This reminds me of the debate in philosophy of mind between the "simulation theory" and the "theory theory" of folk psychology. The former (which I believe is more accepted currently — professional philosophers of mind correct me if I'm wrong) holds that people do not have mental models of other people, not even unconscious ones, and that we make folk-psychological predictions by "simulating" other people "in hardware", as it were.
It seems possible that people model animals similarly, by simulation. The computer-as-pet hypothesis suggests the same for computers. If this is the case, then it could be true that (some) humans literally have no mental models, conscious or unconscious, of computers.
If this were true, then what Kaj_Sotala said —
Literally not having a model about something would require knowing literally nothing about it
would be false.
Of course we could still think of a person as having an implicit mental model of a computer, even if they model it by simulation... but that is stretching the meaning, I think, and this is not the kind of model I referred to when I said most people have no mental models.
Simulations are models. They allow us to make predictions about how something behaves.
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.