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Really enjoyed this! Thanks for writing it up. I'd love to see some more links out to sources (e.g. was surprised to see an article on map vs territory that doesn't mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski)

A few things stood out:

> There is only one Territory

You could call this true by definition, but it's interesting to consider ways it might be untrue. Could there be several, causally-disconnected territories out there? Could reality be composed of many disparate but overlapping subjective realities, as Schrödinger thought [1]?

> no map can accurately, and completely, represent the gap between that map and the territory

There's a great Borges story about a map that completely covers its territory. Fantasy, obviously, but worth a read! I think you'd like Borges in general.

> However, because the maps in our brains are physical objects, they constantly follow their equation of motion and thus move along energy gradients toward their lowest energy state

Is this true? People are open systems (we literally ingest energy), and most physical laws are stated in ways that assume closed systems. We certainly don't just follow the energy gradient--we're able to kick ourselves out of local minimal pretty easily. Otherwise I'd never get off this couch!

If you wanted to model a person as a (closed) physical system moving through a phase space, you'd probably have to include the Sun.

> Emotions have a valence: positive or negative. Our maps move towards positive feelings, and away from negative feelings. Conflict - inconsistencies in our maps - often feels unpleasant (i.e. has a negative valence).

>

> Our brains attempt to move away from the negative feeling induced by conflict, either by changing the position of physiology (distracting ourselves, looking away, walking away, running away) or else by adding, removing, or modifying existing beliefs.

I assume you're getting at something like Predictive Coding here. I disagree that we avoid conflict--we actually seek it out! We actively look for information that rests on the edge of predictability. We _really_ like surprise that can be integrated into our maps, the bigger the surprise the better (e.g. misdirection in humor, horror movies, doom scrolling...pretty much all media).

See also: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem

[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/church-of-reality-schrodinger-believed#%C2%A7intersubjective-reality

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As above, so below. As within, so without. All is mind.

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Nice, I love watching people wrestle with this stuff. :)

First, I was confused by the footnotes. They seem important to me, and dashing back and forth is a hassle, I would just put them inline.

Second, this is pretty dense. I like it, but tastes vary.

Third, consider rewriting this in E'. I have had a lot of good luck processing and communicating about this stuff by just removing all instances of the verb "to be." Google E-Prime for more details. This is controversial, but I always find that the exercise of removing all the "is" words forces me to clarify what I actually mean, and be less hand-wavy overall. It's work, for sure, and I'm not sure you can avoid it 100% if you, like, literally define terms, but I'm curious if it helps you like it does me.

Finally, the content seems pretty sound to me. I stopped using the word "Godel" (I've come to believe it must sound a lot like the words to some ancient spell that summons Daemons of Irrelevant Pedantry) and talk about embedded agency, instead. The key insight, as you point out, is that the territory contains the map, so you can never be sure of the map's accuracy. And we can analyze lots of ways to live with that limitation, and there is a lot of devil in those details, but they all seem, in the end, to *compress* the territory by removing redundancies. So I've stopped thinking about "maps" and instead I think of compressed representations of the territory. Some beliefs are utter BS, and you spend a bunch of time talking about that, and that's fair - it's an important and common situation.

But these day's I'm more interested in how to make the map more accurate, in theory and in practice. Many compressed representations are lossy (Freudian psychoanalysis) but then again many lossy representations are still useful (gardening, classical mechanics.) Some compressed representations require so much heavy processing ("decompression") that we prefer the lossy results in all but a few narrow use cases (molecular biology, quantum mechanics.)

Lossless compression - i.e., the true Laws of the Universe - is theoretically possible, but we'll never know for sure if we found it. This was Popper's gift to science, and I take great comfort that no AI, no Moloch, no alien Omega handing out boxes, can ever know for sure, either.

I have more to say, but time is short. Thanks for the writeup!

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