I'm not sure when the phrase 'world model' came into my lexicon, but by 3ix25 I noted that
...MYKeywords are a collection of concepts that seem to be at the core of MY enterprise, that I'm working to understand the subtleties and interconnections of ==> my World Model, and the guidebook for curation of my Collections...and on 4x25:
...the piles of books that embody the tenuous links I'm attempting to pull into a coherent Narrative of my lifelong and continuing Development of my World Model, the Anschauung of my Welt, my exploration of the resources around me that compose who I am and how I got here, for not much reason beyond the exploration itself. It's somewhat like assembling a complex and multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, around the armature of language.That would be grandiose if I was doing it for anything beyond myself, and grandiosity is simply unnecessary, and embarrassing to be caught at.
...The thing about the jigsaw analogy is that what I'm navigating has no straight edges, and continues to grow as one pieces it, and in more than two dimensions. And there's no finishing it, no taking it apart and returning it to its box. Macramé is a more accurate analogy to what I aim to be constructing... to be seen to be doing: exploring, finding, assembling pieces. If only I'd had that perspective when I started teaching in 1973...
It's always interesting to see how the google view presents its results. Today I googled 'world model' and was surprised to discover that the Algorithm sees it as a term in the AI lexicon: AI's 'World Model(s)' captures some of what I found in that intersection of semantic fields.
And here's the AI summary:
The AI aspect of 'world model' is interesting to explore, but I'm much more interested in the process of articulation of a personal World Model, so I need to explore the versions and aspects of World Model that I am and have been entangled with.
The foundational elements are geographic and explicitly global, traceable to a very early memory of exploring the globe, prominently displayed on a table in the 42 Quincy Street living room, and to the National Geographic maps that graced the staircase to the upper floor of the house. I fancy that I spent hours looking at those. And I had an Atlas of North America, from which I absorbed the idea that stuff flows across physical landscapes. My own immediate surroundings were seen in the Cambridge map...
Among the separable senses of 'world model' that I've engaged with:
Three-world model Wikipedia
World dynamics revisited: a realistic world model simulation Chaweng Chagchit and Joe H. Mize Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 1990This paper investigates and reviews the world models introduced by J.W. Forrester of MIT. A survey of responses to the model and current trends in the global modeling approach are also provided.From the review, it is noted that the assumptions used in the MIT models tend to reflect a generally pessimistic point of view. On the other hand, several critics of the models tend to be overly optimistic. This paper presents a modified world model in which two new variables (technology and pollution abatement) are introduced into (he original model, adding to the existing variables (natural resources, population, pollution, capital investment and agriculture).
Data check on the world model that forecast global collapse Gaya Herrington The Club of Rome (2021)
In the 1972 bestselling book Limits to Growth (LtG), the authors (Meadows, Meadows, Randers & Behrens) concluded that if humanity kept pursuing economic growth without regard for environmental costs, global society would experience sharp declines in available food, standards of living, and ultimately the human population, within the 21st century.The LtG authors used a dynamic systems model, World3, to study key interactions between global variables for population, fertility, mortality, industrial output per capita (p.c.), food p.c., services p.c., nonrenewable resources, and pollution. World3 is based on the work of Forrester (e.g, 1971; 1975), at the time a professor at MIT and the founder of system dynamics: a modeling approach for the interactions between parts of a system, which often produce non-linear behavior like delays, feedback loops, and exponential growth or decline.
Do we have an internal model of the outside world? Michael F Land Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci (2014)...Space appears as continuum, independent of the objects that from time to time populate it. It is the continuum rather than the particular contents that appears to remain still when, for example, we look around a room. On this view, our consciously perceived phenomenal world is a hybrid: the machinery of the precuneus provides a temporarily stable and sparsely populated world model, which we can use as an index for finding the sources information we need for actionPrinciples of Modeling: Real World - Model World Tony Starfield(pdf)
...the four basic elements of model construction:
(1) the real world, which we attempt to model
(2) the model world, which is a simplified version of the real world
(3) the model, containing the working parts to run the model
(4) the data, which is required to run the modelFundamental concepts of a world model? Interactive Fiction Community Forum
All that gives us some idea how 'world model' is being used as a concept in several realms, but it doesn't connect very well with what I thought I meant when I started to consider my 'world model' and how it draws upon MYKeywords, or help much with a Narrative of how my 'world model' has developed.
18x25
On 15vii25 I noted:
What Education should be aimed at is the learner's Development (a Process) of "a world model". It's really not that one "world model" is CORRECT, but that there might be many that exist, all working toward 'best' for the individual learner's own ...needs? purposes? And the point is to be continuing to BUILD one's own.and on 17vii25:
MY world model has its feet in the physical and the biotic, in geography and ecology and temporal processes in which Homo sapiens is engaged...MY world model involves Systems in which life is susceptible to human control, with the caveat of discounts for hubris, error/omission, and short-sightedness... [This was] a product of Whole Earth involvement/influence, during the Stanford years, and via CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review through the 1970s.
It occurred to me to begin to collect a World Model bibliography of books on my shelves that could have a productive conversation if they were gathered together on a cart (and perhaps grouped by birds-of-a-feather affinity):
Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al. (2024)Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth William Thomas (1956)
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World JR McNeill (2001)
What is Environmental History? J Donald Hughes (2015)
An Environmental History of the World: Humankind's Changing Role in the Community of Life Donald Hughes (2010)
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 Alfred W Crosby (1993)
Europe and the People Without History Eric Wolf (1982)
World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction Immanuel Wallerstein (2004)
A World-Systems Reader: New Perspectives on Gender, Urbanism, Cultures, Indigenous Peoples, and Ecology Thomas D Hall (2000)
Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2024)
The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 JR McNeill (2016)
Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader Michael Dove (2007)
Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World RJ Johnston (2002)
Changing the Face of the Earth: Culture, Environment, History Ian G Simmons (1996)
The Human Impact on the Natural Environment Andrew Goudie (2000)
Technology: A World History Daniel R Headrick (2009)
The Atlas of a Changing Climate: Our Evolving Planet Visualized with More Than 100 Maps, Charts, and Infographics Brian Buma (2021)
The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi (2016)
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable Amitav Ghosh (2017)
Thinking in Systems Donella H Meadows (2008)
Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update Donella Meadows (2004)
Spatial organization: The geographer's view of the world Ronald F Abler et al. (1971)
In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization Peter Sloterdijk (2013)
(there will be more)
20xi25
Adam Tooze quotes Peter Sloterdijk::
...After a start-up phase of several centuries, the world system is increasingly stabilizing itself as a complex of rotating and oscillating movements that maintain themselves on their own power. In the realm of circulating capital, momentum has overtaken reasons. Execution replaces legitimation, and facts have become forces majeures. Anyone speaking of globalization could just as easily refer to 'destiny'... Briefings have replaced critique....Being-in-the-world has always had elements of an overwhelmingly extended non-consideration-of-whatever-cannot-be-integrated. One of the outstanding mental effects of 'globalization' is the fact that it has made the greatest anthropological improbability — constantly taking into account the distant other, the invisible rival, the stranger to one's container — the norm. The globalized world is the synchronized world; its form is produced simultaneity, and it finds its convergence in things that are current.
There are no more time-outs in the disclosed and depicted global space. ..."Mankind" — it enters the stage of contemporary thought in a state of progressive self-discovery and interconnection as the vague and splintered para-subject in a universal history of the coincidental.
Images and my World Model
The first visual source that I can definitely identify as foundational in my developing World Model is certainly The Family of Man, which I remember being enthralled by around 1955, and have returned to many timesIn the late 60s and early 70s (indeed, through the 1980s) I was inspired by the empyrean perspective of aerial photography and satellite imagery...
The Earth from Above Yann Arthus-Bertrand (2002)...an eclectic range of natural wonders and man-made oddities captured by both luminaries and amateurs alike in the burgeoning drone-photography community ...Both low- and high-level aerial photographs document places around the world and form the starting point for discussions of ecology, sustainable development, and the current state of the world.Man on Earth Charles Sheffield (1983)
Earth Watch : A Survey of the World from Space Charles Sheffield (1981)
Aerial Muse: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette Hilarie Faberman (2002)
Aerial Geology: A High-Altitude Tour of North America's Spectacular Volcanoes, Canyons, Glaciers, Lakes, Craters, and Peaks Mary Caperton Morton (2017)
In recent years, I've been inspired by a collection of landscape photography books, including
Spina America Richard SharumAmerican Geography Matt Black
...a vivid portrait of an unknown America, to photograph some of the poorest communities across the US. Traveling across forty-six states and Puerto Rico, Black visited designated "poverty areas," places with a poverty rate above 20 percent, and found that poverty areas are so numerous that they're never more than a two-hour's drive apart, woven through the fabric of the country but cut off from "the land of opportunity." American Geography is a visual record of this five-year, 100,000-mile road trip, which chronicles the vulnerable conditions faced by America's poor.American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present Sandra S Phillips and Sally Martin Katz (2021)
...this compilation offers an increasingly nuanced perspective on the American landscape. Divided by region, these photographs address ways in which different histories and traditions of land use have given rise to different cultural transitions: from the Midwestern prairies and agricultural traditions of the South, to the riverine systems in the Northeast, and the environmental challenges and riches of the far West. American Geography also looks at the evidence of older habitation from the adobe dwellings and ancient cultures of the Southwest to the Midwestern mounds, many of them prehistoric.Property Rights Mitch Epstein (2021)
Who owns the land, by whose authority, and with what rights? Mitch Epstein examines the American government's ongoing legacy of property confiscation, and how communities gather to resist...Mitch Epstein (born 1952) has photographed the landscape and psyche of America for half a century
Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky (2003)
Changing the Earth Emmet Gowin (2002)
Emmet Gowin has been taking aerial photographs of the landscape in the United States, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Asia, and the Middle East for over twenty years. In his most compelling photographs, one witnesses how man's footprint has visually scarred and continually altered the earth's surface....images of military test sites, missile silos, ammunition storage and disposal facilities, coal mining, pivot irrigation, offroad motor traffic, and more. The book also surveys his more recent works, which focus on other regions of the world, including the battlefields of Kuwait, new golf courses in Japan, and the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic.
Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape Stephen Shore (2023)
...a series of photographs shot by drone from 2020 onwards, which reveal in arresting detail the interplay of natural and man-made landscapes in Montana, North Carolina, New York, and beyond.Eyes over the World: The Most Spectacular Drone Photography Dirk Dallas
...an eclectic range of natural wonders and man-made oddities captured by both luminaries and amateurs alike in the burgeoning drone-photography community.and here's one I'd really like to add:
New Topographics Britt Salvesen (2026)❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ The concept of hyperobjects found me via Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World Timothy Morton (2013) (see my Kindle Notebook)
Atmosphere, Weather and Climate Roger Barry and Richard Chorley
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧
what Firefox thought the Page said on 29xii25, after a day of augmentation/editing:
