The Map is Not the Territory

(Based on Roy Lichtenstein)

The “map is not the territory” is essentially what Jung implies in a previous post on projection:

“There is nothing in or of the material world that is not a projection of the human mind.“

Gregory Bateson, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), relates this further:

We say the map is not the territory.

But what is the territory?

Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper.

What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps.

The territory never gets in at all. … Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.