On Maps and Models: An Introduction of Sorts

"The map is not the territory" - Alfred Korzybski

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe" -  René Magritte

"A model which took account of all the variegation of reality would be of no more use than a map at the scale of one to one." - Joan Robinson

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted" - attrib. Hassan-i-Sabbah

"Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable." - Paul Valéry 

"In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them." - Aleister Crowley

"Convictions cause convicts" - traditional Discordian catma 

The obvious Magritte + Discordianism pun

As my A-level chemistry teacher used to tell me, "all models are wrong, but some are useful". The
complexity of life and the observed universe is such that, to understand it, we simplify it, reducing it to a model. There was something of a running joke throughout those lessons, that any statement could be appended with "actually, it's a bit more complicated than that..." - the orbits of electrons about the nucleus of an atom being a particularly good example.

This trend continued when I went to university to study medicine, with new and more complex models of anatomy physiology replacing those taught at school. Every previously-certain fact became an over-simplification of a more complicated truth; and in time it became obvious enough to my mind that even these new models were merely that - models, all of which were wrong, but some of which were useful.

This is but a preamble to the main point of this post - that, regardless of the objective nature of truth, we view it only through our own models, which, whilst they are never entirely accurate, may be useful.

Wandering a little into philosophy for a moment, I doubt that it is actually possible to say very much at all about the nature of objective reality. Consider the metaphor of cartography. The map is produced as an abstraction of the land which it seeks to represent, compressing and simplifying the details of the territory. But a map is made by human hands and human eyes - and it is only ever as accurate as the eye that sees the territory, and the hand that draws it.

We take data from the outside world through our senses, and interpret it in accordance with our own preconceptions. This assumption lies behind all manner of branches of psychology, from Object Relations to Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and is borne out by numerous studies and observations on such things as framing effects. We do not see the world as it truly is - rather, we see a model of the world, created by our senses and our beliefs, what was termed by Robert Anton Wilson (he of Illuminatus! fame) as a "reality tunnel". Thus, to return to the model of cartography, any map that we draw is a step abstracted; not a map of the world, but a map of a map.

But this doesn't make our maps useless. Consider the maps of the London Underground, laid out not in accordance with the exact position of the stations on the surface, but more in the fashion of a flow chart. It is significantly abstracted from the surface layout, which hides certain useful bits of information (such as it being significantly quicker to walk from Paddington to Lancaster Gate than to take the underground, despite their apparent distance on the tube map), but which aids comprehension of the routes.

Though this tube map is rather awesome

We jump between models all the time, often without knowing it, shifting our frames of reference to better adapt our thinking to a particular problem. Oftentimes this is unnoticed to us - in the desire for a sense of internal consistency, we like to think that we have a fixed worldview with which we can interpret all things by, though when we rigidly adhere to a single model of our experienced reality we run into what might be called the "First Year Physics Student Problem", in which we attempt to crowbar everything into a single model without really understanding the basis of the model in which the information is first presented. This could also be called the "Internet Rationalist" or "Richard Dawkins" problem, but I digress.

Indeed, the ability to switch models is so fundamental to our ability to function as social beings, that we practically take it for granted. Empathy and the development of "theory of mind" is a good example of one of these model-switching processes: in attempting to gain some understanding of how another person thinks or feels, we place ourselves in their shoes, and create a map of their own internal map - a map of a map, a simulation of a simulation.

I ramble, but there is reason within it, and the fact that I have begun this blog with this particular topic lies here, as it gives rise to some assertions:

• That any given truth is only true within a model; indeed, all truths are defined by the model in which they are contained, and what is true within one model may not be true within another.
• That models relate only to other models; if there is some objective truth that exists outside a model, it cannot be found in any model, save perhaps in the convergence of models.
• That the "truth" of any model is secondary to its utility, which is, ultimately, a measure of how well it allows one to relate to and understand another model.
• That material that exists within one model is best understood, at least initially, by accepting as true any and all assumptions that comprise the structure of the model, regardless of their truth outside that model.
• That, ultimately, these assertions are merely another model; a map of many maps.

This should perhaps be considered the bare-bones of a manifesto of sorts, or at least a set of working assumptions that one might use to better understand the world.

In short: Magick is psychology is religion is science is art is lifehacking is spirituality is sociology is madness is mysticism, and so on and so forth.

All models are models of each other.

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted to be true.