Forrester's 5th Principle of System Dynamics: Quantification of unmeasured but important concepts and relationships.

'The system dynamics process starts from a problem to be solved - a situation that needs to be better understood, or an undesirable behavior that is to be corrected or avoided. The first step is to tap the wealth of information that people possess in their heads. The mental data base is a rich source of information about the parts of a system, about the information available at different points in a system, and about the policies being followed in decision making. The management and social sciences have in the past unduly restricted themselves to measured data and have neglected the far richer and more informative body of information that exists in the knowledge and experience of those in the active, working world.'
From: System Dynamics and the Lessons of 35 Years. Copyright (C) by Jay W. Forrester

Here is corroboration of Forrester's 5th principle from David J. Chalmers, a leader thinker in the emerging field of consciousness studies:
'There is an obvious problem that plagues the development of a theory of consciousness, and that is the paucity of objective data. Conscious experience is not directly observable in an experiemental context, so we cannot generate data about the relationship between physical processes and experience at will. Nevertheless, we all have access to a rich source of data in our own case. Many important regularities between experience and processing can be inferred from considerations about one's own experience. There are also good indirect sources of data from observable cases, as when one relies on the verbal report of a subject as an indication of experience. These methods have their limitations, but we have more than enough data to get a theory off the ground.'
From Chalmers' often quoted paper. For the full paper, please access his 1994 Tucson I paper.

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