Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Map / Territory : Generic / Brand

We humans evolved to think fast. In human terms, we do, it works (or seems to, so far). The corollary is that we don't always think well. Philosophy, especially the division of philosophy called science, helps. Still, it's a mess. Nearly all humans can think, after a fashion; far from all humans are adept at philosophy; very few humans, including those dressed in white coats and called by their employers"scientists," have an accurate idea of what science is: and even when we do, there are still limits to human intelligence that even genius doesn't automatically overcome. I say all that to remind us that Gregory Bateson told us that psychologists have said that the human mind is incapable of maintaining Korzybski's distinction between "map" and "territory." Korzybski said that we commonly confuse the Name with the Thing — Bateson says that psychologists say that we will continue to confuse the Name with the Thing, and the Menu with the Meal ... the Map with the Territory.

I've been re-emphasizing all this recently as part of Macroinformation, my study of complex Information. I subsume all or nearly all under semiotics, insisting that there isn't anything that we know, think, believe, process ... that isn't symbol or sign: from photons hitting the retina, to synapses firing, to saying, "That is a tree." We fast thinkers look through the telescope and say, "I see a star": when what we "see" is "light" which our culture interprets (in the English language) as a "star." We fast thinkers reify our common perceptions, rapidly forgetting, if we ever noticed, that all we have are signs, symbols, ideas: we have no direct, non-symbolic contact with ... anything: and certainly not with anything we should call Reality, or the Universe ...

No matter what we think, qualify it: it's human thought. And if we say, "God thinks it," or "The President says it": well, it's still human thought: thought by symbols, expressed by symbols. In other words ... rather, in the words I started with, nearly everything with us is "map"; though we routinely imagine we are dealing with "territory."

OK, that pk has been saying, again and again, since 1979: online since 1995. I review it, restating it here, to say something new, original with me this morning: modern culture, already liable to map / territory confusions, is dedicated to additionally confusing Generic with Proprietary: and the confusion is deliberately induced by our ... um, shall I say it? ... owners? (But of course our owners, giant multinational corporations for the most part, are themselves owned by the culture, the ghastly, ever more monolithic, culture.)

"Tissue" means something thin, flexible, of next-to-no-substance, disposable. The modern marketplace, with a cultural mandate to make everything-the-same, sells paper tissues in a box. The company manufacturing them calls itself Kleenex. Good, fine. What's neither good nor fine is what the company does next: it tries to get us, the buying public, to confuse the thing we've been taught to need, a "tissue," with a particular brand name of tissue: Kleenex. So: we'll no longer want a drink; we'll want a soda; we'll no longer want a soda, we'll want a cola; we'll no longer want a cola, we'll want a Coke. We'll no longer want a computer, we'll want a PC. We'll no longer want a graphic user interface, we'll want Windows. See? Apple had hoped we'd want Mac.

But that's just the beginning. When I can I'll go on with other deep difficulties:

Culture is rigged to substitute custom for nature: clothing for example. We'll defend the custom As Though it were in our genes!

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