Isn’t the most important feature of an “internal map” that it is a conceptual and subjective thing, and not a physical thing? Obviously this smacks of dualism, but that’s the price we pay for being able to communicate at all.
Any part of reality very likely corresponds with other parts of reality (to the extent that it makes sense to divide reality into parts), but that doesn’t imbue them with knowledge, because they’re the wrong abstraction level of thing to be maps and so their correspondence doesn’t count.
Like any other abstraction, internal maps are fuzzy around the edges. We know of some things that we definitely call maps (in the sense of “correspondence between map and territory”), such as hand-waving at some aspects of whatever commonalities there are between humans when thinking about the world. This concept also seems to be applicable to behaviours of some other animals. We often ascribe internal maps to behaviour of some computer programs too. We ascribe maps to lots of classes of imaginary things. It seems that we do this for most things where we can identify some sensory input, some sort of information store, and some repertoire of actions that appear to be based on both.
We can talk metaphorically about physical objects conveying knowledge, with the help of some implied maps. For example, we may have some set of agents in mind that we expect to be able to use the physical object to update their maps to better match whatever aspects of territory we have in mind. With some shared reference class we can then talk about which objects are better by various metrics at conveying knowledge.
I do think it is is true that in principle “there is no objective difference between a book containing a painstakingly accurate account of a particular battle, and another book of carelessly assembled just-so stories about the same battle” (emphasis mine). With sufficiently bizarre coincidence of contexts, they could even be objectively identical objects. We can in practice say that in some expected class of agents (say, people from the writer’s culture who are capable of reading) interacting in expected ways (like reading it instead of burning it for heat), the former will almost certainly convey more knowledge about the battle than the latter.
Isn’t the most important feature of an “internal map” that it is a conceptual and subjective thing, and not a physical thing? Obviously this smacks of dualism, but that’s the price we pay for being able to communicate at all.
And yet such an “internal” thing must have some manifestation embedded within the physical world. However it is often a useful abstraction to ignore the physical details of how information is created and stored.
I do think it is is true that in principle “there is no objective difference between a book containing a painstakingly accurate account of a particular battle, and another book of carelessly assembled just-so stories about the same battle” (emphasis mine). With sufficiently bizarre coincidence of contexts, they could even be objectively identical objects. We can in practice say that in some expected class of agents (say, people from the writer’s culture who are capable of reading) interacting in expected ways (like reading it instead of burning it for heat), the former will almost certainly convey more knowledge about the battle than the latter.
I don’t think in the context of this discussion that it does beg the question.
The point I was discussing was whether we really mean the same thing by “knowledge in a book” and “knowledge known by an agent”. My argument is that the phrase “knowledge in a book” is just a notational shorthand for “knowledge some implied agents can be expected to gain from it”.
If this is a reasonable position, then “knowledge in an object” is not a property of the object itself. Examining how it is present there is making a probably erroneous assumption that it is there to be found at all.
The question does remain about how knowledge is represented in agents, and I think that is the much more interesting and fruitful meat of the question.
Isn’t the most important feature of an “internal map” that it is a conceptual and subjective thing, and not a physical thing? Obviously this smacks of dualism, but that’s the price we pay for being able to communicate at all.
Any part of reality very likely corresponds with other parts of reality (to the extent that it makes sense to divide reality into parts), but that doesn’t imbue them with knowledge, because they’re the wrong abstraction level of thing to be maps and so their correspondence doesn’t count.
Like any other abstraction, internal maps are fuzzy around the edges. We know of some things that we definitely call maps (in the sense of “correspondence between map and territory”), such as hand-waving at some aspects of whatever commonalities there are between humans when thinking about the world. This concept also seems to be applicable to behaviours of some other animals. We often ascribe internal maps to behaviour of some computer programs too. We ascribe maps to lots of classes of imaginary things. It seems that we do this for most things where we can identify some sensory input, some sort of information store, and some repertoire of actions that appear to be based on both.
We can talk metaphorically about physical objects conveying knowledge, with the help of some implied maps. For example, we may have some set of agents in mind that we expect to be able to use the physical object to update their maps to better match whatever aspects of territory we have in mind. With some shared reference class we can then talk about which objects are better by various metrics at conveying knowledge.
I do think it is is true that in principle “there is no objective difference between a book containing a painstakingly accurate account of a particular battle, and another book of carelessly assembled just-so stories about the same battle” (emphasis mine). With sufficiently bizarre coincidence of contexts, they could even be objectively identical objects. We can in practice say that in some expected class of agents (say, people from the writer’s culture who are capable of reading) interacting in expected ways (like reading it instead of burning it for heat), the former will almost certainly convey more knowledge about the battle than the latter.
And yet such an “internal” thing must have some manifestation embedded within the physical world. However it is often a useful abstraction to ignore the physical details of how information is created and stored.
I think this begs the question of just what knowledge is.
I don’t think in the context of this discussion that it does beg the question.
The point I was discussing was whether we really mean the same thing by “knowledge in a book” and “knowledge known by an agent”. My argument is that the phrase “knowledge in a book” is just a notational shorthand for “knowledge some implied agents can be expected to gain from it”.
If this is a reasonable position, then “knowledge in an object” is not a property of the object itself. Examining how it is present there is making a probably erroneous assumption that it is there to be found at all.
The question does remain about how knowledge is represented in agents, and I think that is the much more interesting and fruitful meat of the question.