Maps & Territories

Beyond The Horizon
This weeks post takes a wide-lens survey of our journeys through space at both a large and small scale. Space Cowboy is a call sign for all of us (all races, all genders) on our various adventures. We chaos monkeys have been innovative and persistent in our explorations. These escapades have allowed us to build maps of our world at many scales from the atomic to the cosmic. This post takes a survey of these maps and how they can be useful to a modern day Space Cowboy.

Maps, Pipes & Territories
Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) was an independent philosopher known for founding General Semantics. He focused on how language and symbols1 shape human understanding and behaviour. He is best known for saying this:

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"The Map is Not the Territory"
Alfred Korybski

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Rene Magritte (1898-1967) underlined the idea with his painting c’est n’est pas une pipe. Just noticed that pipe is a feminine noun. That is a surprise. Never mind. This is not a pipe he declared. The image below will serve as a proxy for his picture. This is not a pipe and almost certainly not the pipe Magritte painted. The map is not the territory. I would not get very far smoking my Peterson’s Luxury Blend Tobacco3 using this picture. Why? Because it is not a pipe.

Fig 1. This is not the pipe Magritte painted

It represents a pipe, just as language, models, and theories represent reality, but are not reality. Memo to self: do not confuse symbols or theories with the real world they describe. I was once at a seminar where a Dutch chap wrote this is not the truth at the top of all his charts. Big letters. In red. It did the trick. So it goes.

News and Social Media are maps. They select, frame, and interpret events, but do not show reality directly. They focus on certain facts, leaving others out. These are political as well as an editorial choices, and we are all making them, whether on transmit or receive. It can lead to a serious slant this way or that to fit with our underlying ideology and BS (Belief Systems).

Social media algorithms personalise our content, based on what gets our attention. We like spending time with like minded chaos monkeys and we like to feel accepted and understood. This produces little echo chambers where we can get these needs met and see a curated “map” that reinforces our worldview. The posts don’t ask us to think: What’s being shown? What’s left out? Whose perspective is this? We have to remember to do this ourself. In fuzzy logic, what % truth to we associate with each message?

Maps of The World
Many early cultures assumed the Earth was flat. It seemed to fit everyday observation and experience. In Mesopotamia, the earth was seen as a flat disk floating on water. In ancient Egypt, the earth was thought to be a flat plane with the sky arched above.

The spherical Earth idea was proposed by Aristotle (384–322 BCE) who noted that ships disappear hull-first over the horizon, and that the earth casts a curved shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. So there must have been a moment when he said something like: Dudes, I think we are living on a ball, but in Greek.

The Ptolemy Map 150 AD showed spherical Earth maps, and the idea has shaped geography for over 1,000 years. The map covered the known inhabited world: Europe, North Africa and China. It was put together using Greek and Roman military and trade reports. Some errors and a lot missing, e.g. the Americas.

The Mappa Mundi, ‘map of the world’, was produced around 1300 AD is a different sort of map. It includes historic items, from a Christian worldview and shows biblical references, e.g. the Tower of Babel. Some items are reported from where history meets myth. This is how us monkeys saw our world at that point. Available for viewing in Hereford, UK.

The Ordnance Survey maps were first issued in 1801 to provide detailed maps of Scotland for defensive and military planning. Footpaths, Churches, pubs, campsites, historic sites and ancient monuments are all shown. OS maps are saluted for their precision and utility.

It is clear from this timeline of development that the world we live in is a somewhat malleable landscape, vulnerable to re-interpretation. As a result, we can define our maps of reality on a personal scale and ipso facto curate our experiences. This is one of the great gifts of being autonomous space cowboys.

To Boldly Go
And so on. As Copernicus, Galileo and Newton worked their sums, the spherical Earth became scientifically undeniable. Galileo almost lost his life for his view that the Earth went around the Sun. This was a big deal as chaos monkeys needed to let go of their collective idea that they were at the centre.

These explorations continued and Space Cowboys continued to discover new realms beyond day to day experience. We became fascinated by the very large and the very small during the 20th Century. There was an explosion in our discoveries of what lies beyond, as we built telescopes and microscopes of greater power and reach.

A snapshot was captured by powers of ten, a profound and beautiful short film by Charles and Ray Eames released in 1977. Every 10 seconds the camera zooms out by a factor of 10. We start in Chicago and then travel out to the city limits, to see the Earth as a sphere, to the solar system, galaxy and onwards to the edge of the observable universe. The direction switches and we travel back to Chicago and onward to smaller scale: cells, DNA, molecules and onwards to an atomic nucleus.

As many monkeys have noticed, we are living out our dramas and intrigues in the mathematical mid-zone of these extremes. The film helps us reflect at many scales, from galaxies to atoms. The images are clear, accessible and elegant.

The natural world we live in is vast and many different ‘realities’ co-exist. The humble bacteria has a different reality to the garden mouse who has a different reality to us chaos monkeys. We live in a series of scaled environments ready for exploration.

Man on The Moon (REM, 1992)
Putting one of us monkeys on the moon is perhaps our most bodacious move. I assign a 99.9995% fuzzy logic chance that it is true that we did this. Other monkeys assign ratings from 0-100% and some believe the whole shebang was staged.

This weeks wisdom from pop music features Man on The Moon by REM. The lyrics pay tribute to one heck of a Space Cowboy: Andy Kaufman (1949–1984). Andy blurred the line between reality and performance, often leaving audiences really unsure whether what they were watching was real.

He appeared regularly on Saturday Night Live and Taxi. He also performed tortuous events as Tony Clifton, one of his many alter egos. He spent a lot of time playing with the staged / live debate in wrestling and chose this as a forum for some absurd performance art.

Some people thought Andy was hilarious. Others that he should be taken off TV. Immediately and forever. At surface level Man on The Moon salutes Andy’s bizarre and brilliant comedic career. These include his impersonation of Elvis, his wrestling acts and the conspiracy theory that he faked his death.

Selected Lyrics from Man on The Moon. REM.
From Automatic For the People, 1992
Mott the Hoople and the Game of Life → (playful commentary on life and culture)
Andy Kaufman in the wrestling match → (blurring of entertainment and reality)
Monopoly, twenty-one, checkers and chess → (life is a game)
Mister Fred Blassie in a breakfast mess → (Andy’s wrestling antics again)
Let's play Twister, let's play Risk → (randomness and ambition in life)
I'll see you in heaven if you make the list → (subverting moral gatekeepers)
Hey Andy, are you goofing on Elvis? → (Are we losing our grip on reality?)
… Hey baby, are we having fun? → (Are we?)
… Mister Charles Darwin had the gall to ask → (Salute to truth seekers)

The song is deceptively simple. Under the bonnet it is a meditation on truth, perception, and absurdity. It honours Andy Kaufman as a cultural trickster, someone who lived between reality and performance, always keeping us guessing. The lyrics and music explore the nature of belief and skepticism, how truth and illusion blur - in comedy, in performance, in life.

In real life, Elvis said to Andy: You’ve got a weird mind, kid. Andy was thrilled. OK. Enough of all this Little Professor analysis. Let’s listen fresh. Rock and Roll. An ode to the Space Cowboy in all of us:

Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride

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"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
Hunter S. Thompson

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Maybe take a moment to review / question / update your maps of the world. What do you believe about our world? Other Monkeys? Yourself? What is missing? Who says things are this way? And on and on. The value of any map is in the doors it opens, the things it allows you do. May our adventures be long and interesting.

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"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Little Gidding, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot

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The possibilities and realities ready for mapping are are endless. So let’s saddle up, grab a stetson and head out to new frontiers. Thanks for reading. Get Ready Player One. Your Life. Your Rules. Buy The Ticket. Take The Ride. Follow The Rabbit Live Loud. Choose Your Associates. New Frontiers.

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