Maps Within Maps
Maps Within Maps
Reality, and How We Get Around in It
In a proper science of subjective experience, we must situate ourselves as scientists within the reality we wish to investigate. Separating ourselves from experience will not do. As far as we are concerned, reality and subjective experience must be considered one and the same.
In fact, as we settle into this requirement, we gain an important insight: the only reality we have direct access to — ever and always — is our experience. Period. Our knowledge of an external, “out there,” “objective” reality is inferred from our lived, conscious experience. No more, no less.
For now, we do not need to wander far into such deep philosophical terrain. By simply acknowledging this ground upon which we stand, we can take our first steps toward getting our new science underway. Let us explore how we might proceed.
Aiming for Stability
We benefit greatly by assuming a stable external reality that acts as our context, and science to this point has done a wonderful job of providing that stability for our understanding of the material world we inhabit. When we interact with the world through standard physics and chemistry, for example, we can rely upon our expectations for how the world will respond to our engagement.
So, then, how can we best proceed in our quest to develop a science that successfully investigates the most profoundly internal reality, that of our own and others’ subjective experience? Is it possible to achieve such reliable stability in our understanding of this inner reality? If so, what are the requirements for such an achievement, and how can we ensure that we honor those?
First, I believe we need to take a step back to take a look at this activity we call science.
Designing Maps for Navigating Experience
As we take on the frame of reality equals experience, we can begin to see that science is merely a subset of a universal human activity. That activity involves making sense of our past experience in ways that serve us in the present experiential moment as we move continuously into an emergent, ever-changing future.
Sense-making is map-making. Even a simple snapshot memory functions as a map. A map is fundamentally an experiential representation of past and possible experience that serves to guide present experiential choices.
We automatically make maps of what we have experienced with the purpose of using those maps to navigate our current, ongoing, and future experience. In navigating, we compare our maps with current experience and use its concordance or discordance to predict the results of a next action, choosing what has the greatest likelihood of producing the outcome we want.
We do this all the time and have been doing it most likely since before we were born. For example, we hold within ourselves a map of our experience of embodiment, and more maps of our experience of the objects in our world, and we rely on those maps to create the experiences of a cookie being delectably chewed in our mouth, a living room lamp turning on, or a ball shooting into the goal. More complex maps help us navigate baking those cookies, soothing ourselves after a difficult evening conversation, or leading a team to a regional championship.
Many of the maps we use most often and find most reliable have settled into realms outside of our awareness. When we learn a sport, for example, our early efforts are hyper-conscious and painstakingly slow as a result. But as our maps become built into our reflexes and inner models of the sport’s features, we become free to train our attention upon more complex dynamics to guide our activity. We can trust our racket to strike the ball and devote our awareness to the broader patterns of activity on the court.
Each of our maps is personal and unique to our individual world of lived experience, building on our rich history including all our many sources of learning. Our personal maps are custom fit to our own uniqueness, and would be virtually impossible to transfer to another person. We can share our experience of our maps, of course, and others can infer certain properties that can be incorporated into their own unique maps. But everyone needs to build their own within the domain of their own awareness.
Our maps are always imperfect, and we automatically attend to differences between our predictions and what actually happens, updating our maps in the background as we continue to navigate as best we can. Our most useful maps are those which are most precise and reliable. We want to be able to rely upon moving our arm and hand in just the right way to bring that cookie to our mouth without dropping it in our lap.
What makes a map optimally effective in this way? Let’s take a look at the fundamental structure of all maps.
The following model is built in part upon the discoveries of psychotopology, which we will investigate in later posts. Please keep in mind that we are building an articulation of this new science by visiting one facet at a time, and the integration into a full, multi-faceted work will take many months at least. Post your questions and curiosities in the comments to guide treatment of future facets.
Map Structure: Entity, Relationship and Context
How is a map best designed to guide navigation of lived experience? All maps begin with perception, also referred to as observation. In order for an observation to take place, something in the field of awareness must be different from something else in the field of awareness. At its most general, we can refer to this difference as a differential property of experience. The image of a tan cookie upon a green tabletop provides a simplistic example of such difference.
A map of experience is made of the following three basic elements, the differentiation of which depends upon an emergent awareness of differential properties in the full space of lived experience. Each of these elements influences and is influenced by the other.
Entity: A perceived pattern of certain differentiated properties of experience remaining relatively stable or predictably changing over time relative to other, related properties. A pattern attains the status of entity when its stable or predictable properties can be encapsulated inside a conceptual “thing,” reliably substituting that “thing” for the more subtle and complex property dynamics.
Relationship: A perceived connection between two or more entities and/or relationships. Such connections can include:
Causality: Various types of cause-effect relationships.
Dependency: Various types of dependency vs. autonomous relationships.
Temporality: Various types of relationship through time, including before or after, sequential, synchronous or asynchronous.
Equivalence: Various types of comparison relationship with varying levels of sameness and/or difference.
Process: A predictable change in one or more entities and/or relationships over time.
Quality: An attribute adding more refined distinction to the general category of an entity or relationship.
Other types of relationship can include correlation, hierarchy, feedback, emergence, intentionality, spatiality, functionality, interactionality, symbolism, possibility, necessity, perspective, and many more.
Context: Entities and relationships arise within and draw their meaning from a context that holds them. Context can include physical and social environments, intentions, values, and other factors. All entities and relationships exist only within and because of a context. When the context changes, everything else changes as well.
As we will see, these three components are essential building blocks for the very structure of conscious experience. The topology of our inner field dimension of conscious experience takes the form of a fractal architecture centered on this essential three-ness. In addition, thought itself also occupies such a three-part structure, with sensory representations as entities, links between specific entities as relationships, and the field dimension of experience functioning as the essential context within which these representations and links take on meaning and occupy the space of our being.
All I can do at this point is to just point in this general direction. Please be patient as we gradually assemble the direct, experiential data of fieldwork to reveal these structures over coming months. For now, let me present a few general features of these maps of experience and how they work.
Language
We can see these dominant features of maps of experience built into our language structure, in which the two most central features of all languages are what the English language refers to as subjects and predicates. In any sentence, the subject indicates the entity and the predicate indicates a relationship between that entity and something else. It is impossible to construct a meaningful sentence without both components being either explicitly stated or implied. All languages build themselves around similar references to entities and relationships even while manifesting a diversity of ways of defining and handling those reflecting various patterns of culture.
At the same time, language itself is context-dependent. Any language is simply a finite set of sound patterns or visual symbols that gain their meaning only through a shared context of others who use this language to link their experiences and communicate meaning. Without this social context, language is meaningless, and within social sub-cultures as small as oneself or between two people in relationship, the same sounds and symbols can take on unique links to features within the territory of lived experience.
Co-Emergence and Relativity
A map’s entities, relationships and context co-emerge through time, the emergence of each contributing to the co-emergence of the others. No experiential entity exists without accompanying relationships within a specific context, and the same goes for relationships with respect to entities and context. As a fundamental example of co-arising, the observable stable distinction between two portions of experience which gives rise to perception of an entity simultaneously gives rise to the relationship between the property pattern carried by the entity and the different properties evident outside the entity.
Entities, relationships and contexts are supremely relative. Entities, for example, can serve as contexts, be incorporated into other entities, or decompose into sub-entities and relationships. Similarly, an entity in one map can become a relationship in another map, or disappear altogether in a new context. Contexts themselves are comprised of patterns of entities and relationships.
In this way, inner maps can be fluid and ever-changing, constantly adapting to the ongoing evolution of life’s conditions. We are constantly tweaking our maps. Alongside this constant transformation, small islands of stability emerge in portions of one’s life that support a reliable consistency. Sometimes this stability emerges due to stable patterns in conditions, while other times stability is enforced by limitations placed upon awareness and activity to confine it to portions of experience which remain more consistent. Again, the raw stuff of our maps is experience itself, not the projected assumption of what the experience may or may not indicate about some objective-style reality.
Natural Limits
All maps have limits. A map’s territory encompasses a given domain of potential experience but cannot extend infinitely. Within its territory, a map cannot fully contain all of the infinite possible states of potential experience. Thus, any given pattern of entities and relationships is tuned to best serve a particular context, and is both partial and provisional.
Meta-Maps
All maps exist as part of the territory of other maps. Some maps operate in a meta position, perhaps guiding the selection of other maps more grounded in a given context. Other maps serve an integrative function, incorporating sub-maps into higher-order maps of experience. No map exists on its own. One context for any map includes all other maps accessible for that person.
Relative Awareness
Every map has the potential to guide navigation from along a spectrum of activation ranging from being fully within awareness to being located fully outside of awareness, operating unconsciously. Again, learning a sport offers a great example of this spectrum. At first, learning to play catch requires our full attention to coordinating the movement of one’s hand relative to an incoming ball. But that coordination becomes fully unconscious at some point, and the hand simply moves as it must to complete the catch with no effort whatsoever, freeing awareness to pay more attention to other dynamics in a complex game.
All-Encompassing
We could go so far as to argue that we inhabit maps and nothing but maps, that reality does not exist for us unless and until it has been encoded into a map. This makes sense, though, only after we have incorporated a more complete understanding of the experiential topology revealed by our new science. As you will see, the actual structure of the field dimension of conscious experience mirrors the structure of the realities we inhabit.
Connections to Modern Neuroscience
Although this model arises independently through the investigation of the structure of subjective experience, it seems to have a corollary in neuroscience. Recently, I read The Experience Machine by Andy Clark and was impressed at how well the neuroscientific model of predictive processing approaches what is revealed through psychotopology. I’m also currently reading A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins, which also strongly supports this model. Once I’ve been able to fully articulate the science of psychotopology, I’ll be eager to come back and make some more detailed comparisons and, I’m sure, raise some interesting questions. To come.
Moving Forward
All of the above represent mere hints, but strong hints, inviting further investigation and clarification. This model of knowledge and reality suggests potent applications. For now, we want to move efficiently toward beginning our actual work. We need to find a way to bring a true science to the study of inner experience.
However, that’s not as easy as we might wish. There is a good reason why such a science has evaded us so far. In my next post in this series, I will discuss the subjectivity barrier, which makes it maddeningly difficult to even get started with the basics of observation necessary to get a new science underway. And of course, we are heading in the direction of piercing that barrier with a new method that delivers disciplined observation of actual, subjective experience with a precision and rigor that enables a true science to get a foothold.
Let’s do this thing.
Reflections
Here’s your chance to influence how I move forward by adding your reflections in the comments below.
How does this post land for you?
What in you feels like it is being spoken to in this post?
What questions are you left with? What are you most curious about?
What feedback would you like to offer me, in service to my being able to share this new work with you and the world?
What feedback could you offer toward improving my writing of this post?
Comments are open to all, and I do hope you will consider also subscribing so we can stay in the loop with one another as this evolves.
Thank you.
Thank you for being here, thank you for reading, and thank you for sharing your thoughts in the comments below. I look forward to meeting you soon.
One last note. I’d love for you to thoughtfully spread the word about Frontiers of Psychotopology. For example, reach out to someone you think would appreciate this, and tell them why. Alternatively, here on Substack, feel free to share with your beloved subscribers.