This is an interesting take on the map-territory distinction, and I agree in part. Thinking about it now, my only issues with the correspondence theory of truth would be
that it might imply dualism, as you suggested, between a “map” partition of reality and a “territory” partition of reality, and
that it might imply that the territory is something that can be objectively “checked” against the map by some magical method that transcends the process of observation that produced the map in the first place.
These implications, however, seem to be artifacts of human psychology that can be corrected for. As for the metaphysical assumption of an objective, external physical world, I don’t see how you can really get around that.
It’s true that the only way we get any glimpse at the territory is through our sensory experiences. However, the map that we build in response to this experience carries information that sets a lower bound on the causal complexity of the territory that generates it.
Both the map and the territory are generative processes. The territory generates our sensory experiences, while the map (or rather, the circuitry in our brains) uses something analogous to Bayesian inference to build generative models whose dynamics are predictive of our experiences. In so doing, the map takes on a causal structure that is necessary to predict the hierarchical statistical regularities that it observes in the dynamics of its experiences.
This structure is what is supposed to correspond to the territory. The outputs of the two generative processes (the sensations coming from the territory and the predictions coming from the map) are how correspondence is checked, but they are not the processes themselves.
In other words, the sensory experiences you talked about are Bayesian evidence for the true structure of the territory that generates them, not the territory itself.
My reply here feels weird to me because I think you basically get my point, but you’re one inferential gap away from my perspective. I’ll see if I can close that gap.
It’s true that the only way we get any glimpse at the territory is through our sensory experiences. However, the map that we build in response to this experience carries information that sets a lower bound on the causal complexity of the territory that generates it.
We need not assume there is anything more than experience, though. Through experience we might infer the existence of some external reality that sense data is about (this is a realist perspective), and as you say this gives us evidence that perhaps the world really does have some structure external to our experience, but we need not assume it to be so.
This is perhaps a somewhat subtle distinction, but the point is to shift as much as possible from assumption to inference. If we take an arealist stance and do not assume realism, we may still come to infer it based on the evidence we collect. This is, arguably, better even if most of the time it doesn’t produce different results because now everything about external reality in our thinking exists firmly within our minds rather than outside of them where we can say nothing about them, and now we can make physical claims about the possibility of an external reality rather than metaphysical assumptions about an external reality.
This is perhaps a somewhat subtle distinction, but the point is to shift as much as possible from assumption to inference. If we take an arealist stance and do not assume realism, we may still come to infer it based on the evidence we collect.
I think I can agree with this.
One caveat would be to note that the brain’s map-making algorithm does make some implicit assumptions about the nature of the territory. For instance, it needs to assume that it’s modeling an actual generative process with hierarchical and cross-modal statistical regularities. It further assumes, based on what I understand about how the cortex learns, that the territory has things like translational equivariance and spatiotemporally local causality.
The cortex (and cerebellum, hippocampus, etc.) has built-in structural and dynamical priors that it tries to map its sensory experiences to, which limits the hypothesis space that it searches when it infers things about the territory. In other words, it makes assumptions.
On the other hand, it is a bit of a theme around here that we should be able to overcome such cognitive biases when trying to understand reality. I think you’re on the right track in trying to peel back the assumptions that evolution gave us (even the more seemingly rational ones like splitting map from territory) to ground our beliefs as solidly as possible.
This is an interesting take on the map-territory distinction, and I agree in part. Thinking about it now, my only issues with the correspondence theory of truth would be
that it might imply dualism, as you suggested, between a “map” partition of reality and a “territory” partition of reality, and
that it might imply that the territory is something that can be objectively “checked” against the map by some magical method that transcends the process of observation that produced the map in the first place.
These implications, however, seem to be artifacts of human psychology that can be corrected for. As for the metaphysical assumption of an objective, external physical world, I don’t see how you can really get around that.
It’s true that the only way we get any glimpse at the territory is through our sensory experiences. However, the map that we build in response to this experience carries information that sets a lower bound on the causal complexity of the territory that generates it.
Both the map and the territory are generative processes. The territory generates our sensory experiences, while the map (or rather, the circuitry in our brains) uses something analogous to Bayesian inference to build generative models whose dynamics are predictive of our experiences. In so doing, the map takes on a causal structure that is necessary to predict the hierarchical statistical regularities that it observes in the dynamics of its experiences.
This structure is what is supposed to correspond to the territory. The outputs of the two generative processes (the sensations coming from the territory and the predictions coming from the map) are how correspondence is checked, but they are not the processes themselves.
In other words, the sensory experiences you talked about are Bayesian evidence for the true structure of the territory that generates them, not the territory itself.
My reply here feels weird to me because I think you basically get my point, but you’re one inferential gap away from my perspective. I’ll see if I can close that gap.
We need not assume there is anything more than experience, though. Through experience we might infer the existence of some external reality that sense data is about (this is a realist perspective), and as you say this gives us evidence that perhaps the world really does have some structure external to our experience, but we need not assume it to be so.
This is perhaps a somewhat subtle distinction, but the point is to shift as much as possible from assumption to inference. If we take an arealist stance and do not assume realism, we may still come to infer it based on the evidence we collect. This is, arguably, better even if most of the time it doesn’t produce different results because now everything about external reality in our thinking exists firmly within our minds rather than outside of them where we can say nothing about them, and now we can make physical claims about the possibility of an external reality rather than metaphysical assumptions about an external reality.
I think I can agree with this.
One caveat would be to note that the brain’s map-making algorithm does make some implicit assumptions about the nature of the territory. For instance, it needs to assume that it’s modeling an actual generative process with hierarchical and cross-modal statistical regularities. It further assumes, based on what I understand about how the cortex learns, that the territory has things like translational equivariance and spatiotemporally local causality.
The cortex (and cerebellum, hippocampus, etc.) has built-in structural and dynamical priors that it tries to map its sensory experiences to, which limits the hypothesis space that it searches when it infers things about the territory. In other words, it makes assumptions.
On the other hand, it is a bit of a theme around here that we should be able to overcome such cognitive biases when trying to understand reality. I think you’re on the right track in trying to peel back the assumptions that evolution gave us (even the more seemingly rational ones like splitting map from territory) to ground our beliefs as solidly as possible.