Map & Territory

the map is not the territory.

"What is it in the territory that gets onto the map?" We know the territory does not get into the map. That is the central point about which we here are all agreed. Now, if the territory were uniform, nothing would get onto the map except its boundaries, which are the points at which it ceases to be uniform against some larger matrix.

What gets onto the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure, difference in surface, or whatever. Differences are the things that get onto a map.

[...] You enter a world in which "effects" - amd I am not sure one should still use the same word - are brought about by differences. That is, they are brought about by the sort of "thing" that gets onto the map from the territory. This is difference.

I suggest to you, now, that the word "idea," in its most elementary sense, is synonymous with "difference." Kant, in the Critique of Judgment [...] argues that in a piece of chalk there are an infinite number of potential facts. The Ding an sich(thing in itself), the piece of chalk, can never enter into communication or mental process because of this infinitude. The sensory receptors cannot accept it; they filter it out. What they do is to select certain facts out of the piece of chalk, which then become, in modern terminology, information.

I suggest that Kant's statement can be modified to say that there is an infinite number of differences around and within the piece of chalk. There are differences between the chalk and the rest of the universe, between the chalk and the sun or the moon.

And within the piece of chalk, there is for every molecule an infinite number of differences between its location and the locations in which it might have been. Of this infinitude, we select a very limited number, which become information. In fact, what we mean by information - the elementary unit of information - is a difference which makes a difference [...]

What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. The territory is Ding an sich and you can't do anything with it. Always the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps of maps, ad infinitum. All "phenomena" are literally "appearances."

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.455, 457-61