A mental model is an abstraction about how someone or something works. A reflection of a real thing that happens in our minds.

For example, my mental model about why trees’ branches go up instead of horizontally:

Trees grow their branches up looking to maximize the sunlight they receive, so that they can get more energy from the sun to live.

Sometimes, mental models are a wrongful explanation of how things work:

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I have always felt that there was something missing to classical physics. Over the years, I was able to pinpoint a number of things that created that sensation:

• The lack of “meta-discussion” about what really means to define and isolate a system for studying it. Why can’t I put a formula, or a strict declaration, on the system that is being defined? Why isn’t there a meta-language to describe the system, something that standarizes what am I putting inside and outside of the system, instead my teachers keep insisting in colloquial descriptions of bodies with weights and their positions? If there is one, why isn’t that just general knowledge, that anybody knows about?
• The names “Entropy” and “Free Energy”. What are them, other than a sleight-of-hand to avoid talking about the lack of tools to describe information flows in the system?
• The relatively low mention of probabilities about different outcomes. This wasn’t actually the case when going to quantum physics or chemistry, where things become less abstract and they need better definitions to match experiments in real life.

Infophysics is my personal journey through exploring how reshaping and introducing information into mechanical models look like. I only have some vague questions and ideas over how would that look like, and plan to expand on them in the future:

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What do we need computers for?

• Communication with our loved ones
• Taking notes, organizing our thoughts and ideas
• Gathering data for ourselves or organizations we belong to
• Organizing collective action
• Finding out about what others think about ideas, products or services
• Getting services and products delivered

All these are different variants of how to organize matter, energy, and information between us humans. But there’s a lot of clutter around these activities: in general, they are conducted through massive systems of information that mostly serve other purposes: in particular, the advertising economy. That is undeniably an important feature of our everyday life, but it’s subject to invisible biases (consumers can be influenced against their best interests). I think we can have an alternative system that solves for discoverability of goods and services in the marketplace, but in a way that is more protective of individual will; without storing huge amounts of data. How can the market for attention be humanized? Can the market-based model of generation of signals be changed in a way that balances the scale towards individuals and not corporations?

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