One Territory

Since I made the post below, I've changed my mind on what is more or less the main point.  In that post, I claimed that biological models of the body are maps (in the sense of "the map is not the territory") that have two territories, one being the body itself, the other being experience itself.

I've changed my mind on this based on the fact that a "map of the body" is not a map of experience itself, but just of the body.  To think otherwise would be to imply that experience is caused solely by the body.  In reality, experience owes the entire experienced world in addition to the body for its existence.

This leads to the question of what the map of all of experience is.  Is it possible to make a map of experience in the same way that a biological model of the body can be made as a map of the actual body?

I think that the way to achieve this is to make a map of all of experience-a map that would take as its object experience itself.  Such a map would not have to account for the intricacies of experience, since maps in general don't do that.  Rather, the map would in general account for the nature of the coupling between the organism and the environment.

Ideally, the map would specify itself, and this would of course be recursive.  However, I don't think that this should be a central concern from the beginning. It would be best to first try to map the experience of an animal that is not self reflexive, and then to introduce self reflection as a developmental addition to the basic map.  

Because I'm impatient, in the next post I want to address what form self reflection could take in such a map...

Two Territories With One Map?

When we think of the phrase "the map and the territory", we usually think of a single map and a corresponding single territory. Nevertheless, a single territory could yield different maps. Depending on what kind of information is desired, maps of a single territory can vary wildly-compare an anatomical map of the nervous system with the famous "map" of the human body that shows the different body parts scaled in proportion to their sensitivity. Clearly it is not difficult to create multiple maps from the same territory. Furthermore, the differences between the multiple maps are easy to understand: They are caused by (a) which particular features of the territory are incorporated into the map or (b) the manner in which these features are incorporated.

In addition to the same territory giving birth to multiple maps, is it possible for the same map to refer to two different territories.

Think of biological models of the body as maps.

It is here that the map (the model of the body) has two territories. There is the interpretation of the territory as being the viewed body (the object of the subject-object distinction), and the territory as the structure of first person experience, (which results from the systemic nature of the body).

Biological models of the body are frequently used to understand why bodies (our own and others) act in certain ways. If we accept experience as another territory of biological models, then those maps can be used to understand the relation between patterns in our phenomenological experience and the structure of our bodies. For example, I have a certain degree of conscious control over certain parts of my body, and I am only privy to certain bodily processes. Can anatomical maps of the human body and an understanding of systems biology can help to shed light on why our experience has the particular character that it does?

We understand the immediate physiological causes of a sneeze, or of an allergic reaction, regardless of whether they occur in our own body or in others. This is a different territory than the structure and regularities of our experience. The fact that we have the experience that we do is not completely suggested to us by existing biological models, although perhaps a super-intelligent observer could discern this. A biological model will affirm that we have the ability to move our arm by showing that how the appropriate muscles work. It will not immediately suggest that we can only exercise conscious control over certain parts of our bodies.

If we want to use biological models to understand conscious experience, we must learn to look for similarities between that experience and models of the body that causes it. Of course, there is the obvious, e.g., I experience an arm, therefore, the model must incorporate an arm. I'm suggesting that we can go further and say things like "I have voluntary control over a specific subset of body parts," therefore, the model must be one that makes sense of this fact, or somehow accounts for it.