Even “territory” in “map vs. territory” is actually a map embedded in… something. (“The referent of ‘territory’”, although saying it this way just recurses the problem.
This recursion itself is the artifact of the fact that we can comprehend territory only through maps. And it exists only in our map, not in the territory. Try reasoning on a fixed level, carefully noticing which elements are part of a map and which are part of a territory for this level. And then you can generalise this reasoning for every level of recursion.
Like reference itself is a more fundamental reality
I think you did a wrong turn here. By “reference” do you mean the ability of a map to correspond to a territory?
Territory is just a lot of fundamentals. The properties of these fundamentals turned out to allow specific configurantions of fundamentals that we call “brains” to arrange themselves in patterns that we call “having a map of a territory”. Which properties of the fundamentals exactly do allow it? - is an interesting question which we do not know the answer yet. We can speculate in terms of laws of physics that are part of our map - probably has something to do with “locality”. Likewise, we can’t exactly specify the principle of what it means to “be a brain” or “have a map representing a territory” in terms of configurations of fundamentals. But we can understand the principle that every referent of our map is some configuration of fundamentals.
This recursion itself is the artifact of the fact that we can comprehend territory only through maps. And it exists only in our map, not in the territory. Try reasoning on a fixed level, carefully noticing which elements are part of a map and which are part of a territory for this level. And then you can generalise this reasoning for every level of recursion.
I think you did a wrong turn here. By “reference” do you mean the ability of a map to correspond to a territory?
Territory is just a lot of fundamentals. The properties of these fundamentals turned out to allow specific configurantions of fundamentals that we call “brains” to arrange themselves in patterns that we call “having a map of a territory”. Which properties of the fundamentals exactly do allow it? - is an interesting question which we do not know the answer yet. We can speculate in terms of laws of physics that are part of our map - probably has something to do with “locality”. Likewise, we can’t exactly specify the principle of what it means to “be a brain” or “have a map representing a territory” in terms of configurations of fundamentals. But we can understand the principle that every referent of our map is some configuration of fundamentals.