A gears-level model represents the world via its individual components - its "gears", so to speak. It takes a high-dimensional system and breaks it up into low-dimensional subsystems which interact with each other.
Examples:
- We understand a physical gearbox, with lots of complicated clockwork, as interactions between behaviorally-simple individual gears.
- We understand complicated physical systems, from bridges to biological cells, as systems of relatively simple components, like girders or individual chemical reactions.
See also: - Reductionism [LINK]