This quote from Dan McClellan highlights one of the central problems in modern human cognition and society. But it needs some elaboration in order to properly equip us to understand the issues he is concerned with.

“Hey everybody. Two quotes from graduate school that I still remind myself of every single day.

“Map is not territory. All models are wrong.”
“Some models are useful.”

And both of these quotes are intended to highlight the fact that all of our conceptual frameworks and models and categories are not isometric with the world around us. They are imperfect models that we generate in order to facilitate more efficient and convenient and consistent thinking and communicating about the world around us. But they are not the world around us. And when we treat them as if they were, we can very easily distort the world around us; particularly when we use them prescriptively or predictively outside the contexts for which they were developed.

And at that point, that’s usually because our priority is no longer understanding the world around us — our priority is curating a position within the world around us.”

Dan McCLellan

In the beginning of this quote, he mentions a famous trope from Alfred Korzybski, the founder of a discipline (Null-A / General Semantics) that examines problems in representational cognition. The simple quote is “The map is not the territory”. This is a revolutionary idea for moderns, because we are scripted to think with tokens and models, and thus confuse them with what we are trying to point at with them. No one thinks the phrase ‘the sun’ IS the sun, but our modern modes of confusion cause these things to become confused in consciousness, so that we treat that which is pointed at as if it were ‘merely’ the pointer (category, word, idea, model, concept, etc.’ One of Korzybski’s insights was to fully reject what he calls ‘the IS of IDENTITY’. Simply stated, this means that in thinking and relating, he maintains the awareness of the monumental difference between pointers and that which we employ them to differentiate. ‘Whatever a tree may be, it CANNOT be a tree.’ A tree is a conceptual representation. Actual situations have little or nothing to do with the behavior in humans that results in such representations (or tokens, pointers, descriptions, etc).This is an example of formally rejecting the facticity of representations. Whatever ‘the facts’ may be (if indeed facts are something more reliable than other representations), they CANNOT be the representations we use to think or speak about them.

“All models are wrong.”

During the evolution of human cognition, our species underwent a cascade of transformations in which participated relationships (and thought) ‘collapsed’ toward the representations we use in thought. The resulting forms of thought and activity were necessarily extremely utilitarian, and dismissed most of what was previously felt, seen and understood about nature and human relationships within it.

This began when the idea of a ‘theory’ started to transform into something more like a law. Prior to this, theories were understood as useful perspectives with which we could speculate about the nature of beings, situations and phenomenon, but their ‘truth’ or facticity was intentionally ambiguous. The idea was to gain insight, rather than to determine truth. This is a more or less analogical method, where multiple useful analogies (even should they conflict) may be held in mind without the necessity of determining the truth value of any or all of them.

This notion of theory is completely distinct from how moderns (generally) conceive of both theories and facts. Around the time of Gallileo, a significant early contributor to this process, theories that could ‘save the appearances’ (i.e. explain most or all observations and make reliable predictions) arose which vied for a new status in human thought and, by extension, perception. The basic idea of a theory transformed from a useful perspective to something profoundly more compelling: facts. Models such as Gallileo’s were not trying to say how things might be seen, but rather what they were and were actually doing. This ambitious imperative quickly dominated the minds of human beings and societies, and was instrumental in generating the explosive emergence of machines and models of reality that surreptitiously declared the meaning, value, function and identity of whatever attracted the theorizing attentions of humans and societies.

That which is — cannot be encompassed by language, models or theories. There is no ‘true’ theory of anything, because all theories rest upon axiomatic assumptions that cannot themselves be explained within the theory. Theories are representations, models, and they are contrived within specific contexts that limit the scope of their reasonable or useful authority as well as their explanatory power. We can think of them as overlays or templates that both highlight certain features of the concerns of their creators and invent or rearrange the tokens we use to represent features of the context being examined. The result is a model. Such models are, in Korzybski’s terms ‘necessarily false to facts’, meaning that they are mere conveniences of description, intentional differentiation, and utilitarian intention.

Consider the word rabbit, and that to which it points. In representational systems, the word doesn’t tell us what it means or encompasses or excludes. We determine that according to context and intention or purpose. If I imagine a rabbit ‘in the wild’, what I imagine will be largely determined by my habits and familiar purposes. Is a rabbit in the wild ‘the same entity’ as one in a cage? In language, yes. In reality, no. Is a dissected rabbit a rabbit or a corpse? When I cook one for dinner, is that still reasonably a rabbit? It depends, of course on our concerns, but none of the tokens or representations capture the pre-theoretical, pre-categorical and pre-clinical referent: the rabbit as a mode of being and becoming, a mode that is at once distinct and dependent upon all of its histories, relationships and situations. Indeed, the rabbit is a ‘mode of everything everywhere’, but language can neither encompass nor explain this.

It turns out that reality and our minds are fundamentally pre- and meta- theoretical. In fact, it is the ‘beyond’ of representational thought in our minds with which we form and become compelled by the products of representational cognition. The actual universe is ‘beyond’ all models, and so, too the minds with which we consider such matters.

As our theories became more mechanical, they became more compelling due to the authority they acquired by becoming both effectively predictive and presecriptive (telling us what could, should and should not be done). Once we could use a theory to somewhat accurately (at some scale) predict futures events or consequences, our species became vulnerable to collapsing identity itself into the theories and models we produce as representational cognitives. Theories must not be confused with truth or even facts; the exception being a matter of degrees of reliability in specific contexts from and for which models and facts originate and function adequately to produce the desired ‘conveniences’ of predictive or prescriptive efficacy. What we call facts are features of models whose scope is necessarily limited to the contexts from which they were derived.

“Some models are useful.” Again, within the appropriate context and with the necessary limitations of scope that must apply. In essence, models and facts are ‘toys’ of perspective and descriptive form. When they are confused with ‘laws’ or ‘the truth’, or their scope undergoes generalization to universals, the opportunities native to human intelligence collapse into their products, and the result is a world that is both relationally uninhabitable, and lethal to life (and intelligence) on Earth.

Reality is not our models or theories. It is transcendental to them. So when we exchange this transcendental (and thus ambiguous) nature for our tokens and conveniences, we begin to live in a world that does not and cannot exist — except in our representations. Once this has taken place, if we then double down on the models and representations, we are inclined to make catastrophic decisions and engage in lethal behaviors — because we are living in the world of tokens and ideas, rather than the actual world of relationships and participation. The resulting decisions will nearly always have terrible consequences. Indeed, we are predicting and prescribing… delusional imperatives born of the worship of concepts over existence itself.

“And at that point, that’s usually because our priority is no longer understanding the world around us — our priority is curating a position within the world around us.” This final part of the quote is interesting, but could be more forcefully stated. “… because our priority is no longer understanding, but giving the appearance of true knowledge, for the sake, primarily of utility and/or domination.” The aspects of human intelligence and cognition that are concerned with models and facts have the peculiar danger of desiring that everything be reduced to them so that the appearance of authority arises. This ‘false authority’ is one of the oldest and deadliest dangers native to our cognitive history and moment. Once everything has been collapsed to models and tokens, they can be compared, and it becomes possible to assert that some model or fact ‘is the truth’. Note the word ‘the’ here. It means ‘the only, the final word, the true declaration of meaning, identity, action or value. There is no such thing and there mustn’t ever be; yet this is the way we are trained, generally, to think, behave, and attend the products of categories, models, language and ideas.