07/21/2023
To understand something is called "seeing" it. We try to make our ideas "clear," to bring them into "focus," to "arrange" our thoughts. The ubiquity of visual metaphors in describing cognitive processes hints at a nexus of relationships between what we see and what we think. When we imagine someone hard at mental work, we might picture a scholar drawing a diagram, a book of sources open at her side. Or we might imagine a stockbroker, watching computer displays of financial , rushing to act on events. Whatever the activity, mental work and perceptual interactions of the world are likely to be interwoven.
This interweaving of interior mental action and external perception (and manipulation) is no accident. It is the essence of how we achieve expanded .
The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained. But human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities.
How have we increased memory, thought, and reasoning? By the invention of external aids: It is things that make us smart.
An important class of the external aids that make us smart are graphical inventions of all sorts. These serve two related but quite distinct purposes. One purpose is for communicating an idea. "A picture is worth ten thousand words." Communicating an idea requires, of course, already having the idea to communicate. The second purpose is to use graphical means to create or discover the idea itself: using the special properties of visual perception to resolve logical problems. Using vision to think.
To understand the intuition behind information , it is useful to gain an appreciation for the important role of the external world in thought and . This notion is sometimes called external cognition to express the way in which internal and external representations and processing weave together in thought. Indeed, the use of the external world, and especially the use of cognitive artifacts or physical inventions to enhance cognition, is all around us.
Graphic aids for thinking have an ancient and venerable history, from the invention of writing, 5,000 years ago, to the internet we know and love today. What we need now is a medium for graphics with dramatically improved rendering, real-time interactivity, real-time reasoning, real-time collaboration, and dramatically lower cost. This medium would allow graphic depictions that automatically assemble thousands of data objects into pictures, revealing hidden patterns. It would allow diagrams that move, react, or even initiate. It would create new methods for amplifying cognition, new means for coming to and about the world, and new channels for sharing that knowledge with new .
This application goes under the name of Futuremodel.
