The Territory
38Benya Fallenstein
12LoganStrohl
4LoganStrohl
12Duncan Sabien (Inactive)
7LightStar
7Phil Scadden
7Duncan Sabien (Inactive)
4MalcolmOcean
2ChristianKl
3brook
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This comment is about something I'm confused about, and I'm sufficiently confused about it that I can't write it as a clearly-articulated question or statement. Its current state is more like a confused question that my brain in trying to untangle as I'm reading this sequence. So I'll probably meander, and the meandering probably won't come together into a clear satisfying thing by the end of this comment.
A big reason I'm interested in Logan-style naturalism is that you (Logan) frequently say things about it that resonate with ways in which I approach my own work. The most salient instance is your concept of "pre-conceptual intimacy":
In pre-conceptual intimacy, they're making a lot of fascinating observations and surprisingly quick improvements to relevant parts of life. But they're also feeling very confused and disoriented, because their pre-existing concepts around the problem just don't seem to make sense anymore, and they don't have new stories about what's going on yet either. They tend to utter phrases like, "Is memory even a thing?", "How could I ever have thought that?", and "I really have no idea what's going on with this, and it turns out I never have."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EKc4RfKhPRmnLtRXn/research-facilitation-invitation
There is a particular mode that I'm in when I do what I think of as my best work, and this paragraph reminds me of it. Although, hm, now that I actually have it in front of me, most of the details don't quite match… but I think that's mostly because most of the words in this paragraph are about pre-existing concepts, and when I'm in this mode, I mostly just don't pay attention to any concepts that don't currently fit.
–I think I maybe only feel particularly disoriented when I have pre-existing concepts that don't fit, but still feel like they encapsulate something important that I don't want to lose sight of?–
Anyway, when I try to correct for these things, "pre-conceptual intimacy" seems to resonate a lot with this mode that I sometimes work in.
However, an aspect of the description above that still doesn't match is that, when I'm working in this mode, I'm not in any very obvious way making any observations. It seems like most of what I'm doing is that I'm having a vague confused intuition, and I, uh. I bump them around in my head until they maybe turn into concepts that make sense, or are at least a little more like that? (Turns out that I don't actually particularly know how to describe the thing.)
It wouldn't be incorrect, I think, to say that I'm looking at two parts of my map that are inconsistent with each other, and I'm trying to make them consistent, or I'm looking at one part of my map (my confused intuition) and I try to use it to fill in a different, blank part of my map.
There are ways to increase some kinds of knowledge that largely involve staring at maps. Perhaps your own map is not clearly labeled in places, or it’s somehow inconsistent with itself, or it doesn’t match the map of an expert.
[...]
But the main thing a cartographer ought to be focused on, the vast majority of the time, is the world itself.
This seems obviously right for literal cartography. I want to talk, as part of my meandering, about how it might apply to math. I don't actually feel confused about math, I just find it a helpful example.
It seems to me that, on the one hand, (most) math research could be described as being all about staring at some parts of your map and trying to use them to fill in other parts of your map. But–
Now I mean something like, “The thing that is made of something other than my own perceptions and interpretations. The thing that resists my expectations, according to its own rules. The thing that does not care what I think, or what I have happened to imagine.”
–but on the other hand, math certainly resists my expectations according to its own rules. Moreover, when I try to do prove a math result, I am in contact with that resistance: I get feedback from the territory (of math), even though it seems like in some sense it wouldn't be incorrect to say that all I am doing is to stare at different parts of my map.
I think this is somehow an important node in my confusion (though, again, I don't actually feel confused about math): When reading your posts, I seem to have formed a, uh, story? frame?, that says that {getting feedback from the territory} is important and that it is sort of the opposite of {merely staring at your map}. So if I think of doing math as both "getting feedback from the territory" and "nothing but staring at your map", that breaks that model.
Maybe this just means that I should not think of math proofs as happening all in the map; maybe I should say that because doing math proofs gives me feedback about the way that math resists my expectations, therefore by definition it is not happening all in my map.
…I feel uncomfortable and kind of dirty about the previous paragraph, and that's after working on it for a while trying to make it less bad. As written, it seems to be saying: I have formed a picture of a constellation in my head, and now I'm looking at the sky and there is no star where my mental picture says there should be one; and I now want to know whether the real constellation instead has this nearby star or that one. Sometimes it genuinely makes sense to ask "does this way of thinking about things feel more revealing, or that one?" But in this case, it just feels like a wrong question. The real thing inside me I would like to convey is that I'm mentally lightly touching on each of the two pictures I could draw, getting in touch with how both feel somewhat right but fairly wrong, because touching on what the world looks like from these two wrong perspectives jiggers something around in my head that makes me feel that I'm a little closer to resolving my confusion.
Maybe this just means that I should not think of math proofs as happening all in the map; maybe I should say that because doing math proofs gives me feedback about the way that math resists my expectations, therefore by definition it is not happening all in my map.
But suppose I'm a physicist. I spend some of my time doing experiments, and I spend some of my time thinking about physics and about my experiments, and as I do the latter, I frequently do math. I'm not interested in studying math, the thing I want to study is physics, but math is an important tool for doing so. And when I use this tool, it resists my expectations just as it does when I do math for its own sake; once I have a formal model of some physical phenomenon, math tells me something about what to expect from my physical observations in a way that does not care what I think, or what I happened to imagine. But it feels like in the case of physics, something important is captured by saying that my experiments are making direct contact with the territory of physics, whereas the math I do is all in my map.
Worse, consider Einstein when he said that if Eddington's attempt to verify General Relativity had failed, "Then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct." [1] At this point, he had obviously done a lot of math about GR, but the math couldn't have given him that confidence that the theory was correct; given how little empirical observation [2] it was based on, it must have been {philosophical arguments slash his sense of how physics worked} that allowed him to come to this conclusion. And for him to predict so well on so little data, his philosophical intuitions must somehow have had the power to resist expectations according to their own rules, not in the way physics experiments do, but kind of close to the way mathematical calculations do. But if we tried to say that Einstein's philosophical intuitions didn't happen in the map, then… would any sort of thinking that actually does anything useful count as "happening in the map"?
[1] Each source I've checked seems to give a slightly different quote and story, which, uuuh, but anyway.
[2] (Empirical observation distinguishing it from Newtonian mechanics, I mean.)
I think that I personally have a tendency to spend a lot of time thinking about my map, and that I could, in many domains I care about, benefit from noticing a bunch of low-hanging fruit in making more direct observations. But I don't actually think that {what I consider to be my highest-quality work} to be an example of this. I mean, that work is certainly informed by intuitions I've formed in contact with present day machine-learning systems, or by doing math, or by watching my own thinking. But it's not, I think, made of contact with these things, and my contact with the territory (AGI alignment) seems to me about as tenuous as Einstein's with his. I think that the best work I do is in fact made up of thinking about what some existing parts of my map can tell me about what should be in other parts of my map.
So what am I to make of naturalism, or "Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation"?
One story I could try to tell is that naturalism won't have much to tell me about the part of my work I consider most important. I could either say that "Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation" is false because sometimes you can come to deep understanding of the territory just by thinking about it; or I could perhaps say that it's true, and that just thinking is useful but isn't enough to give you deep mastery of the subject; or I guess I could say that my approach to my work is just fundamentally doomed.
This story may be true. But it doesn't currently ring true, because it doesn't explain why numerous things you've said about naturalism have had such a strong resonance with my model of my work process.
When I do my thing that is in fact mostly "just thinking about it", I have a distinction in my head that I track with my felt sense, which feels as if it's tracking "whether I'm interacting with the real thing, or merely making up stories about it". In the first case, I feel like I am in contact with something that can resist my expectations (although in truth this thing is itself made of anticipations).
I very much have habits for this kind of work that rhyme with patience: I approach it with a frame of mind that "isn't expecting to find answers today", that is looking at the feeling of the thought on the tip of my tongue and pokes around in that vicinity but isn't expecting to be able to articulate that thought by any particular point in time. I look at the problem from this perspective and from that perspective, and feel successful if this shifts something in my felt sense that makes me feel a little bit less confused.
And there is an experience and sensation there that, as a felt sense, very much resonates with the idea of peeling back interpretative layers and increasing sensation at the point of contact, and with the metaphor of being "naked" in contact with the thing.
Maybe all of this is me missing you and interpreting your words in terms of something I'm familiar with. But what I actually think is going on is that your words are painting a picture of a constellation in my head that sort-of-but-not-quite matches the stars I see in the night sky; and that there is some nearby picture that does make sense of what I'm seeing; but I, like, just really don't know what that picture looks like, yet. (And so I look at it from this wrong perspective and from that one, and notice how that shifts my felt sense of it a little and makes me feel a little less confused–which is why I had to write a long meandering semi-essay in order to be able to say anything detailed about it at all.)
I love this comment. I expect that whatever must be going on in your head for you to have written it is near the top of "good things that could plausibly result from my writing this essay series". I am delighted.
I, too, will now say some rambly things that are part of my process of thinking rather than any sort of conclusion. I predict that they will sound a lot more confident than I actually feel.
According to me, you're obviously interacting with the territory when you're doing math. (I say this even though I've never watched you math, and have only barely dipped my toes into math myself, which is perhaps suspicious. But I shall continue this line of thought.) You're almost certainly pressing your whole self up against the territory over and over again, sometimes lifting an arm and replacing it slightly differently when you feel a gap, some sensation of not-quite-the-right-fit-yet. How good you are at math probably depends a whole lot on how much integrity you have in your dedication to this contact (where "integrity" more often feels from the inside like "can't bring myself to have it be another way despite the struggle", as opposed to the "dutiful" way it sometimes looks from the outside as though it feels). This is most of the difference between "math" and "the fake math-like thing people often do in high school and sometimes undergrad before they begin to know what math is".
Since this is an intro series of essays, there's a TON of detail and nuance and complication I left out. One piece of nuance I ended up leaving out came up in discussion with Robin, one of my alpha readers.
(Sorry, people who are reading this before the sequence has finished publishing. I'm about to talk about something from two essays ahead, which Benya has seen but you have not. You might want to wait a few days before continuing.)
In one of my drafts, I claimed that, "A memory of an arm involves greater presence of a contacted than does the description of a fictional arm in a novel. A photograph has more presence than a memory." (The final draft says something similar, but hopefully a bit more clearly.) And this sort of tripped Robin up. At first they were like "Wait that's wrong!" Then they mulled it over a bit and ended up writing,
> okay, I think I'm finally getting what you meant to point at here (and correct me if I'm wrong): you're pointing at a spectrum of territory-ness, of there-ness, of what can be contacted.
> (I think you call this "presence" later on? okay, presence is actually a pretty good word for it.)
> and so when it comes to looking at the territory we'd call "arm", you're asserting that the following scenarios start with the most presence and decrease in order:
> touching an arm > photograph of an arm > memory of an arm > description of an arm in a novel
> ?
> i think part of my initial confusion was also that "memory" is often the sort of contacted that I mean to engage with, and so when you were asserting it had less presence than a photograph, a part of me was like, "woah that's wrong!!!"
They're totally right here, at least about what I think. Somewhere, in some previous draft that I can't find right now, I had a footnote, probably in this essay ("The Territory"), which said something relevant about Focusing. I really wish I could find that ultimately omitted footnote. But anyway, I think the main thing that Focusing has going for it, compared to most other introspective methods, is its insistence on making and maintaining contact with the territory. The region of territory you're contacting during Focusing is your own feelings/thoughts/attitudes etc. And the reason it's such a huge breakthrough for so many people, I conjecture, is that they're used to imagining that the map/territory distinction is the same as the internal/external distinction, so their heuristics and intuitions about how to engage with the the territory by default turn off when they try to deal with their own minds. Or something like that. But in fact their own minds are part of the territory, and you get different results when you treat your mind as part of the territory instead of treating it as (what? I'm not sure either! I too am a bit confused! Treating it as a story that follows story rules? Treating it as fundamentally mysterious? Treating it as the representations of it in other people's heads? All of these seem like things people do to their inner workings, an not much like things cartographers do to rivers.).
I suspect that the map/territory distinction itself is best thought of as a kind of cognitive first aid. (It's better to have tourniquets than to not have tourniquets, because otherwise people bleed to death. But there's a lot more to medicine than first aid, and a tourniquet will never reattach a severed arm.) Though at some point in a person's cognitive development, that's true of just about any concept. I suspect that what really matters is the quality/methodology/attitude of engagement, rather than the distinction between what-sort-of-thing-you're-engaging with, and the map/territory distinction is merely instrumental in leading a lot of people toward a different, frequently-better-for-epistemic-rationality quality of engagement, much as Focusing's emphasis on the body as a source of information acts as a bridge that lets people introspect in a new kind of way.
All of this discussion gets at the motivation behind the next (half-)essay in this sequence, "On Realness". My investigation of "realness" began as a puzzle: Everything that exists is real, right? Like by definition? So how come some things seem more real than others?
I think somewhere in that comment I meant to link to my essay on primitive introspection, but never got around to it. I think I meant to say something about how the most useful sense organ for receiving data about math, whatever that is, is the prefrontal cortex, and the reason naturalism stuff keeps resonating with you is because naturalism is largely about improving your PFC-qua-sense-organ the same way a novice perfumer is in the process of improving their nose-qua-sense-organ. Maybe.
Just a smidge of a reply, because I haven't grokked all of the above but this felt maybe useful:
Math (and certain ways of doing logic in general) has an unusual property in that it is an extremely parsimonious map? It's a map that clings super tightly to the territory, with unusually little in the way of the problems gestured at in the image below.
So maybe that resolves the distinction between "wait, amn't I in full contact with the territory?" and "wait, amn't I also just staring at my map?"
Unlike most maps, math/logic don't throw a wide lasso around lots and lots of points; they're skeletal and precise, and so it's less the case that you will lose track of the difference between your map and the thing your map is mapping.
Maybe.
Snippet of thought.
This feels insightful.
I have experienced incremental_progress-towards-a-clearer-model_of_reality, which feels like one of the highest praise one aspiring rationalist can give another.
Fascinating. As someone who has used map and compass from almost as long as I can remember, work with maps everyday and having lived most of my life pre-cellphone, your description was also an insight into another way of looking at the world. What is obvious to one is not obvious to another and I suspect I would get quickly lost in other worlds you inhabit.
Can I recommend that you do a little reading on geomorphology? I first read a textbook on that at high school and it changed the way I looked at the world. Landscapes talked back to me. Studying geology and making geological maps massively reinforced it. You can anticipate what the landscape will do as you trasverse it. Like geological mapping, you are doing constant bayesian updates. Building a model in your head, making predictions and then a very short time later comparing it to what is in the territory itself.
One of the drawbacks of having been a beta reader is having much less in the way of substantive commentary to offer (since it all got incorporated into the final draft).
But I will note that "confusing purpose for substance" seems like a really big deal when it comes to understanding humans, and How To Do Humaning Better.
We are really, really good at confusing purpose for substance.
A lot of what you're pointing at here reminds me of an idea I had for illustrating how the brain hemispheres work (based on Iain McGilchrist's new model, not the old debunked models from the 60s). I had an image of a comic or something depicting the two hemispheres as hiking partners, the left hemisphere (LH) with its face buried in the map and the right hemisphere (RH) looking around at the territory. And there could be a series of short stories showing how if they're not able to talk to each other they can get in various confusions, but how if they are able to coordinate effectively then the RH can help the LH update the map, and the LH's map can help make sense of the fully-detailed reality of the territory.
"Pre-conceptual intimacy" seems to point very much at the RH's way of attending to the world in general. A quote from a twitter thread of mine, paraphrasing McGilchrist: "whatever we experience comes to us first – it “presences” to us in unpreconceived freshness – in the RHem"
I've found understanding the nature of the brain hemispheres to be one of the most useful models I've taken in over the last few years, particularly for improving my relationship between map & territory and noticing how my attention affects what I experience. So I'd highly recommend it to you Logan and anyone who's interested in these questions you're exploring.
Ways Of Attending is a great short intro but costs $20 which is silly given that it's basically a long essay, like 30 pages. I've written a thorough summary of it (about half the length of the whole book) in this twitter thread. (I've also written a bit about it in this LW comment about how people are confused when they're saying "system 1" & "system 2") Then there's also The Master and his Emissary, his longer book with a couple thousand citations.
And there could be a series of short stories showing how if they're not able to talk to each other they can get in various confusions, but how if they are able to coordinate effectively then the RH can help the LH update the map, and the LH's map can help make sense of the fully-detailed reality of the territory.
It took me a bit to figure out the abbreviations. It would be helpful to introduce the abbreviation when you mention the left hemisphere and right hemisphere the first time for easier reading.
This elicited in me a very specific kind of joy I first experienced reading ZAMM, and for which I have made all too little time ever since. I have nothing substantial to say beyond that I find your prose delightful in the same way I find delight in Original Seeing. Thank you!
(Copying over FB reactions from while reading) There’s something that feels familiar so far. For myself and when I’m working with clients, I often encourage experiments and journaling about the experience as they go. Part of the reason is uncertainty about the result, but another part is taking the time to check your expectations against your actual experience as it’s happening.
Like, I recently felt really drained. Noticing that feeling, I could immediately say several things that had been draining, but I wouldn’t have said they were hard while I’d been doing them. I was just caught up in making things go smoothly at the time. It was only afterwards noticing that how drained I felt that made me realize the activity was very energy draining. It would have been easy to brush over the activity with “Oh, I had a fun time”, which was true. But it was also true that I had to recover afterwards.
I feel like there’s something valuable here in being able to pay the kind of attention to my experience that led me to that knowledge. But I don’t have a good vocabulary to describe it to my clients.
Trying to sit with the thought of the territory as the thing that exists as it actually is regardless of whatever I expect. This feels easy to believe for textbook physics, somewhat harder for whatever I'm trying to paint (I have to repeatedly remind myself to actually look at the cloud I'm painting), and really hard for psychology. (Like, I recently told someone that, in theory, if their daily planning is calibrated they should have days where they get more done than planned, but in practice this gets complicated because of interactions between their plans and how quickly/efficiently they work.)
Yet, to the best of my knowledge, psychology isn't *not* physics... It's just that we humans aren't yet good enough at physics to understand psychology.
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