Total Eclipse

Reading Thomas Nagel’s seminal “What is it like to be a bat?” There is a mantra I find myself repeating:

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY.

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Some food for thought, emphasis mine.
[There's a paper here, waiting to be written, about the relation of a presupposed subjective character of experience, the myth of the given, esoteric and exoteric belief, reductionism and emergentism and the Map-Territory relation]

“…I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won’t go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails—simply in virtue of our mental concepts—that the system is conscious.” – Nagel

“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory.” – Baudrillard.

“One of the forms taken by the Myth of the Given is the idea that there is, indeed must be, a structure of particular matter of such fact that (a) each fact can not only be noninferentially known to be the case, but presupposes no other knowledge either of particular matters of fact, or of general truths; and (b) such that the noninferential knowledge of facts belonging to this structure constitutes the ultimate court of appeal for all factual claims, particular and general, about the world.” – Sellars

Tagged as Alfred Korzybski, Consciousness, dualism, esoteric belief, exoteric belief, Jean Baudrillard, map, Map-Territory Relationship, Mind, Mind-Body Problem, Myth of the Given, noninferential knowledge, Shay Brog, simulacra, territory, The Problem of Consciousness, Thomas Nagel, Wilfrid Sellars, שי ברוג + Categorized as Meta/Personal, Philosophy