When an image you are looking at is altered due to viewing it through a pane of coloured glass, you don’t suddenly start calling it “the map” instead of “the territory.”
So why is it, when it passes through our eyes and brain it suddenly becomes “the map,” when the brain is made of the same fundamental stuff (quarks etc.) as the glass?
The image that you see contains far less information than the original actual stuff that makes up the original “image and coloured glass” objects that exist in front of you. That is why the image in your head is map, not territory.
You also have “territory” that makes up your head… but that doesn’t mean that everything represented inside you little piece of territory is also territory.
After all, you can store a map in your glovebox. Does the glovebox turn a map of England into England itself, simply because a glovebox is part of the territory?
I would say that the stuff making up “the map” is not stuff inside the brain. Instead, it is stuff inside the mind, and the mind is “emergent from” the brain (or, if you prefer, the mind “reduces to” the brain).
The neurons in the brain reduce (through several levels) to brain quarks. The map ideas in the mind also reduce to brain quarks, but they do so in an odd way. I choose to label that kind of oddness “emergence”, but the local powers-that-be seem to disapprove of this terminology.
When an image you are looking at is altered due to viewing it through a pane of coloured glass, you don’t suddenly start calling it “the map” instead of “the territory.”
So why is it, when it passes through our eyes and brain it suddenly becomes “the map,” when the brain is made of the same fundamental stuff (quarks etc.) as the glass?
The image that you see contains far less information than the original actual stuff that makes up the original “image and coloured glass” objects that exist in front of you. That is why the image in your head is map, not territory.
You also have “territory” that makes up your head… but that doesn’t mean that everything represented inside you little piece of territory is also territory.
After all, you can store a map in your glovebox. Does the glovebox turn a map of England into England itself, simply because a glovebox is part of the territory?
I would say that the stuff making up “the map” is not stuff inside the brain. Instead, it is stuff inside the mind, and the mind is “emergent from” the brain (or, if you prefer, the mind “reduces to” the brain).
The neurons in the brain reduce (through several levels) to brain quarks. The map ideas in the mind also reduce to brain quarks, but they do so in an odd way. I choose to label that kind of oddness “emergence”, but the local powers-that-be seem to disapprove of this terminology.