What is Mapology?
Mapology may be the most advanced Theory of knowledge or Map of maps so far (Map 2005 ff.). This may also mean: a mapological shift or "mapological turn" in the end... (*)
| ____ Akutobhayâ |
- I am a map-maker.
- Sentence 1 as a visual map may become a linguistic map (etc.) within an English-reading map-maker, e.g., the reader of this paper (i.e., “You”?).
- Maps are more or less stable or "pre-stabilized" biases.
- My whole world is made up of maps, and of shifts between and within maps. This discovery of me being a map-maker (and being ABLE to play skillfully with maps) can also be called "consciousness". And in fact, there may never be any fact, act, interaction, navigation, theory, system, pattern, network, model or space without any map and map-maker...
- There may be a lot of ever MORE different (differentiated, selective, selected, methodically biased) local maps, which may mutually map, modify and extend each other within an ever more global (potential?) landscape:
visual maps, auditory maps, body maps, oculomotor maps, tactile maps, gustatory maps, odor maps, vestibular maps, tool maps ("mapping tools") … linguistic maps (including "translations", i.e., the mapping of one language onto another within an individual bilingual map-maker...), historical maps, juridical maps, economic maps, political maps, “sociological” maps, ethological maps, biogeochemical maps of "networks of interactions", physical maps (including blueprints, diagrams, voxel maps, probability maps, electron density maps, etc.), mathematical maps (including "functions", i.e., "map(ping)s"), cartographic maps, empathetic (“social”) map-maker maps, mapological maps (“theories of sciences”), etc.
And here is the point where some mapping fallacy (or ontological fallacy, or ontological bias) may come in: a linguistic map (e.g., the word “apple”) may not map some ’ontological object’ or ’matter’ or 'truth' or 'stable thing' (i.e., apple?) at all, but may ‘only’ map or “refer to” OTHER maps, e.g., to some visual, gustatory, odor, and/or tactile maps. Accordingly, there may be no such thing as a "map of maps", but only a shift from one (local...) map to another map...
- My Self consists of all activABLE – and: mappABLE? controllABLE? – maps, i.e., my Self is the more or less smooth "Potential landscape" of all activABLE maps. These maps may also be called playing-cards (in German: “Spielkarten”).
- There also seem to be maps and shifts that CAN NOT be activated nor self-initiated and nor co-controlled within my Self. These (thus) contingen maps may be called Umwelt or Not-Self. This contingency or NON-controllABILITY may thus critically depend on some non-predictABLE feedback from some seemingly "outside world".
And this "contingent uncertainty" may also be one stimulation or "reason" for a shift to scientific and religious maps, i.e., to seemingly hyperstable and absolute-total maps, games, methods, biases, and detours, e.g., while seeking (more or less methodically...) for some "evolutionary-historical causes", "big bangs", "first movers", "first causes" and "explanations" within a religious (and perhaps already biological-infantile bias), i.e., the search for stability, balance, homeostasis, and "truth", and the reduction of mis-matches, uncertainties, and unpredictable shifts (including some "unknown hour of death")... - Emotions are shifts.
- Volition is a shift or tension-tendency to a target map, i.e., a shift to an activABLE map, which may be “chosen” (selected, anticipated, expected, predicted, tended-to) out of several OTHER POSSibilities or maps within a “POTENTIAL landscape” containing myriads of such POSSIBLE “tendencies-tensions” and possible shifts from maps to maps...
- Some shifts – between maps, within maps, or to maps – may be discrete (i.e., more or less “abrupt”), or MORE or less continuous-contiguous (i.e., “blurred”). Thus, maps may mutually map each other in a MORE or less continuous-contiguous-coherent – and hence more or less stable – fashion. Hence, maps may be MORE or less stable or hard-wired – as in the case of prior beliefs or biases (i.e. already "pre-stabilized" maps)…
- Emotional shifts that are mapped may (thus) become feelings, i.e., “conscious” emotions, which may then be mapped and co-controlled further by linguistic maps (i.e., "linguistic detours") in turn, e.g., by words like “envy”, “jealousy”, “hate”, etc. One of the perhaps most crucial feelings is the feeling of a mis-match or conflict, e.g., between two maps that may "feed back" and map (on-)to each other... Besides, contingent mis-matches and feedbacks may also be methodically & voluntarily produced and pursued by some "critical scientific-technical" methods (investigations, tortures).
- Maps that are mapped in turn (e.g., by OTHER maps) may (thus) become conscious, too.
- There may be activABLE maps that CAN be mapped in addition (“explicit memory”).
- There may be activABLE maps that CAN NOT be mapped further (“implicit memory”).
- Different(iated) maps may map or co-control or “inhibit” each other mutually within a map-maker -- and within some “to-be-balanced” static-dynamic “Potential landscape”?
- Some maps and shifts may even become methodical detours, and thus co-controls with regard to OTHER maps and shifts.
- The POSSIBILITY of a map-maker to co-control its own games, maps and shifts by OTHER (different) maps, playing-cards, and detours (shifts) may be called Self-control (maps mapping maps), i.e., the mutual co-control of maps within a map-maker or Self.
- The MORE differentiated the maps within a map-maker, and (thus) the MORE POSSIBLE detours this map-maker may POSSESS, the MORE sensitive, RICH, and capABLE of Self-control such a map-maker may be.
- Empathy is the "social hypothesis" (i.e., the map) according to which “other” bodies than just “my body” may also be ABLE to make maps, i.e., a map-maker’s hypothesis that there may be "OTHER” map-makerS or “SelVES” than just “I” or “my Self”.
This pseudo-symmetric (mirroring) mapping of map-maker features or SelVES onto “other” bodies ("similar" body maps), and this fatal intermingling of ("similar") bodies and SelVES may be called "hypersocial fallacy" or "hypersocial bias". This bias may be extremely dangerous in some daily “social practice” (i.e., "social simulations" and "mind games"), as in “social” feelings or "idola fori" like “envy”, “jealousy”, “hate”, "death", “we”, “humans”, “our society”, “we Germans”, “the Jews”, “the Americans”, “the capitalists”, “females”, “males”, “children”, “parents”, or in “socio-politic-economic” and “game-theoretic” maps in general.
But there are neither some "Jews" nor some "Aryans" nor some "Germans" nor some “Afroamericans”, but only bodies (or perhaps individidual genomes) that may all "struggle" for some "stability", with individual strategies to perpetuate themselves (i.e., their bodies, their Selves, or their maps), i.e., that may all "want" to be sustained & "understood" (vulgo: "to be loved")... - Some maps may be fictitious carrots (i.e., fallacies...) that stimulate the (PRO-)CREATION of maps, i.e., the production, extension, and expansion of ever MORE maps and biases... For example: the idea (i.e., the map) of some “History” (i.e., the historical bias) may be a fictitious carrot or some pretext fuelling the (pro-)creation of ever MORE historical maps (texts, stories) via historical methods (detours), including detours and contingent mirrors like visual maps (e.g., paintings, sculptures, books, films) or linguistic maps (e.g., textual (re-)sources, archives, libraries). Accordingly, there may be no "History" at all, but only stories or historical maps told by more or less intelligent (i.e., more or less RICH) story-tellerS (i.e., map-makerS).
- Esthetic and technical and scientific methods may consist of Self-stimulating (and systematic) playings (games) with contingent and non-contingent maps and shifts within a map-maker. For example, musical artists play with auditory (etc.) shifts and maps, and try to expand and extend and refine these maps ever MORE... And: the "best" (and mostly anonymous) artists have never looked for money nor social recognition nor sexual display, but only for absolute beauty and perfection, i.e., for some total stability (stable attractors) or slightest shifts...
- Philosophical methods may consist of some Self-s(t)imulating (and: Self-critical? introspective?) playing with (seemingly?) non-contingent maps & shifts within a map-maker. That means: shifting around with my maps within some simulation mode or "day-dreaming" or "default-mode" for the sake of generating, extending, and expanding ever MORE possibilities and possible maps (i.e., "new ideas")...
- Within neurobiological maps, the linguistic term “map-maker” may be replaced by the linguistic map “brain” or “nervous system”, and the word “map” may be replaced by “neural map” (i.e., “neural activity pattern”). However, strictly (mapologically) speaking, it is neither some “brain” nor some “State” nor some “Society” that CAN “feel”, but only a map-maker.
- Within neuro-computational maps, the term “map-maker" may be replaced by "POTENTIAL landscape", and the terms “maps” and “shifts” may be replaced by (static? pre-stabilized? temporarily stabilized?) “attractors” (or: “attractor landscapes”) and "dynamic" “trajectories” (or: "transients") respectively. Out of such a dynamic “Potential landscape” virtually (potentially...) containing myriads of superposed and permanently shifting attractor landscapes, only a few POSSibilities or maps or “states” may actually be active, realized, retrieved, reached, or attained in this very moment (“here and now”).
- Within evolutionary-biological maps, there may be the primordial idea of GROWTH, i.e., the idea of a shift to some ever MORE & ever BETTER & ever MORE predictABLE: e.g., the shift to ever MORE neural synapses, neural maps, cancer cells, bodies, mathematical maps, paintings, songs, riches, and money, or to ever MORE (Self-stimulating, Self-simulating…) and ever MORE differentiated maps and co-controls, i.e., ever BETTER mappings of some Self, SelVES, body maps, and contingent “Umwelt”...
Accordingly, maps – i.e., historically stabilized biases and temporarily stabilized prior beliefs that can still be modified and adapted – do never have to be ontologically or eternally true; they only have to be "good" (i.e., "fitting" or stable) enough for some rather ARBITRARY and short-living "survival" and "replication" of ever MORE bodies (or genes, publications, papers, texts, books, or WHATever)... Similarly, scientific maps and (experimental) mappings by so-called "scientists" do not have to be true either, because they only have to "function" within functional (methodical) circuits and networks.
The historical emergence of short-living stabilities and stabilizations (evolutionary selections) may ONLY be a Self-organizing consequence of all those "blind" growths and mutual mappings and mutual (historical) stabilizations... And: "variability begets stability", i.e., there is no (populational) stability without any (slightly and ever shifting...) variability.
- Not all map-makerS may be “damned” to make maps – and some few map-makers may already have become aware of (i.e., have been able to map) the problem of maps, and the problem of stability & shifts on all levels...
- And those who will have the “best” (i.e., the most stable? the most perfectly shifting?) maps...
(Oliver Elbs, April 2005 ff.)
Keywords: map-maker, map, mapping, shift, stability
(*) A similar text like the one above has already been published in my short book entitled "MAP 2020" (Munich, 2006) — see Publications — but I know that no body has read all this at all...