Even if you only care about your map, you still care about your map as a part of the territory,
...a “territory” that exists only in your brain, since you cannot directly perceive or operate upon the real territory.
otherwise you make the next step and declare that you don’t care about state of your brain either, you only care about caring itself, at which point you disappear in a “puff!” of metaphysical confusion.
...and note too, that all of this modeling is taking place in a brain. When you point to something and label it “reality”, you are pointing to a portion of your map. It is not, and cannot be the actual territory. It doesn’t matter how many times you try to say, “but no, I mean real reality”, because the only thing you have to represent that idea with is your brain.
It is still the idea of reality, a model of reality, that exists in your map.
Yes, the map is represented physically within the territory. The map “runs on” a platform made of territory, just as “you” run on a platform made of map. All I am saying is, “you” cannot access the territory directly, because your platform is made of map, just as the map’s platform is made of territory. Everything we perceive or think or imagine is therefore map… including the portion of the map we refer to as the territory.
We want our preferences to point to the territory, but they cannot do so in actual reality. We have the illusion that they can, because we have the same representative freedom as an artist drawing a picture of hands drawing each other—we can easily represent paradoxical and unreal things within the surface of the map.
(I remember reading at one point a tutorial in General Semantics that illustrated this point much better than I am doing, but sadly I cannot seem to find it at the moment.)
We want our preferences to point to the territory, but they cannot do so in actual reality.
There’s a distinction to be made between the fact that our knowledge about whether our preferences are satisfied is map-bound and the assertion that our preferences only take the map into account.
...a “territory” that exists only in your brain, since you cannot directly perceive or operate upon the real territory.
...and note too, that all of this modeling is taking place in a brain. When you point to something and label it “reality”, you are pointing to a portion of your map. It is not, and cannot be the actual territory. It doesn’t matter how many times you try to say, “but no, I mean real reality”, because the only thing you have to represent that idea with is your brain.
It is still the idea of reality, a model of reality, that exists in your map.
Yes, the map is represented physically within the territory. The map “runs on” a platform made of territory, just as “you” run on a platform made of map. All I am saying is, “you” cannot access the territory directly, because your platform is made of map, just as the map’s platform is made of territory. Everything we perceive or think or imagine is therefore map… including the portion of the map we refer to as the territory.
We want our preferences to point to the territory, but they cannot do so in actual reality. We have the illusion that they can, because we have the same representative freedom as an artist drawing a picture of hands drawing each other—we can easily represent paradoxical and unreal things within the surface of the map.
(I remember reading at one point a tutorial in General Semantics that illustrated this point much better than I am doing, but sadly I cannot seem to find it at the moment.)
There’s a distinction to be made between the fact that our knowledge about whether our preferences are satisfied is map-bound and the assertion that our preferences only take the map into account.