Models and Aphorisms

We all know that great imaginative literature can be read on many different levels--Shakespeare could simultaneously produce gripping plots, sensitive character delineations, Tudor propaganda, and philosophical reflections on fate and social responsibility. I am going to advance a similar claim for the scientific models we are producing here at Santa Fe. My basic message is that while each of these models is primarily directed at some particular world of experience--which might be physical, chemical, biological, social or economic--on another level they can lead to new insights about “other” worlds of experience, including those that we ourselves inhabit in our personal and professional lives. These insights, I believe, can be encapsulated in the form of aphorisms, whose meanings are shaped by an understanding of the modelled worlds, and from there can extend metaphorically, to help us reinterpret our own worlds of experience. Later in my talk, I’ll illustrate this claim with four examples.