[rileyphone]

I'm reading Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems right now which I think is a good overview of this line of reasoning. Of course models are idealized, but they're also one of the best ways to understand complex systems. The human brain does something very similar in forming intuitions about the world, but we should recognize that in order to make a better model we will have to make one in silico. Another interesting approach is agent-based modeling, which explores how the decisions of agents with limited information can create emergent patterns.