Radical Agnosticism
“In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”
On Exactitude in Science, Jose Luis Borges*
With the writings of Alfred Korzybski (the father of general semantics), Robert Anton Wilson, and a dash of Taoism and Buddhism as my temporary map, I start off with the proposition that while there may indeed be a Universe, it’s impossible to definitively prove, and unimportant anyway. (Why it’s impossible to prove and why it doesn’t matter become apparent once the idea unfolds.)
Everything we know, we know because of the indivisible pairing of mind and sense organs. There is no eye — there is the eye-brain. There are no taste buds, there is the tastebud/brain complex. The ear-brain, the skin-brain, and so on. We receive sensory information through an organ and its immediately transformed into electrical signals the brain can manipulate.
The human brain doesn’t have “direct knowledge” of anything at all, merely signals ostensibly coming from outside oneself which the brain transforms into knowledge, sensory data, and qualia, for example.
In order to comprehend the world, the brain makes maps (in most people reinforced by an insidious and obnoxious devil, lifelong in duration, known as “belief”) which describe the various territories of the universe but do not in any way approximate it.
Since people believe these maps are the territory (the menu is the lunch) they get quite heated when confronted by others who do not share their particular map! This doesn’t necessarily mean (nor not mean) that anyone is wrong. As long as each map is internally consistent with the rules which guide it, two maps which do not resemble each other in any way are quite capable of describing the exact same territory!
On a mundane level, we can think of a topographical map of a county and a map which describes the population of a county. Both are describing in this case actual territory, neither agree with each other, and both are right, as long as the maps themselves follow the rules inherent in their geneses. It turns out that our map-making function goes much further than mere roadmaps, however!
We’re brought up with a system of beliefs and basic tenets by our families, communities, media, institutions, etc. This system in and of itself, which we come to believe is “the way the world works” is itself a first-order map of the Universe.
Someone born in 1988 in the Bay Area might be brought up as a secular humanist, with all the attendant trappings such inculcation entail. Another person born the same day in Kansas might be brought up as a God-fearing Christian, a monotheist with a very old conception of the earth being the omphalos which emanates above, the heavens, and below, hell. Most people, thinking they are learning about the territory and not the map wouldn’t even consider changing at a later date!
Later on, people tend to learn science. This is one of the most successful maps of all time. It’s so successful that it seems on the verge of discovering its own maphood… if it weren’t for scientists, of course. As someone who adores science, and as a 20 year student of astrology (a vanquished map much of whose ink is still being recovered to this day!) I love when scientific materialists and metaphysical astrologers come to blows over their maps of the Universe, each describing the same territory in different ways. Both maps, if adhered to strictly according to the rules inherent in the generation of each map, will describe the Universe perfectly, and allow one to navigate through life. But they aren’t for the same purpose, really, and are useful at different times.
Both are simply ways of perceiving the world, cataloging everything in it, and projecting into the shadowy and possibly fictitious future what could come next.
So now on top of our fundamental map which has been instilled in us from childhood and forms the universe in its image around us, we have a map of that map, a second level abstraction or metamap which helps us to organize data as we grow in the world. Science for most people in the modern world, of course. A learned person in the Renaissance may have used a map constructed from Hellenistic astrology and medicine, Platonism, folklore and such and the inevitable noise which creeps up in maps (I suppose we can call the inevitable discrepancy between the Territory and the Map “noise” — gobbledygook, errors, and deliberate falsifications, accumulated over ages and never questioned or noticed.)
Just yesterday, i read this article about a new way of creating maps which use computers to go through all of the databases of scientific scholarly papers and note details such as which disciplines most regularly interrelate, which institutions have the most impact, and much more. In essence, with the help of computers, these information scientists (I think information science should be called metaphysics but i guess the name was taken!) were able to create a map of a map of a map. It’s a fascinating read and entirely germane to this subject.
Now we have three levels of abstraction of the Universe and still no direct knowledge of it. Merely the menus we’ve created so we can most wisely choose our lunches! One last thing before I finish. Most people, not realizing that they’ve only been experiencing maps of the Universe their whole lives and not the Universe itself, will be stuck in whatever default map they’re given by the happenstance of their particular upbringing. But given that two people can be correct while diametrically opposed to each other, I think it behooves us to loosen our grip on our favorite maps and use whichever map is the most useful at the time!
This is where the radical in “Radical Agnosticism” comes from. We needn’t merely say “I don’t know.” All we need is the seed of a map to generate it from its core propositions and voila! Onward we travel through, well, the same territory as ever, but perhaps we’ll find a treasure or two along the way! Science is useful, but science isn’t “True” in the absolute sense, in that it exactly approximates the Universe. Science is a useful abstraction for accelerating culture. Mapswitchers will be the ultimate philosophical first responders of the future!
“All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.” Robert Anton Wilson
