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	Re: addition: beliefs and maps
	Posted By: Forrest of B.org	Date: 10/3/05 7:07 p.m.
	In Response To: addition: beliefs and maps (goran) : I have somethings to add. : There's one reality out there. we use our sensory organs to read this : reality. The sensory data gets transfered into our brain and translated : into pictures, feelings and thought processes. : How the brain translate sensory data, has much to do (if you belive in : psyhcology) with your beliefs. This means, what you believe - you see. : (the beliefs filter the sensory data and deletes most of the stuff that runs : against it) : Your beliefs are your brain's map to the real world, and a map can never be : perfect, unless it is reality itself, and then it's not a map. Catchy eh? : Humans have so many and different beliefs, that finding two humans with exact : the same beliefs would be quite impossible. : What one human belive in and holds for true, may another human not belive in, : and hold for untrue. They both created their own maps of the same reality. : They walk around and navigate through reality with different maps. : Who's right and who is wrong? No one can ever know. We are all partially right, but only partially so. Ideas don't just come into our brains at random, they come from somewhere, from reality, and the inaccuracies in the "map" or "image" that they form is due to lacking information - they're like blurry low-res pictures. The real thing is infinitely high-res, so we can never hope to have a perfect reproduction of it in our heads, but we can hope to fill in the missing information in the picture and improve the quality of our mental model of reality. I'm not sure if you mean it this way, but you sound very futile about all of this; you may as well be saying that everyone lives in their own separate "reality" (fiction, really) and if those "realities" ever overlap it's only by chance, which is what it sounded like you were saying before and which is why I wrote that whole long thing. It seems both an unpleasant and an unproductive view to hold. If you accept what I said above, that ideas all come from somewhere, from reality, to form the data of our mental model, then it seems obvious that there is a common basis, and common truth, which we all hold in common in all of our mental models, and that in growing those models we will have more and more overlap - if we had perfect, infinite models the overlap would be complete and identical with the one true reality. So if someone's map doesn't mesh with yours, it's because either you or they or possible both are missing some information, and by figuring out which information is missing between you and sharing it, you will both end up not only with the same map as each other (in agreement), but most likely with a greater map than either of you started with (more knowledgeable). Don't get me wrong, I totally accept what you're saying about beliefs filtering the information we get from reality, and how that skews everybody's judgement, but that is precisely why I think a belief like this notion of collaborative conversation is such an important one - it keeps you open-minded but still critically thinking, and lets you expand your mental map without throwing away the parts you've already got. Lets play with your map metaphor, because it works pretty well. Lets say we both are in Britain and trying to find our way around the countryside there, looking for such-and-such historic landmark, the plains of so-and-so where William Wallace farted and finally defeated the English. You've got a detailed atlas of Western European road maps, and I've got a detailed atlas of North Atlantic islands and their geography. Whose atlas has the right maps? Which one should we throw away, and which one should we keep? The obvious answer seems to be "neither, and both" - they both have information about Britain in them, one with more details about the roads and buildings, and another with details about the geographical features. We could use my geographical map to figure out what plain where is the one that matches the historical description we're after, and then use your road map to figure how the fsck to get to there from London. Most useful would be an atlas that's got both road maps and geographical maps, and wouldn't it be sweet if we could compile such a thing about the entire world, not just the geography of North Atlantic islands and the roads of Western Europe, which happen to overlap in England. : Here's some interresting questions to ask yourself: : 1. Should you let other ppl draw on your map without your "ok" first? : 2. Should you write on other ppl's maps without permission and without : knowledge of what their map looks like? No and no; but those don't seem possible anyway. You can't directly write into somebody's mind. : 3. What do you do when you get lost with your map? (bad map) Find your way out of wherever you're lost by whatever means you can, keep track of the route you take out, and update your map with the details of that route once you've reoriented yourself. : 4. What do you do when you find your way with your map? (good map) Keep it, and go exploring off the edges of it. Map the new and uncharted territories. : 5. Is it ok to show ppl your map? : 6. Should you look on other ppl's maps? Heartily, yes and yes. Maybe you'll find someone else has a map with some neat areas on it that you weren't aware of, and you can use it as a preliminary guide into those regions - but still keep in mind to watch for inaccuracies on their map when you go exploring those areas, and to take note of them. The few exceptions to this are that it's often fun to go exploring yourself without a map, so always looking at other people's maps may not be so fun (and could bias you when you finally go to those places yourself - maybe you'd avoid the awesome waterpark labelled "here be sea monsters" on their map), and it's useful to sometimes withhold information so that people can learn to map right for themselves, and not rely on people to feed them ready-made maps (which, the youngsters being unable to map for themselves, will permanently bias them since they'll be incapable of correct any errors they spot, and will instead just learn to ignore them).

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Replies:

	Mapping community	goran	9/27/05 11:52 a.m.
	Re: Mapping community	Blake37	9/27/05 12:11 p.m.
	Re: Mapping community	Nick Hoad	9/27/05 1:30 p.m.
	Re: Mapping community	Me_43	9/27/05 8:23 p.m.
	Re: Mapping community	goran	9/28/05 12:38 a.m.
	Re: Mapping community	RyokoTK	9/28/05 3:25 a.m.
	Re: Mapping community	goran	9/28/05 5:23 a.m.
	Re: Mapping community	Forrest of B.org	9/28/05 8:18 a.m.
	Re: Mapping community	Nick Hoad	9/28/05 12:52 p.m.
	Re: Mapping community	RyokoTK	9/28/05 5:23 p.m.
	Re: Mapping community	ellio7t	9/30/05 9:15 a.m.
	****To mapping community****	me_43	9/28/05 11:45 p.m.
	Just be quiet, me_43. Seriously. *NM*	RyokoTK	9/29/05 3:39 a.m.
	Re: Just be quiet, me_43. Seriously.	Simon/team Sigma	9/29/05 3:50 a.m.
	Re: ****To mapping community****	goran	9/29/05 4:02 a.m.
	Can't we all just get along? *NM*	Bob-B-Q	9/29/05 4:47 a.m.
	Re: Can't we all just get along?	Simon/team Sigma	9/29/05 5:11 a.m.
	Consider the circumstances.	RyokoTK	9/29/05 12:38 p.m.
	Re: Consider the circumstances.	me_43	10/4/05 3:19 a.m.
	I'm with Bob-B-Q on this	Reiginko	9/29/05 5:33 a.m.
	Re: I'm with Bob-B-Q on this	me_43	9/29/05 6:38 a.m.
	To all of you...	Forrest of B.org	9/29/05 7:47 a.m.
	Re: To all of you...	kyjel	9/29/05 9:11 a.m.
	Re: To all of you...	Jacke	9/29/05 9:51 a.m.
	Re: To all of you...	Forrest of B.org	9/29/05 8:06 p.m.
	Re: To all of you...	goran	9/29/05 10:00 p.m.
	Sleep is irrelevent to the Fobot	Tyler	9/30/05 1:35 p.m.
	Re: Sleep is irrelevent to the Fobot	Forrest of B.org	9/30/05 1:52 p.m.
	Re: Sleep is irrelevent to the Fobot	Forrest of B.org	9/30/05 1:53 p.m.
	Re: Sleep is irrelevent to the Fobot	Tyler	9/30/05 2:57 p.m.
	Re: Sleep is irrelevent to the Fobot	Forrest of B.org	9/30/05 10:11 p.m.
	Re: Sleep is irrelevent to the Fobot	Speaker-To-Animals	10/1/05 7:31 a.m.
	Re: Sleep is irrelevent to the Fobot	Blake37	10/1/05 9:35 a.m.
	Re: Sleep is irrelevent to the Fobot	Forrest of B.org	10/3/05 2:13 p.m.
	stop	goran	9/29/05 10:44 a.m.
	I wouldn't see it as "preaching"	MrHen	9/29/05 11:41 a.m.
	Re: stop	Forrest of B.org	9/29/05 2:40 p.m.
	Re: stop	Forrest of B.org	9/29/05 8:01 p.m.
	Re: stop	Bob-B-Q	9/29/05 3:24 p.m.
	Re: stop	RyokoTK	9/29/05 3:29 p.m.
	Re: stop	Forrest of B.org	9/29/05 7:49 p.m.
	Re: stop	goran	9/29/05 9:54 p.m.
	Re: stop	Forrest of B.org	9/29/05 10:24 p.m.
	Re: stop	goran	9/30/05 3:10 a.m.
	Re: stop	RyokoTK	9/30/05 4:07 a.m.
	Re: stop	goran	9/30/05 3:18 a.m.
	FROG BLAST THE VENT CORE!!!!!!! *NM*	ukimalefu	9/30/05 4:58 a.m.
	Re: stop	Forrest of B.org	9/30/05 6:25 a.m.
	Steve's house	goran	9/30/05 9:10 a.m.
	Collaborative Conversation	Forrest of B.org	9/30/05 12:37 p.m.
	Re: Collaborative Conversation	Forrest of B.org	9/30/05 1:32 p.m.
	Unsolicted advice (this time without anecdots)	goran	9/30/05 4:39 p.m.
	Re: Collaborative Conversation	goran	9/30/05 5:10 p.m.
	Re: Collaborative Conversation	D-M.A.	9/30/05 9:12 p.m.
	Re: Collaborative Conversation	Forrest of B.org	9/30/05 10:24 p.m.
	Re: Collaborative Conversation	goran	10/1/05 1:56 a.m.
	Re: Collaborative Conversation	goran	10/1/05 12:52 a.m.
	Re: Collaborative Conversation	D-M.A.	10/1/05 1:39 a.m.
	Re: Collaborative Conversation	D-M.A.	10/1/05 1:50 a.m.
	Re: Collaborative Conversation	goran	10/1/05 2:46 a.m.
	Re: Collaborative Conversation	goran	10/1/05 2:29 a.m.
	Another note to self...	Forrest of B.org	10/3/05 12:10 p.m.
	Subjective vs Objective, Relative vs Absolute	Forrest of B.org	10/3/05 1:12 p.m.
	Applause! *NM*	Blake37	10/3/05 1:42 p.m.
	addition: beliefs and maps	goran	10/3/05 3:22 p.m.
	Re: addition: beliefs and maps	D-M.A.	10/3/05 7:04 p.m.
	Re: addition: beliefs and maps	Forrest of B.org	10/3/05 7:07 p.m.
	Re: addition: beliefs and maps	goran	10/4/05 12:32 a.m.
	MSF Story Hour	Jacke	9/30/05 1:38 p.m.
	Re: To all of you...	me_43	10/1/05 2:37 a.m.
	Re: To all of you...	RyokoTK	10/1/05 4:00 a.m.
	Re: To all of you...	me_43	10/1/05 7:27 a.m.
	Re: To all of you...	Simon/team Sigma	10/1/05 12:17 p.m.
	Re: To all of you...	Steve Levinson	10/1/05 7:07 p.m.
	Re: To all of you...	C Lund	10/1/05 11:16 p.m.
	Re: An objective opinion? Maybe.	Blayne	9/29/05 7:40 a.m.
	Re: ****To mapping community****	Adam Ashwell	9/29/05 12:08 p.m.
	To me_43, Göran and anyone else who'll listen	Steve Levinson	9/30/05 9:08 p.m.
	Re: To me_43, Göran and anyone else who'll listen	D-M.A.	9/30/05 9:22 p.m.
	Re: To me_43, Göran and anyone else who'll listen	Forrest of B.org	9/30/05 10:35 p.m.
	Re: To me_43, Göran and anyone else who'll listen	goran	10/1/05 12:28 a.m.
	Re: To me_43, Göran and anyone else who'll listen	me_43	10/1/05 2:45 a.m.
	Re: Mapping community	D-M.A.	9/29/05 10:42 a.m.
	Re: Mapping community	me_43	10/5/05 10:01 p.m.
	Can't see shit. *omg downloads*	Me_43	10/5/05 11:27 p.m.
	Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	Reiginko	10/6/05 2:08 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	Forrest of B.org	10/6/05 6:51 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	goran	10/6/05 9:51 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	Forrest of B.org	10/6/05 2:16 p.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	me_43	10/7/05 2:06 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	goran	10/7/05 2:54 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	Nick Hoad	10/7/05 10:44 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	goran	10/7/05 11:14 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	Nick Hoad	10/7/05 1:54 p.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	me_43	10/8/05 12:54 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	me_43	10/8/05 12:55 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	goran	10/8/05 1:34 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	RyokoTK	10/7/05 3:12 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	me_43	10/8/05 12:55 a.m.
	Re: Oh, man, and I thought this thread had died	RyokoTK	10/8/05 3:16 a.m.
	Do you really think you can make better maps?	RyokoTK	10/6/05 3:34 a.m.
	Re: Do you really think you can make better maps?	Simon/team Sigma	10/6/05 3:55 a.m.
	Re: Mapping community	goran	10/6/05 4:14 a.m.
	[end thread]	me_43	10/6/05 5:06 a.m.
	Re: [end thread]	D-M.A.	10/6/05 7:55 a.m.
	Re: [end thread]	Dave	10/7/05 9:08 p.m.
	Re: [end thread]	goran	10/8/05 1:32 a.m.
	Re: [end thread]	goran	10/8/05 2:06 a.m.
	Re: [end thread]	RyokoTK	10/8/05 3:16 a.m.
	Re: Mapping community	goran	10/6/05 4:53 a.m.
	Re: Mapping community	goran	10/6/05 11:55 a.m.

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