MT Theorizing
It seems to be impossible for me to settle on any final disposition to take toward the relationship between my experience and the world at large, between things internal and things external, between what we think with and what we think about. Here's an octet of competing grand MT (Map-Territory) theories.
1. The Apeman MT: Come on! We're just a bunch of less-hairy monkeys running around flinging poop at passers-by and writing books about our itchy crotches. How can we have managed to come across and understood anything true or absolute about the world? The very idea of understanding is itself a ridiculous joke. The Martians are laughing at us! And God is laughing at them! And the godless universe in which we reside is laughing at Her! The world is queerer than we can imagine! How does a species even go about evolving a capacity for final or meaningful knowledge? What we call knowledge is just the glintings of neurons in one tiny corner of the universe. One grunt means hand, another means east, a third means horny. How do we get from there to expressing our feelings about our favorite TV show or writing down an equation that allows us to predict when the comet will return? Can't say. Despite my susceptibility to nearsighted speciesism and the seeming truth of my own thoughts, you can't ever really convince me that anything we think we know has any sort of universality. Hubris! We have cobbled together an impressive array of mental behaviors (for a monkey) that produce our peculiar world, but none of that qualifies as understanding — only self-deception and illusion added to intentionality. Our most sophisticated maps are as a three-year-old's crayon scribblings compared to... compared to something, I'm sure! The very notion of a meaningful conception of maps and territories (qua maps and territories) is undoubtedly impossible (for Martians and Bodhisattvas too) and/or beyond us.
Belief in any degree of meaningful theoretical knowledge involves swallowing a sort of miracle: maps can somehow give true insight into the territory, a good simulation of event x is equal to event x. I'm not quite ready, in this frame of mind, to give myself over to this miracle. Thus, my answer to the question "What is the relationship between our mental representations and the world we seem to be aware of? "Whuh?"
2. Platonic Idealism MT. There is a deeper reality beyond our minds, but it isn't atoms and the void, not the world of matter. It's a world of permanent forms whose shadows or projections or intersections-with-the-physical-plane we see dancing on the walls of the cave. This MT theory is related to my Allegory of the Cafe and Leibniz's Monadology and Bohm's Implicate Order. They all imply that our participation in the very dynamics that the territory puts out preclude any possibility of unmediated exposure to the deepest stuff. We are, in a sense self-blinding. (In the case of the Allegory of the Cafe, the very purpose of our noise-canceling headphones is to the keep out influence from everywhere else, so its no surprise to discover that they make poor instruments for hearing the things that are actually out there). We are only aware of phenomena (the product of the monads, etc.) on the surface of our bubbles, while the underlying sources of the phenomena (the noumena and/or the interiors of the monads themselves) are forever inaccessible (windowless). We can understand the phenomena in a manner of speaking but absolutely no progress can be made toward the Absolute. And it's not necessarily as simple as if there is some noumenon X that we experience as phenomenon x. The plural totality of {X} may give rise to a singular x at some point in spacetime. This unbrigeable separation isn't something to be fretted over, however; it's just the way it is. So, in the end, this MT is indeed em-tee. We can no more know about the relationship between maps and territories than we can about the territories themselves. (A mystic might say that we can turn off the cancellation function of our headphones and some of the world can sneak in unscathed. Which leads to...)
3. The Transcendental/Jedi MT: Maps are perpetually illusory, something to be overcome or bypassed or transcended to achieve direct contact with Being. There is no try, no rational approach to understanding the nature of the deeper reality, but through meditation on it or contemplation of it or total immersion in it, wisdom can be achieved. What is the intellectual manifestation of this enlightenment? That is, are there enlightened thoughts? Can the Buddha come back from a transcendent state and talk to us about it? I would think not, except to grant Her the ability to say with certainty, "No, that idea betrays such and such an illusion." The most we can ask for is that we come to regard our explanations and descriptions with the just the right of blend of skepticism and belief -- and that would be pretty good!
Perhaps the living world is undergirded or sustained by a sea of Force consisting in the conscious energies of all beings. Deep connection between the individual and the Force which bypasses maps leads to great power for Good ... or Evil.
4. The NT MT: In the beginning was the word (logos, i.e. maps). The world is made of or through the speech of God (as in "Let there be light"). Humans (unlike other animals) are also endowed with this godlike capacity of speech, this intimate connection with the Divine Territory. Words are prayers and incantations, and the Universe is a text written by God to be read by us. The world was created in order to be understood by the righteous. This MT theory is an ingenious and satisfying settlement of the big MT question. That is, there is no Territory but that which arose mutually with its appropriate set of maps at the dawn of creation. God said, "Let there be light," so that the nature of light itself is forever bound up with the word "light." This isn't very far from Einstein's God who doesn't play dice with the universe. That is, the MT connection is mysterious (since it must be taken on faith that God is creating and sustaining that connection), but the world is comprehensible nonetheless (since God has made it thus for us). This MT seems in many ways mystical and unscientific, but it leaves lots of room for science to discover the actual laws of Nature rather than the sort of laws we find in the next MT, which explains how science flourished in the Christian Era. Physics can be lawlike, and correct maps correspond to territories perfectly. (See the Correspondence Theory of Truth).
5. The Falsifiability (or Approximation) MT: Maps are provisional approximations of territories. We can compare various versions of these models to the territory and semi-rationally choose the ones that do the best job for the purposes at hand with the predetermined measurement criteria. No model can ever be known to be final or perfect. Thus, we leave aside the question of truth and knowledge as fruitless and unnecessary. We must satisfy ourselves for now with a particular degree of uncertainty, but as science progresses that uncertainty will shrink. Our maps might not be perfectable but they are always improvable. Since statistics trump explanation, we gather the data and generate Fourier-like theories (see 6 below) that account for them. These theories only apply over limited domains.
The Copenhagen interpretation, devised in response to the multiple and unresolvable explanations of quantum mechanics, really extends to everything; measure and then report on your measurements, but be careful saying what it all means. This MT theory is the point of view scientists should emphasize, in my opinion. That is, it's THE science MT. Unfortunately these damn scientists often lend their science credibility to truthy pronouncements that are way out of bounds — We now understand that a spider's behavior is hard-wired in its tiny brain. Really?
6. The Fourier Sledgehammer MT: The relationship between our maps and the territory is arbitrary or unknowable — and possibly meaningless. The only bits of evidence we have about the supposed territory are its effects on our consciousness bubbles. Those effects trace out deformations to the surface of those bubbles we can picture as highly squiggly graphs (This is a metaphor, people!). Our only way of perceiving the deforming events involves pushing back on them (smoothing them out). Get that? We don't know them until we engage with them and analyze them. Thus, our descriptions and explanations are (based on) this cancellation process. Fourier showed that judicious subtraction of sine waves can cancel any deformation as perfectly as we please, like a body shop banging out dents in a fender. Likewise, little wavelets (Gaussian curves) and other stock objects can in practice do the job as well as Fourier's waves. That is, whatever deformation takes place, we can ex-plain it using any of a variety of off-the-shelf candidates (perhaps atoms and forces, God's will, natural selection, sex drives, the dialectic, class struggle, the conspiracy of the illuminati, grace, good vs. evil, spiritual evolution, etc.). The explanation can work (undo the deformation) to any degree of accuracy and yet bear no meaningful relationship to the actual external events that produced the deformation in the first place (if it even makes sense to suppose there is such a thing as an external event). Any such sledgehammer explanation is by its nature parsimonious in that a single off-the-shelf item does all the work. No multiplicity of causes here. All theories that ex-plain things are correct explanations. Do explanations that include mathematically accurate predictions trump the others, truth-wise? Can't say. The accuracy seems to come from greater attention to detail rather than any superiority of technique. From the Fourier metaphor's perspective, most arbitrary explanations should have some applicability beyond the designated area of cancellation — but less and less so the further out we go from the finite interval over which it was calculated. Thus, they can make relatively decent predictions near the domain of cancellation. That is, it shouldn't be too surprising to get decent predictions from arbitrary explanations in some cases, and that might inspire faith in our explanation, but only explanations that somehow reflect the actual nature of the territory being described should produce really good predictions far from their original domain of applicability. Given a bit of determination and resourcefulness, we can invent enough epicycles to make any basic approach work for us. Given the diversity of opinion in the world and the extraordinary degree of satisfaction people derive from sticking to their various crazy positions, it certainly seems to be borne out that almost any dogma will do just fine (if the ultimate criterion for judging a map is the satisfaction of the map's owner -- and I reckon that's as good a criterion as any). The key to understanding might be "doubling down" on our favored point of view until the world gives up. All explanations are Ptolemaic.
7. The Idealism MT. There is no territory and no maps, only mind. Thoughts aren't representations but instead have their own existence. Bypass the middleman for big savings! The apparent truths or scientific laws may be valid, but only for the minds perceiving them. (Frankly, it's hard for me to know what to make of a pure or simple-minded idealism, and I haven't the education or imagination to devise one that isn't simple-minded)
8. The Feeling MT: Reasoning about the nature of the MT relationship is a fool's errand. It is what it is! A holistic, intuitionist approach to thinking is all we have and all we need. Believe or don't believe, act or don't act, but please don't subject me to your tortured philosophical musings. I mean really. How far has all of this gotten you? Empty (MT) theorizing indeed!
My own point of view is a sort of combo drawn from some shifting middle ground between Plato, Fourier, and the Apeman. The typical intelligent person spends most of her time in the Feeling camp but will profess to be in the Falsifiabilty camp.