenson.com/acknowledgments.html
Gödel and Husserl
http://www.scribd.com/doc/145167330/Godel-s-Philosophical-Program-and-Husserl-s-Phenomenology
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-015-8478-4_16
