"The map is not the territory," as the saying goes. The only life-size, atomically detailed, 100% accurate map of California is California. But California has important regularities, such as the shape of its highways, that can be described using vastly less information—not to mention vastly less physical material—than it would take to describe every atom within the state borders. Hence the other saying: "The map is not the territory, but you can't fold up the territory and put it in your glove compartment."

A paper map of California, at a scale of 10 kilometers to 1 centimeter (a million to one), doesn't have room to show the distinct position of two fallen leaves lying a centimeter apart on the sidewalk. Even if the map tried to show the leaves, the leaves would appear as the same point on the map; or rather the map would need a feature size of 10 nanometers, which is a finer resolution than most book printers handle, not to mention human eyes.

Reality is very large—just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I don't mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny, comparatively speaking.

Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map.

But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, "Oh, look, I'm compressing two things into one point on my map." What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it.

A sufficiently young child, or a sufficiently ancient Greek philosopher, would not know that there were such things as "acoustic vibrations" or "auditory experiences". There would just be a single thing that happened when a tree fell; a single event called "sound".

To realize that there are two distinct events, underlying one point on your map, is an essentially scientific challenge—a big, difficult scientific challenge.

Sometimes fallacies of compression result from confusing two known things under the same label—you know about acoustic vibrations, and you know about auditory processing in brains, but you call them both "sound" and so confuse yourself. But the more dangerous fallacy of compression arises from having no idea whatsoever that two distinct entities e...

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