On "Maps" as Maybe the Best Metaphor For Our Knowledge?

I was talking with a friend of a friend about GPS devices and I said I didn't have one. He didn't either. I said I like the challenge of getting lost (my sense of direction in non-familiar environments seems sub-optimal) and trying to "figure it out." We both still carry road-maps in our cars. About GPS systems: Apparently they're getting smaller, cheaper, more portable, and are causing trouble with not only the cops "illegally" tracking someone, but citizens are using them to spy on each other. (But of course...)

(I've already digressed?)

I still use road maps in my car. I love maps of all kinds. They fire my imagination.

"The map is not the territory." - Korzybski, who apparently annoyed certain segments of the cognoscenti by repeating something so obvious. (But is the phrase so obvious when looked at from from the angle of personal knowledge? Human behavior? Our own neuroses?)

Robert Anton Wilson, elaborating on Korzybski's famous riff, reminded us that for a map to actually "be" the territory it would:

• Have to be as big as the territory
• Have to show every inhabitant, including animals, plants, and microbes
• Give an account of every change, which it cannot do: maps are inherently frozen in time

In a fragment by Borges, "On Exactitude In Science," the cartographers of the Empire zealously mapped the entire Empire, point-by-point. The map of the Empire was as big as the Empire: what a pain in the ass. Eventually, they realized the uselessness and "pitilessness" of such a venture.

In reading a collection of articles on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th edition (AKA: the DSM-V), I became ever more aware that Big Pharma had succeeded in making more behaviors "diseases" that could be treated by drugs, while things like "homosexuality" had been taken out of earlier versions of the book. Psychiatrists apparently listen to their patients, and if they don't "know" enough about what drug to prescribe - what they decode as a specific set of mental symptoms - they consult the DSM-V. But it's only a "map" of human complaints and hypotheses and theories and ideologies about what might help "remedy" the patient's unhappiness.

Here's where I think Korzybski's "map" metaphor is still underrated. Practically all of our knowledge "is" "maps". Certainly all of our books are maps. Even "fiction" books. (I welcome a spirited disagreement in the comments!)

                                                                               metaphor

Veteran Korzybski scholar Robert Pula:

By "maps" [in the korzybskian sense] we should understand everything and anything that humans formulate...including (to take a few in alphabetical order), biology, Buddhism, Catholicism, chemistry, Evangelism, Freudianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Lutheranism, physics, Taoism, etc, etc,...!"
-Preface to the 5th ed. of Science and Sanity, 1994, p. xvii

This entire blog - any blog you read - mostly consists of maps, or maps of maps, or maps of maps of maps, etc. And what of it? Are we still sub- and/or un-consciously looking for Someone with The Truth? (What we want is "more of the truth," no?)

What truths do we want most for ourselves? How to go about it? When do we know we're on the "best" or one of the better trails?

Computer scientist Alan Kay, on "science":

Science is a relationship between what we can represent and think about and what's actually "out there"; it's an extension of good map making..."
-p.118 What We Believe But Can't Prove (ed. John Brockman)

Kay appreciates Korzybski. Here's Blake Victor Seidenshaw on Alan Kay on Alfred Korzybski (or a map of a map of a map?):

I enjoyed Alan Kay's perceptive comments about the irony of the Korzybskian "null-A," since the "null" is itself an Aristotelian operator! Alan mentioned that he thought Korzybski himself probably would have found this hilarious, since he had obviously never intended to do away with Aristotelian logic entirely. This is an important, if obvious point: if you think about it, as Korzybski certainly did, we cannot logically - intellectually - do away with classical logic; the very attempt to do so would precisely reproduce it. This amounts to an excellent paradox; it is literally unthinkable.
-ETC: A Review of General Semantics; vol.67; no.1, January 2010, p.3

With Robert Anton Wilson, "The word is not the thing" being called Korzybksi's First Law, the 2nd Law is "The map is not the territory." Aside from the philosophical zombies and the possibility I'm a brain in a vat imagining/hallucinating my "reality" (or the recent lysergic philosophical idea that we're probably Sims created by more advanced beings from Elsewhere, although, with this last, on some level, so effing what?), there seems to be a booming, buzzing confusion of a pre-verbal world "out there." Once we note it and begin to make sense of it we're abstracting/making a "map" of "reality" in our nervous system. (I think that guy is going to make a left-hand turn...why can't he use his turn indicator?: This forms part of your own mental map of "driving" or "other drivers", etc)

It seems there might exist some exceptions to this? Maybe. How about when maps are part of the territory? When I'm teaching a class and I talk about how "maps" work, am I not using maps as part of the territory about representation from within a teaching framework?

[...Or does this constitute a Strange Loop? Can I JOOTS (jump outside of the system- Douglas Hofstadter) and aver the teacher is using his knowledge (map) to talk about how maps work, putting teacher in a larger set/system of "reality" of map-users and map-makers? Just asking for a friend...]

Well, as we saw in my prior OG-spew, many Serious Thinkers thought Korzybski "nutty" and gave plenty of snarl words and "reasons" why. I'm not buying. Korzybski was weird, but also: pretty damned genius, in my opinion. Here's a passage from deep in modern cognitive neurolinguistics:

(The author has spent 190+ pages addressing neurons, how they fire, how the nervous system of humans make neural circuits based on embodied being-in-the-world, and how conceptual schemes arise, allowing us to categorize our experiences and understand the world. - OG):

How do people learn the concepts and language covering rich array of cultural frames such as baseball, marriage, and politics? In particular, what does the embodied NTL [Neural Theory of Language - OG] have to say about learning and using the language of cultural discourse? 

The answer is metaphor. Metaphor in general refers to understanding one domain in terms of another...The NTL approach suggests that all of our cultural frames derive their meanings from metaphorical mappings to the embodied experience represented in primary conceptual schemas. 
-p.194, From Molecule To Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language, Jerome A. Feldman (2006)

Now: you're an embodied human reading and abstracting from what I've written here. You're making sense of it in the best way you can for right now. (I am trying to do this, as you read and breathe.) Feldman is reporting on not only his own work, but the work of hundreds of other cognitive scientists and others. He's trying his best - presumably - to get us to understand this exciting set of ideas. And, as I abstract from this, it's all about "metaphorical mappings."

We are attracted to people who make really interesting maps. A lot of the time we call these people "artists" or "inventors." We love them because they help us make our own maps richer in detail.

If you accept the idea in the title for this blog-spew, what other sorts of metaphors exist but maps? Metaphors here "are" maps. Maps are metaphors, by a process of algebraic thinking.

Where might I have gone wrong here?

                                            artaĵo por Bobby Campbell

A Drift on Dreams

As some sort of mystic-model-agnostic non-monotheistic lover of science and as a reader of literature ("licher-choor" in Ezra Pound-speak), and a plenum of pamphlets/manifestos/crank-and-kook broadsides and all "religious" phenomena and junk mail...just as you too are (roughly?): dreams never fail to elude the interests of my imagination. Of that a few words before one of us goes off to Slumber-Land, the land of multiple cartoonish zzzzzzzzs.

Some writers I admire have talked about the value of writing down dreams as soon as you can, in order to incorporate the material in some way. William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson come to mind. (The former even used a device called a Dream Machine while "awake" to simulate a dream-state; the latter gave interviews in which he said he kept a dream journal, and I even think he wrote about it in his Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1, but no one I know has seen this/these journals, if indeed they are extant. RAW died in early 2007.) 


James Joyce wrote an entire novel in his own invented dream-language. (Of that, more some other time.)


What I've found difficult is turning on enough light to grab a pen with paper, getting down enough details before the dream traces melt away into the voidstream, all without incurring a chronic insomnia. Guys like Burroughs had to be committed to the dream-thing, and it looks to me like it paid off big-time.
 --------------------------
I've habitually logged/diarized/journaled every day since September of 1989, so there are scads of "last dream of the night"s logged in those spiral-bound notebooks. I've recorded my dreams, when I could, not for use in a novel (I have never written one), but simply for my own kicks. You know that last one? The one right before waking? Somnologists looking into the oneiric say EEGs tell us that for most folks the longest dream of the night is that last one before waking. The tell-tale waves are right there on the graph. Your had REM, you shouted out "cookie!," QED.

Sometimes I can only recall fleeting bits. Here's one I had from three nights ago, as I wrote it down upon waking:

"Rainy, dark day and yet I'm out gardening. Someone with a dry hacking cough in the distance on a quiet day, quiet rain. A single jewish mother I don't know asks for directions. Jeff (my dead younger brother) and the blond straight-haired guitar student of long ago who really looked up to me. I could fly - literally - but he couldn't. I kept trying to help him. Too easy to read this dream."

Okay, maybe it's not interesting to you, but that was one that actually gave me some insight. With that one I applied the Jungian thing where you assume every person in the dream is yourself, even though my dead brother and the student were real people. I have no idea who the jewish mother was, or how I knew she was single (or jewish, for that matter), or how she got into my backyard. Anyway...
 -------------------
"I believe it to be true that dreams are the true interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them." That's Montaigne, in the late 1500s, in one of his delightful Essays. And since Joseph and his psychedelic dream-coat that his dad gave him in the OT - and earlier, no doubt - we have and probably will continue to seek to read into our dreams for the numinous, or whether mommy really loved us, or whatever. This despite some compelling scientific approaches to dreams, fMRI machines and sleep studies, etc. (I'm thinking of the work of Allan Hobson, and G. William Domhoff and few others.)

This "reading"of ours and others' dreams: I consider it a time-honored aspect of the Poetic Faculty of us, homo sap. I'm "conservative" enough to say, yes, give us the latest science on dreams, but exercising our Poetic Faculty is a blast. I'll take both approaches, and some chewing gum, that girly magazine over there, a bottle of Old Harper...

[What? You're still awake?]

Here's Jerome Feldman, a cognitive scientist at Berkeley, in his wonderful and recent book:

"There is general agreement and considerable evidence that dreaming is important in consolidating memory and involves simulating experiences." - p.80 of Feldman's  From Molecule To Metaphor


Now, I think that's probably "right," but I will go on being overly intrigued by the sheer oddness of my dreams. Why? 'Cuz I wanna, that's why! I see a value in it. I ain't a-hurtin' no one!

Another scientist at Berkeley, Jack Gallant, has been working on a machine that could reproduce dreams. I read that in a science article one desultory day not long ago, and jotted his name down. Sounds impossible and/or ridiculous? Maybe? Here's something on Gallant and his work as of 2008.

I guess Gallant and his team have dared to dream the impossible dream-reading machine. Guys like that can't help but do that stuff, and we can all quickly imagine - on an absurdist level - yet further possible invasions of what we so laffingly used to call "privacy."

But I also hope it yields some good Art.

Finally, I note that the late great Professor George Carlin, in his riveting Napalm and Silly Putty, wondered if movie directors had credits at the end of their dreams.


ZZZZZ?!?!?!?ZZZZZZZZZZ????!?ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????zzz