This style of impermanent, adaptive thinking reminds me of that which Thomas Kuhn advocates for in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In order to build upon our knowledge of the world around us we have to be willing to accept when old systems of understanding are no longer viable and must be changed. The resulting paradigm shift ultimately elevates our knowledge on a given subject while progressing its field of work.

I took media criticism last year and a core concept of that course is how technology/modern means of communication are functionally extensions of the human body and human faculties. This distinction between an idea and model seems comparable to that concept; we require sophisticated computers as extensions of ourselves to adequately quantify the knowledge we do and don't have. Until then our ideas about the world cannot be materialized or understood by others.