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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 [...]
You enter a world in which "effects" - amd I am not sure one should still use the same word - are brought about by differences.
Differences are the things that get onto a map.
I suggest to you, now, that the word "idea," in its most elementary sense, is synonymous with "difference."
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
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Q: Things which are still only seem to be still because we cannot see the motion. Is that right?
A: No, it is not right. I said that all you could see is motion. Even if an object is still it is visible only because of the motion of its parts. You cannot sense stillness, not comfort, nor balance. You can KNOW that you are comfortable, or in balance, but you must be uncomfortable, or lose your balance before your senses will respond.
[Walter Russell]
The Message of the Divine Iliad, Vol. II, p. 80
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[...] it is a major precept of modern structural linguistics that meaning is not a relation of identity between signifier and signified but a product of the differences, the signifying contrasts and relationships that exist at every level of language.
[...] language is always and everywhere a system of differential signs [...] meaning subsists in various structures of relationship and not in some ideal correspondence between sound and sense [...]
[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 85
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Related posts:-
Solid Ground
The Principle of Polarity
Balance
Sailing the Turbulent Seas
This, Not That
Everything and Nothing
All is Change
Infinite Doorways
The Colour Wheel
A Different Difference
Making it up as we go along
Mind Your Language
The Eternal Ideas
Short Cuts
