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Originally Posted by Rade
... is it possible that the Consciousness is a thing that exists is 'outside' the Map, in the same way the ontological elements of the Territory are things that exist outside the Map ?...
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[EDIT] I am reversing the use of "exists" and "is real" in order for them to be consistent with the statement that "The Territory exists" and "existence exists". [/EDIT]
Okay, what Korzybski (and I) was trying to do was make sense of the world, in the simplest possible way with the fewest assumptions. He assumed there was no mystic solution, no supernatural solution. Your explanation is quite complicated and gives definitions to Map and Territory that Korzybski did not intend.
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...In other words, in the same way ontological elements of Territory interact with senses, which then send ...data signals to the Map about the ontological elements... is it possible that the Map ... is nothing more than the sum total of these ...data signals as information and are then given to something outside of this matrix of information--namely the Consciousness, a thing that exists within the mind having identity separate from the Map ?......then two different Territories must exist...
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See? All these extra layers and entities are not necessary. Additionally, I haven't said much about the Mind, except to say that it occurs within the brain -- as dynamic patterns -- that from one POV are electro-chemical signals, and from another POV is a self-organizing semantic structure.
"Quantum" doesn't come into this at all.
Again, from Korzybski, there is just ONE reality. He calls it the Territory. What the human brain does is to build a replica, a simulacrum of the Territory. This replica is constructed of memories and semantic structures (think of Lego structures, only the Lego blocks are "words"). This replica of reality, he calls the Map. Ideally, the Map should match the Territory, point for point. But it doesn't and it can't. The brain is just not big enough to to model the whole world, not even the parts we can see. But for our purposes, we can say that the Map corresponds to the Territory pretty damn well.
If you start putting Consciousness (self-awareness) outside the Map, then you might as well put it physically outside the brain. This leads nowhere. DeCartes made the same mistake. The Mind, all parts of the Mind, are physically in the brain, and therefore, they MUST be part of the Map. The very concept of "I", aware of itself, is not a physical object, not even an invisible physical object. The "I" in our Minds is a logical construct, a semantic construct. And the individual Lego blocks, are the atomic elements of Languaging itself. And Languaging is the concept and process of storing, retrieving, communicating, evaluating, and assigning meaning to Information. The Mind, the "I", is built out of Languaging.
So, we don't have to get supernatural here, or propose multiple Territories or multiple Maps.
We don't have to bring in the Id, the Conscious, the Subconscious, or intelligence. These are all just made-up words attempting to give labels to different aspects of the Mind.
Finally, we can speak of "exists" versus "is real". Let's define "exists" as the fundemental property of anything that has mass, physical size, energy, form or substance. Everything that exists is also real. But there are things which are "real" which do not exist.
The Territory is real and it exists. The Map is real, but it does not exist. Just as the letters "book" are
NOT really a book, so is any simulacrum constructed entirely out of logical/semantic Lego blocks
NOT the thing that is simulated. But the simulacrum is very real [we interact with it!!!], and it can be compared to the existence it simulates.
The Mind, imprisoned within the skull, is totally cut off from all contact with the Territory. The Mind only has access to the Map. This is where the Mind occurs, lives, loves, laughs, has sex, learns to read and write, wonders at the stars in the sky, goes to work every day, surfs the Internet, understands gravity and how to make cornbread, and carries on deep involved discussions about the Nature of Reality. Your entire subjective world is the Map. And you are an element of that Map. You are real.
Does that make more sense?
