Model Cognition

A Philosophy of Human Cognition Reasoned from a Coffee Cup

By: Tim Tang

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Paperback | 15 August 2026

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What if the world you trust is partly made by your own mind?

Model Cognition begins with a simple coffee cup. Look at it, close your eyes, and try to hold it in your mind. What remains is not the cup itself, but a model: partial, useful, and strangely convincing.

From that small experiment, Tim Tang develops a philosophy of human cognition that reaches into memory, learning, judgment, intimacy, shared reality, power, organizational decline, and artificial intelligence.

We never possess reality whole. We select, weigh, exaggerate, compress, project, and fill in what is missing. These models allow us to act, love, cooperate, and build civilizations. They also make us mistake our own mental versions for the world itself.

The question is not whether we can live without models. We cannot. The question is whether we can remain clear enough to let reality correct them.

Lucid, direct, and deeply human, Model Cognition is a book about how we see, how we misunderstand, and how we might stay awake inside the models we inevitably create.

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