Approximating reality

The world is ridiculously complicated. We construct models to represent what we see and think we understand. Simple models of complex phenomena, and we’re happy when our models represent the most important patterns.

We would, of course, often like to understand the details, so we add more detail to our models. And our models get closer to reality. Yet as our models represent the world in more and more detail they themselves become more and more complex. All the simple parts of the models start to interact in increasingly unexpected ways, until it becomes almost as difficult to interpret the model as it is to understand the real world.

It’s a good thing we see beauty in complexity.

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