Models of Reality & Level of Abstraction
The physical world and the rules that regulate it are complicated and very difficult to grasp. To make sense of it, we — humans — attempt to explain it with mental models. Models are logical constructions defined with terms that we created and understand. We use those models as proxies for reality in an attempt to grasp and predict its complicated and multifaceted rules.
Models are not an engineering-only concept; they are fundamental to everyday life and are natural simplifications of the world that we experience. We build models for everything, every day. For example, the memory we have of someone we met is a model of that person that we constructed in our mind. It is a description that is simple enough to store away in our memory, and sophisticated enough to be nuanced. ...