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Something that has continually interested me is the process of creating models that "simulate" some facet of nature. For a recent class, I created a simple model of a phenomenon that I experience nearly every day as a college student where one student begins to pack up and others follow, creating a positive-feedback loop that causes more and more students to pack up until the entire class has packed up.
The original blog post I wrote about this is here and the simulation itself can be found here.
While this was created mainly to be a sort of interesting diversion (and also to fulfill a requirement for a class) I think it is also a reflection of a way of thinking about the universe around us. Our perceived phenomenal experience is only an approximation of the near-infinitude of physical processes going on around us. In some sense, what we see is just a "model" or "simulation"—the natural occurrences we observe are an abstract distillation by our senses from these "real" processes. Construed this way, perception is an ongoing simulation of the nature around us.
Obviously, simulations often leave out many details of the systems which they simulate. This is obviously the case in my classroom simulation. The decision to pack up isn't caused by some equation, but rather by hundreds of complex conscious decision-making processes (not to mention the physical processes underlying these, and so on) yet its essence can be modeled with a very simple Java applet.
The thought that I hope that this undertaking instills is that we should not take our perceptions for granted—we should both explore them and appreciate them as the proverbial tip of the iceberg of what is actually going on around us and understand that our experience (like a computer simulation) may only be a statistical approximation of reality.
The original blog post I wrote about this is here and the simulation itself can be found here.
While this was created mainly to be a sort of interesting diversion (and also to fulfill a requirement for a class) I think it is also a reflection of a way of thinking about the universe around us. Our perceived phenomenal experience is only an approximation of the near-infinitude of physical processes going on around us. In some sense, what we see is just a "model" or "simulation"—the natural occurrences we observe are an abstract distillation by our senses from these "real" processes. Construed this way, perception is an ongoing simulation of the nature around us.
Obviously, simulations often leave out many details of the systems which they simulate. This is obviously the case in my classroom simulation. The decision to pack up isn't caused by some equation, but rather by hundreds of complex conscious decision-making processes (not to mention the physical processes underlying these, and so on) yet its essence can be modeled with a very simple Java applet.
The thought that I hope that this undertaking instills is that we should not take our perceptions for granted—we should both explore them and appreciate them as the proverbial tip of the iceberg of what is actually going on around us and understand that our experience (like a computer simulation) may only be a statistical approximation of reality.
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