A Map is not a territory

Unlike any other known life form, humans have evolved a capacity to create and manipulate symbols and to compare them with the outside word ( "outside world"  means anything external to human body). This capacity allowed the transference of symbols from the mind to symbols outside the body and mind. By creating unique vocal patterns or artful scratching designs on stone, wood, or papyrus, somehow we learned how to compare the sounds and designs to thoughts in the mind. By learning and teaching how to remember the symbols through the use of a common code, an alphabet, we gained the ability to communicate our ideas through space and time. With these linguistic tools emerges the spoken and written language.

Automatically, the invention of written language produced a special and exciting result. What an innovation to store thoughts on a physical object, giving it to a messenger, and transferring your thought to another human being that lives miles away, or at some future time. Writing allows the storage of ideas that one can recall after a day, a week, or years after. It must have seemed magical to those at the dawn of the invention of writing.

 Unfortunately, out of linguistic thought emerges a dangerous flaw that stems from a lack of understanding the difference between the symbols and the things they aim to represent. We sometimes confuse the two by believing in them even when their representations no longer exist. The originator of general semantics, Alfred Korzybski came up with the phrase, "A map is not the territory" meaning that a map can describe a territory in some similar structure that allows us to traverse the land, which gives us a useful tool, but that our perception of the map can never equal the territory, but only our version of it, our map. All symbolism acts in this manner. All information comes to us as second hand. Everything we perceive from the outside world comes delayed, even if by only a few milliseconds, and processed by our brains into linguistic symbols. We may live in the present, but our thoughts reflect the past. We only have maps to refer to and nothing else.