Scott, others
"There is no terrain. It's maps all the way down." This seems to me as much
a half truth as the equally simple belief that Dr Johnson's rock against
which he refuted something or other is 'objective' reality.
Taken at face value your statement is a form of idealism. But it also lacks
internal consistency, since it takes one half of a relationship and reifies
it. By this I mean that the word 'map' only makes sense in the context of a
'terrain'. Mapping is about a particular form of relationship, similar to
modelling. The relationship of a model to that being modelled seems to me
clear enough. The model extracts certain information from a more complex
reality, and presents that in a way that can be used for certain purposes.
So the usual map of the London Underground gives useful information about
the serial arrangement of train stations, and the linkages between lines,
but only a vague and often misleading view of the geographical location of
the stations, which can be shown on another type of map. Mapping is a form
of human activity, a purposeful simplification.
The aspect of your statement that is useful is the recognition that there is
no level of human understanding that cannot be seen as a form of mapping, of
extraction of meaning from a more complex whole. One reason that most of the
well known physicists of the past century were mystics in outlook was
because they became aware that the scientific understanding of reality was a
very incomplete mathematical model. It worked well enough as a model, but
was inadequate to 'explain' lived experience. Something more than
mathematics was required to do justice to that experience.
This is where Pirsig, in my opinion, takes the appropriate middle road. He
argues that a SOM is a useful enough map for certain contexts. The problem,
as Wilber shows, is when anything that falls outside that map is minimised
or denied. The so-called 'objectivity' of science has been a huge problem
only because it denied any value to the 'subjective' dimensions of human
experience. Otherwise it becomes just another more or less useful map, great
as a basis for technological innovation, useless for art criticism.
The MOQ is also a useful map, in that it creates a model of how we as human
beings might know 'our' world, while accepting that the world is not the map
that we can construct of it. It is a meta-map. It is, at best, as far as we
can go in understanding the world, but it omits as undefinable our total
experiencing of the world, while rightly pointing to the primacy of that
experience.
The suggestion that it is maps all the way down is a subtle inversion of
this. At its worst it becomes an idealism that denies any reality outside
our mental mapping of it, something Pirsig is careful to avoid. It ignores
the 'arrow of simplification' that underlies all mapping and modelling. And
it ignores the immediacy of experience, what Pirsig calls 'quality' or
'value', which is not mapped, but experienced. The mapping is the static
latching. It is a human processing of a more primordial experience.
The mystic, in my view, is dedicated to living this immediate experience,
and recognises the distancing that always occurs when it is mapped. Hence
the mystic disempowers the familiar maps, which always use past experience
to predict the future, and concentrates on the immediate moment, unmapped,
but nonetheless real. To the mystic, the statement "It's maps all the way
down" is just another barrier to immediacy.
John B
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