I think the reason it took so long to discover “the map is not the territory” is that it is applied atheism. To a theist, the map in god’s mind caused the territory to happen, so that map is even more real than the territory. And every human map is as accurate as it approaches the primordial divine map (or Platonic Forms), the fact that it also happens to predict the terrain merely being a nice bonus. Even Einstein seems to have believed something like this.
To invent “the map is not the territory” you not only need to be an atheist, you need to be an experienced, confident atheist who can figure out what follows from it, and have balls/ovaries of steel to challenge about one and half millenia of quasi-Platonic intellectual tradition of philosophy and science which was about looking for the primordial map.
This becomes intuitively obvious if you think about something artificial, like a house. I make a design of a living room 4m by 5m accross and draw a blueprint. Based on this blueprint, a hundred houses are built, but as bricklayers are not surgically precise and kinda drunk, one house will have a 3.99m x 5.01m living room, another one 4.02m x 4.99m and so on. A century later the town crumbles and a thousand year after that archeologists try to dig it out. What are they going to do? Just measure every room and leave it at that, or rather consider these variously sized rooms are actually 4m x 5m rooms, just inaccurately built? Will they try to figure out the idea, the blueprint behind it, the primordial map that created the terrain? The 4m x 5m map they themselves draw will not be accurate to the terrain, but it is the terrain that they will consider inaccurately implemented, not the map, they will think they have found the primordial map, blueprint, that was inaccurately followed (correctly). And that is largely how theistic science worked. We assumed there is a primordial map. We assumed reality has a blueprint, and we tried to find the blueprint, not simply figuring out reality. Saying the map is not the terrain is another way of saying there is no primordial blueprint, no creator god.
However, I don’t think it took atheism to get to “the map is not the territory”. I think it’s just difficult for people to realize that their thoughts are a very incomplete description of the world—the stuff in your head feels so plausible.
Why do you think it was not necessary for it? To me it is the discovery vs. invention problem. With theism truths are made by discovery, truth is the information that is closest to the priomordial information of the thoughts of the creator, the primordial blueprint. Without theism, truths are simply models, tools, handy little gadgets used for prediction and invented, not discovered.
It’s not only about god. Humans have direct immediate access to the contents of their own maps, while all information about the territory is suspect because it comes through the unreliable senses. This can easily lead a wannabe philosopher to stop trusting their senses and treat their own mind as a trustworthy separate magisterium (because they have a separate access to its contents).
Attributing the same thing to god is merely a patch to the problem of “my mind (but not yours) is special to me, your mind (but not mine) is special to you, but speaking objectively, maybe minds really are not special at all”. You can avoid this conclusion by making a logical jump to “well, it’s the God’s mind that is really really special!”
But this does not actually address the essence of the problem, which is that my (human) mind is not special, and… well, the whole chain of thought was started by the assumption that it was. So when we know the original idea was wrong, why follow the chain at all?
(Funny thing is, living things are built from DNA blueprints like you described, so that means that ironically evolution is the only place where the idealistic approach is kinda correct. The only problem is that the blueprints themselves are also subject to change.)
If I remember correctly, it was Dawkins who argued that DNA is not a blueprint in a strict sense, but rather a recipe, in the sense that just by looking at the genes you can predict which phenotypes they will produce, but the process requires specific sequences of steps and on/off switching of genes, with the result that just by looking at the phenotype you cannot deduce what the genes looked like.
Yes. That was an oversimplification. In reality, what exactly will the DNA produce depends on… many things, probably even including small changes in temperature.
But maps of maps are supposed to be potentially 100% accurate i.e. being copies of each other? Are you saying lossless copying is not possible through the senses?
But maps of maps are supposed to be potentially 100% accurate i.e. being copies of each other?
If I read text and as a result neurons in my brain fire those two maps of ideas aren’t identical copies of each other. Translating from one medium into another isn’t loseless.
More fundamentally the point is that consciousness of abstraction isn’t only important when you go from x to m(x) but also when you go from m(x) to n(m(x)).
“consciousness of abstraction” is a term from Alfred Korzybski Science and Sanity which coined “the map is not the territory”.
An important part of sanity is to be conscious about the abstraction on which one operates.
As a computer programmer you might have a lot of levels:
Specification for the software, Scala code, Java Code, Assembler Code, Machine Code, the actual execution of the code.
If you ask a question such as “did autism increase in the last three decades” it’s important to be conscious of what abstraction of autisms you are thinking about. There the number of autism diagnosis done by doctors. There an official definition of what autism happens to be. There’s also a physical state of brains that corresponds to autism.
Consciousness of abstraction is also important when talking about things like inflation or unemployement.
Official inflation numbers is a map of a more abstract inflation concept. Different countries measure their inflation slightly differently.
Maybe it is worth repeating here:
I think the reason it took so long to discover “the map is not the territory” is that it is applied atheism. To a theist, the map in god’s mind caused the territory to happen, so that map is even more real than the territory. And every human map is as accurate as it approaches the primordial divine map (or Platonic Forms), the fact that it also happens to predict the terrain merely being a nice bonus. Even Einstein seems to have believed something like this.
To invent “the map is not the territory” you not only need to be an atheist, you need to be an experienced, confident atheist who can figure out what follows from it, and have balls/ovaries of steel to challenge about one and half millenia of quasi-Platonic intellectual tradition of philosophy and science which was about looking for the primordial map.
This becomes intuitively obvious if you think about something artificial, like a house. I make a design of a living room 4m by 5m accross and draw a blueprint. Based on this blueprint, a hundred houses are built, but as bricklayers are not surgically precise and kinda drunk, one house will have a 3.99m x 5.01m living room, another one 4.02m x 4.99m and so on. A century later the town crumbles and a thousand year after that archeologists try to dig it out. What are they going to do? Just measure every room and leave it at that, or rather consider these variously sized rooms are actually 4m x 5m rooms, just inaccurately built? Will they try to figure out the idea, the blueprint behind it, the primordial map that created the terrain? The 4m x 5m map they themselves draw will not be accurate to the terrain, but it is the terrain that they will consider inaccurately implemented, not the map, they will think they have found the primordial map, blueprint, that was inaccurately followed (correctly). And that is largely how theistic science worked. We assumed there is a primordial map. We assumed reality has a blueprint, and we tried to find the blueprint, not simply figuring out reality. Saying the map is not the terrain is another way of saying there is no primordial blueprint, no creator god.
This is why it took so long IMHO.
I think you’d like Why We Keep Asking “Was Machiavelli an Atheist?”, about how really hard and slow the path to atheism was.
However, I don’t think it took atheism to get to “the map is not the territory”. I think it’s just difficult for people to realize that their thoughts are a very incomplete description of the world—the stuff in your head feels so plausible.
Why do you think it was not necessary for it? To me it is the discovery vs. invention problem. With theism truths are made by discovery, truth is the information that is closest to the priomordial information of the thoughts of the creator, the primordial blueprint. Without theism, truths are simply models, tools, handy little gadgets used for prediction and invented, not discovered.
There’s a tradition which focuses on God being unknowable, so I think people who believed that could think that human maps are not the territory.
It’s not only about god. Humans have direct immediate access to the contents of their own maps, while all information about the territory is suspect because it comes through the unreliable senses. This can easily lead a wannabe philosopher to stop trusting their senses and treat their own mind as a trustworthy separate magisterium (because they have a separate access to its contents).
Attributing the same thing to god is merely a patch to the problem of “my mind (but not yours) is special to me, your mind (but not mine) is special to you, but speaking objectively, maybe minds really are not special at all”. You can avoid this conclusion by making a logical jump to “well, it’s the God’s mind that is really really special!”
But this does not actually address the essence of the problem, which is that my (human) mind is not special, and… well, the whole chain of thought was started by the assumption that it was. So when we know the original idea was wrong, why follow the chain at all?
(Funny thing is, living things are built from DNA blueprints like you described, so that means that ironically evolution is the only place where the idealistic approach is kinda correct. The only problem is that the blueprints themselves are also subject to change.)
If I remember correctly, it was Dawkins who argued that DNA is not a blueprint in a strict sense, but rather a recipe, in the sense that just by looking at the genes you can predict which phenotypes they will produce, but the process requires specific sequences of steps and on/off switching of genes, with the result that just by looking at the phenotype you cannot deduce what the genes looked like.
Yes. That was an oversimplification. In reality, what exactly will the DNA produce depends on… many things, probably even including small changes in temperature.
Even if such a map would exist we could only have a map of that map in our head.
Even today a lot of physicist use “natural law” in a way where they aren’t clear about map/territory distinctions.
But maps of maps are supposed to be potentially 100% accurate i.e. being copies of each other? Are you saying lossless copying is not possible through the senses?
If I read text and as a result neurons in my brain fire those two maps of ideas aren’t identical copies of each other. Translating from one medium into another isn’t loseless.
More fundamentally the point is that consciousness of abstraction isn’t only important when you go from x to m(x) but also when you go from m(x) to n(m(x)). “consciousness of abstraction” is a term from Alfred Korzybski Science and Sanity which coined “the map is not the territory”. An important part of sanity is to be conscious about the abstraction on which one operates.
As a computer programmer you might have a lot of levels:
Specification for the software, Scala code, Java Code, Assembler Code, Machine Code, the actual execution of the code.
If you ask a question such as “did autism increase in the last three decades” it’s important to be conscious of what abstraction of autisms you are thinking about. There the number of autism diagnosis done by doctors. There an official definition of what autism happens to be. There’s also a physical state of brains that corresponds to autism.
Consciousness of abstraction is also important when talking about things like inflation or unemployement. Official inflation numbers is a map of a more abstract inflation concept. Different countries measure their inflation slightly differently.