Reality & the Mind of God
by David Geelan | 1 November 2024 |
What does it mean to ‘understand’ something? If we say ‘I understand quadratic equations or ‘I understand the sanctuary doctrine’ or ‘I understand how yachts sail in directions other than downwind,’ what do we mean?
One way of thinking about the answer to these questions is that to understand something is to have a mental model of it: to be able to in some sense visualize the key features of the thing, its relationships internally and externally, and the way it functions. Having such a model allows us to run mental ‘experiments’ where we change something and can imagine what the effects would be if we changed that thing in the real world.
Now that’s slightly complicated by the fact that not everyone’s brain works exactly like my brain! In fact, each of our brains works a little bit differently, so ironically, my mental model of mental models might be unlike yours!
As just one example, a little less than 1% of people have complete aphantasia, the condition where they do not form mental images at all. About another 3% of people have partial aphantasia, where their mental images are fragmentary or fleeting. People with aphantasia will still make mental models of the world, but perhaps in words or symbols rather than pictures.
The mental model created by a novice in a topic will be simpler and less elaborate than that created by an expert, but may serve the purpose perfectly well for answering the kinds of questions a novice is asking of it. As we develop expertise in a topic, our mental models will become both more comprehensive – they will include many more of the key features of the thing to be understood, including complicated things like exceptions to rules – and more accurate: they will come to be more and more like the concept to be understood.
Because we are human and our minds have limitations, sometimes there will be a trade-off between comprehensiveness and accuracy: adding more details may over-complicate the picture and make it less helpful, or being excessively precise might lose necessary fuzziness in a concept.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his one-paragraph short story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ makes the point that if we add more and more and more comprehensiveness and accuracy to the map we make of a country, eventually we need to make a map with a scale of 1 mile per mile: the map needs to be the same size as the country and identically represent every single feature of the country… and at that point the map becomes indistinguishable from the country, and arguably redundant.
I said before that our mental maps have limitations because we are human and our minds have limitations. What of a Mind without limitations? Would not the mental model of reality in the Mind of God be so comprehensive and accurate that it would coincide with reality itself?
Might not, in the end, reality exist within the Mind of God, with each of us making smaller and simpler flawed maps of it from which to work?
From such a perspective, God is not so much immanent (all through) and transcendent (greater than) the material world, but is the underlying reality in which the material world has its existence.
Dr. David Geelan is Sue’s husband and Cassie and Alexandra’s dad. He started out at Avondale College, and is currently Professor and National Head of the School of Education, within the faculty of Education, Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia.
