More MT Noodling
The most general overarching theme of my philosophical speculations is:
THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY, EXCEPT WHEN IT IS.
The hedging here is absolutely fundamental. That is, I'm not just being wishy-washy. The relationship between what is and what we can say about what is seems like it should be straightforward, but it isn't. It's recursive, mysterious, invertedly self-referential (like x=-1/x) and, I think, unresolvable...except when it is.
In theory, when we apply logic to our most basic Western assumptions about the nature of reality (which includes the legitimacy of logic itself), we must conclude that the territories and their corresponding maps ought to live in very separate realms. On the other hand, in everyday practice, we act as if there is no distinction between our explanations, on the one hand, and truths about reality on the other. That's quite a gap, and, I propose, neither point of view -- independence nor correspondence -- is remotely the case.
Presumably, we are animals who evolved words as tokens for objects in order to communicate and to reason. One tongue click means look here, a rolling r sound expresses horniness, a double grunt means hunger, etc. And grammars evolved to string these tokens together to create and/or express something we might reasonably consider a thought. How does such a thing lead to the Ten Commandments or a love sonnet or Newton's law of gravitation, let alone the certainty of a mathematical theorem? The mind boggles at all the leaps of complexity and deep ontological connection required to get from such a start to where language and culture and Knowledge are now. From the inside, it's very hard to tell; We are truly beguiled by the apparent validity of the things we say. Either our explanations are right or some other better explanations are. But, in fact, there's no a priori reason to think the world is susceptible to such linguistic or theoretical reduction. What would it mean if it were? Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and grammar have no correlates in the world an sich, unless God made it so. Theories simply can't be true in the way we'd like to think they are. Still, they work so darn well... They satisfy us. Maybe our modern conception of, say, weather is no more satisfying to us than our earlier ideas that the gods were angry or sad or happy, but that seemingly doesn't detract from our current level of satisfaction.
"It's more than a half mile walk from the door of the train station to the door of the Surinamese restaurant" no problem
"The apple fell because of gravity" big problem
The map-territory distinction isn't as significant for factual descriptions (like walking distances) as it is for explanations (like scientific theories). Things don't happen because of their explanations. Apples don't fall because of the law of gravitation or even because of gravity itself. Gravity is what we call phenomena like the falling of apples. And the law of gravity is a way of making sense of that appellation(!).
We might say that the apple fails to Earth because of gravity, but that's a confusion of the map for the territory. Gravity isn't the reason we don't float off into space; it's a way for us to distinguish between the contrafactual and the factual.
We might feel that the perfect simulation of reality which we might someday be able to construct from computers programmed with the laws of nature is as real as nature itself, but no simulation can create actual gravity (or any other physical phenomena). We wouldn't injure ourselves by falling in the simulation.
I'm stuck in the same place I always am. In trying to explain what's wrong with the idea of explanation, I'm caught in a self-referential maelstrom that careens between tautology and paradox. I can wave and point, but the fish can't explain what water is (until perhaps it's flailing and dying on the dock). We who are chained to the cave watching the shadows cast on the wall can't tell they are just shadows until we are somehow liberated from the cave (flailing and dying).
In the last few years, I've started to feel that a dim sort of light can be shed on the situation by contrasting statistical knowledge to that attained or understood through explanation and narrative. My thoughts on Fourier's Theorem and Ptolemaic thinking (elsewhere) highlight the arbitrariness of our explanations, but the possible insight we might get from that is contingent on a sort of legitimacy of the equivalence I posit between our descriptions-explanations-expressions and literal de-scribing, ex-plaining, and ex-pressing -- the idea that thinking, from a particular perspective, is merely about undoing the effect of the world on us. Cogitation is a homeostatic process.
Except when it isn't... There are at least two somewhat related proposals that I've talked about before that could mitigate the strangeness of the otherwise unreasonable connection between maps and territories or between words and truth. One is Biblical, I'm afraid: In the beginning was the Word. If words are prior to the world, if God saying "Let there be light" kickstarted everything, then of course there's a divine connection between maps and territories. This lovely resolution of my problem isn't quite enough, however, to make me believe in God. That would raise a thousand more unanswerable questions! Still it also suggests a neat way that maps and territories might have co-evolved -- one that I am more apt to accept. The key concept is a sort of monadology. What if the fundamental aspects of reality actually were, in a way, particles and fields? Not the dead particles and fields of physics, but beings or consciousness "bubbles" and their interactions. Yes, we're headed back into the Bubble & Beacon realm! If there really is nothing but a plenum (love that word!) of conscious selves, including subselves and superselves, and the chatter they produce with their streams of consciousness -- descriptions, explanations, narratives, and proclamations -- then it would be no surprise that the world would slowly come to resemble that chatter and those explanations. Influence is sort of the point of the chatter, and influence implies directed change and directed stasis. One missing ingredient in the above recipe is grammar. If descriptions are fundamental so must grammar be fundamental. That gives a whole new spin to Chomsky's Universal Grammar. And lately I've tried referring to this universal grammar as LOGIC=LOGOS. Logos is translated as Word in the biblical phrase cited above, but following my own take on the ancient Greek philosophy in which Logos is first used, Logos meant something more like the inherent intelligence of reality, a tendency toward order perhaps. If it's reasonable to say that consciousness might be fundamental, is it much of a leap to say that some kind of ordering or intelligence might also be? Can there be consciousness without intelligence in the broadest sense? What is this broad sense of intelligence to which I refer? Not entirely sure, but I'm calling whatever it is LOGIC=LOGOS.
If you perform my favorite assumption switch from "Nothing changes without force" to "All possibilities have a tendency to manifest themselves at once unless prevented from doing so," then intelligence such as our own doesn't have to be the product of computation in brains but blossoms forth when conditions, including especially brain conditions, are right. That's one way that LOGIC=LOGOS. Another is simply that logic, which appears to be an aspect of maps, seems to always apply in the territory itself. That is, logic is an aspect of everything reasonable. Duh!
I might be accused of a sort of mysticism (especially in this LOGIC=LOGOS thing), and that's a reasonable assessment. But there's little in my thinking that suggests the existence of occult and unfathomable powers. The word Mysterianism has been used to describe the idea that our minds are incapable of making sense of the nature of consciousness in particular. I would extend the list of things that our minds are incapable of making sense of to just about everything. I'm a mysterian about almost everything, except when I'm not.