I don’t buy this usage, my brain is nothing but models. but I could buy a related concept this post made me think of: my brain, which is a big honkin’ messy model of my behavior, includes as part of it a model of the environment as it is now. and separately (well, sort of. not really. or at least not exactly) it has temporal models of “given that this is how things are right now, here’s how they might change”. and actually, sometimes I have blurry understandings, where the thing I’m thinking about is abstracted over a chunk of spacetime. maybe I don’t know exactly when you’ll eat, so I don’t know if you’re eating right now, but I know that, having “now” as being as long as a day, you eat now. if “now” is only as long as a speed of light round trip between us, then I don’t know where you are exactly, but I still know that you are, that you are a body, that you’re between 95f and 110f (probably right around 98.5f!), some other things like that. but in order to talk about what happens in the future, I need to think about way more than just you. I have to think about the state right now of—well, most humans on earth, the weather, various machines, and so on, and consider how they might interact. I can be much more sure of facts that are close to me in spacetime than facts that are far, which I need to think to figure out. so in that sense I would say I have a model of the world, but I only have beliefs about the future.
… but that’s the opposite of how you used the words. I find your usage confusing.
I don’t buy this usage, my brain is nothing but models. but I could buy a related concept this post made me think of: my brain, which is a big honkin’ messy model of my behavior, includes as part of it a model of the environment as it is now. and separately (well, sort of. not really. or at least not exactly) it has temporal models of “given that this is how things are right now, here’s how they might change”. and actually, sometimes I have blurry understandings, where the thing I’m thinking about is abstracted over a chunk of spacetime. maybe I don’t know exactly when you’ll eat, so I don’t know if you’re eating right now, but I know that, having “now” as being as long as a day, you eat now. if “now” is only as long as a speed of light round trip between us, then I don’t know where you are exactly, but I still know that you are, that you are a body, that you’re between 95f and 110f (probably right around 98.5f!), some other things like that. but in order to talk about what happens in the future, I need to think about way more than just you. I have to think about the state right now of—well, most humans on earth, the weather, various machines, and so on, and consider how they might interact. I can be much more sure of facts that are close to me in spacetime than facts that are far, which I need to think to figure out. so in that sense I would say I have a model of the world, but I only have beliefs about the future.
… but that’s the opposite of how you used the words. I find your usage confusing.