the map is of the territory

Any understanding of the mundane world that we develop necessarily involves dimension reduction and simplification: so the story goes. We may end up with a tractable model that predicts reasonably well, but we’ll never get our error term to zero, and we mustn’t confuse our toy conceptions for a high-fidelity reproduction of “reality.”

When you encounter a new idea, you change, and so the world changes. When you share an idea with another, they change. When you create a new idea, you restructure the ecological space of ideas itself. At each of these steps, the material world has changed, because ideas and people are part of the world. And when your ideas change so too does your e... See more

I am proposing that it can be helpful to think of Ideas as occupying a space that exists alongside the purely physical world with which we’re all familiar, and that further it is useful to think of this parallel emergent world as extremely real and not at all a metaphor .

The spiritual is real , actually, and it should be taken more seriously than it is. We can give it better grounding and appropriate respect in a framework that can be appreciated even by rationalists.

“The map is not the territory.” The meaning of this aphorism is straightforward: we may imagine a means of understanding the mundane world, or a part of it; but we should not mistake this story for the truth: we should not believe everything we think.