Page updated 28/01/2019

My approach to examining Humanism was to start at the beginning and look at the basics. This meant re-visiting many ideas and models I had developed over the years and checking to see if they still held up. I gathered a lot of new information from the web – mainly from the philosophers and scientists. This approach to questioning everything and starting at the basics is a method of analysis I have used many times in my working career. It also seems to be a method used by some of the famous thinkers. I had not seriously looked at philosophy previously and the last few years research into that has been interesting. I need to make sure the basic frames are solid before moving to more complex humanist frames.

Frames, mental models and schemas are ways humans look at the world. They are a natural extension of language, grouping and ordering techniques that our brain can use to make sense of the world.

Frameworks are usually deliberately designed and planned to focus on specific characteristics of a human issue. For example a frame for looking at buying a house might consist of only the characteristics of money, number of bedrooms and location. A well designed frame can help focus on the key issues and eliminate enormous amount of complexity.

Our ability to store complex information in related ways in our brains produces mental models which can contain diverse information – feelings, memory, abstractions, options, choices and unknown. We can manipulate and change our mental models

Humans develop schemas or patterns of behavior which help reduce complexity and simplify tasks

I will explore some frames at high levels to see if there are some robust high level frames suitable for examining humanism