The map is not the territory, but…

[00:00:00]Multiple things can be true at once. The map is not the territory. Not all maps represent the same territory, much less in the same way. But the territory exists and the right map is a useful guide to understanding and navigating the territory. This topic, the map territory distinction, is something I've wanted to talk about for a while and I think I finally have an approach I'm happy with. So I want to start with Jorge Bourhees and the one paragraph short story on exactitude in science which I thought about reading but I think it's easier just to paraphrase even though it's one paragraph which basically there is this kingdom that has a group of ctographers make a map that covers every detail in the territory at a onetoone scale and of course that map is useless and so it ends up being abandoned and torn up in tatters in the desert which gets to a critical point which is that for a map to be useful, it needs to be reductionist. It needs to leave a lot out. Sort of on the Pareto principle, you know, 8020, 80% of anything is accounted for by 20% of inputs roughly. And there's other numbers, different ways, but the general point remains that for whatever you're trying to do, most of the information that you need can be conveyed in a small number of factors. And so we all use maps all the time, often not necessarily aware that we're using maps. And that actually gets me into Jean Bodiard in simulation and similacra which so he talks about in his case there are I think four levels of similacra but what really matters here is he acknowledges reality exists and then first order similacra is a representation of reality so it's a map but we also use maps and maps of maps of maps and such until we lose track of them potentially which is I think because there are layers to reality and there's at least two that I think are critical to understand which are the default underlying physical reality and social reality which this book a while ago I read the introduction and first chapter which I do a lot non-fiction books then I finally started reading it got about halfway through and decided I'm done with philosophy for a while so I'm going to finish it when I feel like I'm into philosophy again but Sorl is pointing out that for example property ownership and money are social realities that cannot exist without language and sort of people acknowledging them as such and sort of builds on that premise.

[00:02:29]He also notes that his last chapter he is making the case that there is also an underlying reality because people doubt that and so I think that point is kind of critical to understanding our social reality.

[00:02:42]often the map kind of is the territory right like with currency and even when it's not it contains maps of both physical like underlying reality and of itself sort of self-referentially right social reality contains maps of social reality and again map is not the territory is a metaphor right but I think it's a useful metaphor and so think about subway maps versus those tourist maps that you'll get in cities that have the hotspots and local businesses versus a highway map versus a UGS United States Geographic Service topographical map, right? All of those serve different functions for different purposes. And if you're using a UGS topographical map to try to navigate around the subways in Manhattan, you're going to probably get horribly lost, right? But if you're using a subway map to try to drive around Manhattan, you're also going to get lost. And so it depends what you're trying to do. And this is true. If you haven't seen my video on frameworks, I'd suggest watching it after this because ultimately these maps, they're just frameworks that are helping us reduce the critical components of some form of reality, whether it's physical reality or social reality down to the essential parts that we need to navigate it. And so I have mentioned before that I didn't think I identify with the philosophical school until I started reading the pragmatists and his William James pragmatism. And I realized I think I can call myself a pragmatist which makes sense because it both stems from American culture and permeates it.

[00:04:18]And James point is essentially you don't need to know what's precisely true. You just need to compare the various frameworks, the various maps you have and ask which one is going to make the more useful predictions for me and follow that in those circumstances. And that I think is the essential point. And with all that in mind, I actually wanted to now sort of come back to something I discussed in one of my earlier videos, which is the book spiral dynamics, which if you've heard of this, it's almost certainly people talking about Ken Wilbur's sort of reinterpretation. And so Ken Wilbur's representation of spiral dynamics is a good example of what Bojiard would call second order similacra because it is a representation of simplification of spiral dynamics, which is a simplification of reality.

[00:05:03]And Wilbur does this because he is then building on it. And so you can see this is a pretty decent sized book and they've written papers and stuff beyond it and it still doesn't cover everything you might want to know about it. So to actually build on it into his integral theory, he had to take a lot out. And in that video I talked about a couple of things he took out. For this video, I'm just going to mention so it's critical to understand there are a lot of like developmental levels theories for both people and societies that operate in various different ways. One of the most common is that we have especially with morality you have preconventional morality, conventional morality and postconventional morality. So preconventional morality would be you don't lie because you'll get punished for lying. Conventional morality would be you don't lie because lying is wrong and we agree that it's wrong.

[00:05:52]Postconventional morality is we don't lie because lying is harmful or such and such a reason. Right? Or it might be no actually we do lie. Actually lying is better potentially depending on who you're talking to. So that's I think the easiest to understand. But I still want to talk about spiral dynamics because it breaks down at a more granular level of detail that I think is more useful for this discussion. And it also gets to something I think is important which is that spiral dynamics has a distinction between first order and second order thinking. So everything from be so beige, purple, red, blue, orange, green up to this is first order and then yellow, turquoise and coral is second order. And until you've reached second order thinking, if you acknowledge that spiral dynamics exists, most people at first order thinking think they're doing second order thinking when they're not.

[00:06:43]And then when you actually get there, you're like, "Oh, this is second order thinking." And in my case, I had already gotten to second order thinking before my father told me about Wilbur's interpretation. The other thing that is important about spiral dynamics that I think is helpful is that the warm colors represent agency motivated goals. sort of you're trying to achieve as an individual in the world and cool colors represent communion motivated goals.

[00:07:05]You're trying to connect with other people and build society and that's I think one of the most important things that Wilbur left out in his simplification of spiral dynamics. And so I wanted to bring it up again because so I tried to this was a uh tower snail shell that I sort of drew from memory. I looked it up half the time like I didn't quite get it right what these snails look like but it's close and I so you can see I have you know the colors so beige, purple, red, blue, orange, green, yellow, turquoise, coral and I have this one as like indigo or violet. In my video on the book I mentioned I was not entirely sure if coral exists. Suppose I should explain if you're not familiar with spiral dynamics what these colors are very briefly. And so beige is basically survival. Purple is kind of magical thinking. Red is how do I get what I want out of the world. Blue is sort of the conventional sort of morality based rules-based order. Orange is sort of the rationalistic empirical order. And then green is the post-rationalistic often people often say that associate green with postmodernism though not everyone who is green is a postmodernist and not all postmodernists are green like Bojiardo is generally associated with postmodernism but his writing is at least yellow I would say but still this gives you a general idea and then the second order levels like you can see if you're at the first order I think if someone explains it to you you can at least see what the higher levels look Second order is hard to understand until you are there.

[00:08:50]And it's interesting because it's one thing you'll see is we all have different personalities and like inclinations, right? And so I've always inclined towards perspectivism and people who incline towards perspectivism will often seem like they're second order when they're not. And I actually know there's a channel on YouTube who I watch and he I was wondering is he yellow or is he really good orange? And I actually sent him an email and his answers I'm like okay yeah he's orange but he's really good at it. However, anyway, so the reason I am going over these spitter spiral dynamics and I mentioned in my last video coral, I wasn't sure if it existed because once you have second order and you have it for both agency and communion goals, do you need more? And the authors of spiral dynamics said they thought like the second order thinking didn't arise until recently. But if you read like dowist texts, I think you pretty clearly see yellow and turquoise thinking in them.

[00:09:48]and with coral. So when I read this book, Al Gazali's path to Sufism, he sort of takes turquoise for granted and then yesands it seemingly which suggests something beyond turquoise thinking assuming and again this is a map but it's a map of sort of development that is assuming we all develop on a certain trajectory in western societies. And so Al Gazali who was in the Islamic world before modernism even existed in the west. It could be there's different developments in different parts of the world as well. I won't get into all that here. And then for the existentialist philosophy reading group I attend. We read Nietze human all too human. And I was like I was talking to a friend who was familiar with Nichze and familiar with Ken Wilbur's interpretation of spiral dynamics though I've told her about sort of the critical features of the original that Wilbur left out at least to my mind and I was describing Nietze in this book and saying this seems like again he is assuming turquoise and then yes anding it and my friend was like yeah niche at the end of his life I'm very convinced was coral.

[00:10:53]So, I was not sure if coral existed or what it looked like. And I think I'm getting there now. And I think it's becoming clearer that coral is the distinction between coral versus yellow and turquoise, at least in the West, is that it comes back to sort of recognizing both the impossibility of individualism and the necessity of hierarchies, which I talked about. I finally started questioning my assumptions terms of individualism and egalitarianism recently though I'd sort of been grasping at this for a while.

[00:11:29]And then so you often see what my friend calls harmonics between these. And so you see the office predicted you see a harmonic with red. And so red is like how do you manipulate people sort of for my own ends and then coral becomes how do we shape how do we interact with society for what I think the best ends are which is sounds like social engineering which I've been critical of but it's not cuz again I'm talking about like on a grassroots like community- based voluntary level but anyways so the reason I am going over all of this is because I've been thinking about this is sort of a good way to illustrate how map territory distinctions and their understandings differ. And the reason sort of brought it all together is I was I mentioned I've been trying to understand number of things. One of which is sort of right-wing thought. And I watched a new right-wing YouTube channel. So I'm not going to link the video cuz it wasn't very interesting except that they said something that a lot of people who identify with the right like to claim, which is that the right is interested in truth and recognize an underlying reality and is trying to get there and the left rejects it. And there are I mean Thomas soul constrained versus unconstrained or tragic versus vision of the anointed does make the case that a lot of people on the left do have this tendency although it's not in rejecting the existence of an underlying reality usually so much as insisting that it is malleable that the map can reshape the territory which it can but I think they overstate it and so I think that to the extent like cuz I'm someone I believe in the constrained vision as soul described des it. But I don't think I could ever be rightwing, which I might have a video about at some point, probably a blog post certainly some point because of certain assumptions I see on the right that I'm still trying to pin down as sort of hyper constrained. And one way I put it is so the people like on the right will tend to be like, you know, you can't do this thing that people did 5 minutes ago 10 yards over there. You can't do it here and now. And people on the left will be like, hey, if you can imagine it, we can do And I think both of these are wrong. And I think this does reflect something beyond like a simple relatively modern political division because this person was saying left right isn't even like real. It's something a lot of something you see from people on the right a lot is left right really comes out of the French Revolution. I'm beyond it because I'm beyond the enlightenment. they'll say.

[00:13:55]And so I was thinking about that and I think you do have tendencies in one direction or the other that make people lean more towards these visions that we associate with political left and right.

[00:14:06]But you also see like spiral dynamics kind of explains tendencies towards that too, especially for people who are more flexible. And so like I until recently and until probably until I actually started grasping at coral I always identified sympathized at least to some degree with the left which could be my personality could also be my upbringing probably some of both I don't know which is more but you know I've still gone through all of these levels while also holding to the constrained vision the tragic vision and so I've been thinking about this in terms of the map territory and this was my first draft so I'm not sure I got all of these quite right. So like here I put so everything up to orange can include and up to blue it must include that the map is the territory which I think is kind of I think purple and beige generally there's not really even a recognition of a distinction between map and territory and then blue and red tend to see well basically if it works to represent the territory well enough it must actually represent the territory well and it doesn't have flaws and there's one map we can follow. And then orange also tends to say there's one map we can follow. So the boundary between conventional and postconventional morality tends to go through orange. So people in orange start out with conventional and go to postconventional morality. And people in orange will also tend to sort of understand that the map reflects the territory, but they'll still think there's one map that sort of reflects the territory best. And you can see that in green. You can also see people in green. I put territory does not exist, which again I think is not quite right.

[00:15:45]Right. I think it's some people do believe that but it's more common to believe that the territory can be defined by the maps which is something you see with both orange and green to some degree and then getting above. So once you get to the second order thinking about these questions then you realize the map reflects the territory or it reflects rather aspects of the territory which gets back to what I said at the beginning that the map is not the territory. Not all maps represent the same territory, much less in the same way, but the territory exists.

[00:16:19]And finding the right map is useful for navigating the territory. And one thing that I think might distinguish these higher levels, assuming I am grasping at Coral, which I really starting to think I am, and my friend who has seen people she thinks is Coral, kind of thinks too, is that I think Coral recognizes this distinction that Surl talks about between physical reality and social reality. And so, anyways, I wanted to talk about this. I'll see how this video does. I can always redo it if it doesn't do well.

[00:16:54]although at least two videos where I've done they've actually done surprisingly well. So, we'll see. But anyways, thanks for watching. I'm Magpie. If you want to support me, I have affiliate links and a Kofi which has a Discord tier down below. And anyways, thanks again for watching and I'll see y'all in the next one, which will probably be unless this one is doing really well and I'll put it off. It'll be Wednesday. It will be that is my oneyear channel anniversary for doing videos.

[00:17:22]And yeah, so I'll probably see you Wednesday unless this is doing really well when I'll hold that off a bit.

[00:17:27]Anyways, thanks again for watching. See you all on the next one.