One-to-one Mapping
Hyperreality and mapping beyond 1:1
By the time he was 30, Surrealist painter René Magritte understood perception as a semiotic membrane between reality and the mind. There's my word of the day: semiotic. Before today I could not have used it in a sentence. But now I see that our ever-intensifying search for meaning in this Millennial flood of information as signs and symbols is an effort in semiotics.
So many of our academic and scientific pursuits can be cast as mapping realms for meaning.
- Life: Geneticists map genomes base-pair by base-pair to the structures and functions of organisms.
- Humanity: Archaeologists and anthropologists dig up bones and dust off tomes to map the lives and stories of people into culture and history.
- Intelligence: Programmers and computer scientists encode logic and reason, ethics and judgment, abilities and strategies into algorithms and (neural) networks.
- Consciousness: Psychologists and neuroscientists map the electrical signals in our brains to the sensations we experience, the behaviors we exhibit, and the choices we make.
- The Cosmos: Astronomers map space and time, stars and galaxies, black holes and quasars, even the background radiation that emanates from furthest reaches of the known universe. Meanwhile physicists map the infinitesimal components of matter and the fundamental forces of nature in search of a grand unified theory of everything.
All of these maps must be imperfect to be useful. Their power and value lie in their reduction or expansion, as much in what they leave out as what they contain. As we'll see, a 1:1 map (one that describes its subject in full scale and full detail) is an exercise in futility. But what of a map that holds more information than the reality it describes?
First, a brief history of 1:1 maps
I'll begin at the oldest bread crumb I have found so far.
In 1895, Lewis Carroll left us a grave warning disguised as a whimsical conversation in his final novel, Sylvie and Bruno.
"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.
"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"
"About six inches to the mile."
"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all ! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
Some forty years later, Jorge Luis Borges pseudonymously echoed Carroll's admonition "On Exactitude in Science".
"… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."
— purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658
This was not long after Alfred Korzybski had reminded the American Association for the Advancement of Science: "A map is not the territory it represents [emphasis mine], but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."
In 1937, Paul Valéry put it simply: "Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable." Perhaps too simply?
Around 1963, the impossibility of a 1:1 map was called Bonini's paradox by some business types around Stanford.
In 1981, Jean Baudrillard would tell us the 1:1 map is well-suited as a target of nostalgia, but no longer as a concept to be explored. He opens Simulacra and Simulation:
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory.
Umberto Eco seems not to have gotten Baudrillard's memo. His 1982 essay "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1" teems with paradoxes and contradictions, exhausting the possibilities as Eco strives to offer instructions for 1:1 mapping. Even still, some have taken him semi-seriously, like Sara Morawetz and Julian Day did in 2016 as they demonstrated this "useless exercise" in each territory of the empire Down Under.
Eco gave them no easy task. For example, he stipulated:
That the empire in question be that X than which nihil maius cogitari possit, and hence that the map cannot be produced and spread out in a desert area of a second, separate empire X~2~ such that X~2~ > X (as if a 1:1 map of the principality of Monaco were to be spread out in the Sahara). In this case, the project would lose all theoretical interest.
That little Latin tidbit comes to us from Anselm of Cantebury's description of the Christian God as something than which "nothing greater can be conceived", which, to me, smacks of "the which than which there is no whicher", a turn-of-phrase that Alan Watts often used when trying to describe the indescribable "just as the tooth cannot bite itself." Watts would surely agree that a 1:1 map cannot be.
Beyond 1:1
I think Baudrillard was way ahead of us. Today's reality pales in comparison to the hyperreal simulation we inhabit. Take this simple thought experiment from Alex Steffen:
… go to a street you know well, find the oldest picture of it you can, and look at it as you walk down that street, and try to think of all the ways your thoughts, actions and interactions are being informed by access to understandings of that street and its context that would have been at least unlikely, if not impossible, twenty years ago.
Of course, being able to find and look at that picture on your phone in the first place is itself a sign that you no longer live in the city in which the photographer stood. That city had no 1:1 map.
iPhone as third eye
For those of us who carry radio-networked supercomputers with a wide array of sensory input and feedback mechanisms (a.k.a. smartphones) reality has become augmented, amplified, holographic, even virtual. We weave meaning-laden layers of information and captured sensations into our perception of reality in real time and space.
And as you will recall, maps can describe much more than urban geography: life itself, the cosmos, humanity, intelligence, consciousness, and everything else.