We all have an internal mental model, which is in large part what our mind or inner mentality/self-experience consists of. Visually-sensorily speaking at least, but philosophers and other intelligent people move beyond the basic level of emulating/modeling sensations and are also modeling concepts, ideas, facts, truth, etc. AND in addition the best thinkers will have multiple simulations running at once with direct and indirect comparison-contrast occurring between them in real time.
This is what it means to think, or at least what it means to think well. Even the most simple thinking is modeling-comparison in real time between, for example, a word and its meaning (or rather, a word and a particular segment of its meaning). We hold both modeled things in our minds as immediate self-experience and the comparison-contrast between them generates the actual understanding, which understanding goes on to form a building block of our consciousness in that moment and going forward in time in so far as these experiences accumulate as memory.
Naive people (most people) don’t know they are doing this, and sometimes will say stupid things such as ask you to prove some idea to them when the idea and its accuracy are immediately apparent if the person would simply think about it. Yet they can’t just think about it, or rather they won’t do so because despite this being their actual method of self-experiencing consciousness the method is stuck in low gear on the sensory level only. They have yet to elevate inner mental modeling to concepts and facts let alone to the increasingly complex and dependent-derivative iterations of those. Let alone to have multiple modelings going on simultaneously to generate emergent comparison-contrasts as ‘images’ which immediacy of inner self-experience produces not only understanding but, over time and with effort of correct thinking, knowledge.
This also explains the mystery of why a person who is much more intelligent than another person is able to effectively read the mind of that other person, even without knowing it. The lesser mind can be more easily emulated in a mental model inside the larger mind. This is certainly the case with regard to limited purviews, when the conversation or situation in question is highly defined and confined in meaning-space. In such instances the person with the lesser mind simply cannot fathom how the other person has guessed and intuited them out so perfectly and quickly, with only a few clues as it were being able to recreate their lesser mind and run it forward and backward in real time to see exactly what sort of results it produces given which various combinations of inputs. This is why such a lesser mind cannot effectively fake or cover up things once they realize some part of themselves has been revealed to the other person. They will certainly adopt a mannerism or set of responses aimed at trying to counteract the effects of the realization and set things back into what they deem their control-space, however to a far greater mind these efforts are entirely transparent. Yet being such a far greater mind, that other person will more than likely just smile and say nothing. Humility and deference co-exist alongside compassion or at least sympathetic understanding and the realization there is little to be gained by rubbing it in their face. Destruction is easy, creative construction is much more challenging and rewarding. Even that aside, in most cases it simply isn’t worth the effort and momentary situational annoyance to bother pointing out or deconstructing their silly fictive narratives and desperate dissimulations.
[-o< [-o< 
