Eugene I wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 4:19 pm That's because the maps that we construct are the meanings of the thoughts. The thoughts, being phenomena of conscious experiences, are indeed of the same fundamental nature as the "territory" itself - of the nature of reality of our conscious experience. However, the content of the thoughts, their meanings, are only abstracted "facets" of the conscious phenomena of thought, and such facets ("maps") are unable to capture the reality of the "territory".
I would like to add something in this respect. Doesn't add much for strict philosophy but could be interesting for what goes beyond philosophy.
The situation with the 'map and the territory' is a great illustration of the overall situation of current intellectual comprehension of reality. I agree with both Eugene and Ashvin. Yes, the intellect has hit the ceiling so to speak. It feels the territory of reality, yet it's fully incapable to encompass it in consciousness. It's like we are probing only here and there and extracting mineral like concepts but we can never reconstruct from these fragments the complete picture. This realization also leads to the pragmatic fallback - at least we can find what's useful even if we may never be able to behold reality.
Reality can be beheld. Only not from the standpoint of consciousness that is busy connecting chains of logical thoughts. The fundamental polarity of world of perceptions and world of ideas is actually truly fundamental. It's just that we cognize from these worlds only what we can think of. The concepts that we use are extracts from the world of ideas but this doesn't mean that this world is made only of concept-like ideas. It's similar about the world of perceptions. Sometimes we can recognize only perception for which we have concept for. It's interesting for example how the Himba tribe perceives color differently based on the different concepts and words they have developed.
Once we cross the threshold of ordinary consciousness the two worlds actually are the same but we begin to experience new kinds of ideas and correspondingly different kinds of perceptions. Our spiritual activity is again the meeting point of the two, although it is no longer intellectual thinking but something more akin to constant metamorphosis, an organic growth process. It should also be noted that the both worlds are much more intimately united, they are flowing into one another as soul and spirit. Nevertheless, this activity is full of meaning, just as intellectual thinking is full of meaning. In fact, it is much more meaningful than anything that we can construct through thoughts in the ordinary state. The reason for this is that the high-order processes that we experience carry within their flow the mineral-like concepts of the intellect. When we live within this flow we experience in a panoramic way whole domains of our ordinary soul-life.
I'll try to illustrate this with something rather abstract. In mathematics there are things called iterated function systems (IFS). Imagine a black box that performs some calculation. You input two random values A and B, and the box outputs two values X and Y. Then you take these X and Y as coordinates and plot a dot. Then you take the same X and Y and input them back into the box as A and B. This returns new X and Y and process continues. In the beginning it looks like we are drawing random dots - every next output seems to land in quite random location on the paper. But gradually, as more and more dots accumulate we begin to recognize patterns:
This can actually be used as somewhat useful analogy for higher perception (not the mathematical part but only the picture). In certain sense it can be said that in our ordinary state we are constantly 'probing' dots with our thoughts but they don't accumulate and we can very hardly feel that we are actually exploring with our thinking a living structure. Through proper meditation we can stop the random probing and concentrate on a point. As it expands we begin the feel the potential for thoughts but we resist to manifest them. The more we do that the more this feeling for potential becomes more and more tangible and it reveals a structure - we can perceive a wholeness of thoughts that could be thought but we withhold that from happening. It's not a static structure but highly dynamic, constantly metamorphosing. Of course from this point on, everything we talk about can be only in the lines of similes and analogies but nevertheless it shares something with the IFS analogy. We perceive the living structure as something holistic and we recognize how in our normal intellectual life we are only probing this structure without ever being able to grasp it. What is thus revealed is called in esoteric science the consciousness (astral) body and the soul organs (chakras). It's just one example of an infinite world that opens up.
I mention this for the following reason. There are concepts in #2 which for all practical reasons seem not to correspond to anything perceptible. Such is the case for the concept of 'astral body'. This sounds as something totally made up and fantasized. Yet when we attain to higher cognition we discover the perception which matches the concept. We do this in our normal life too. Very often we only hear about things and try to form a concept and the actual perception comes only later. (in higher cognition we don't experience the astral body as a concept - it's a living meaningful experience - but as we zoom in back in the intellectual state, the meaning of the experience is extracted as a concept that thinking can deal with. That's how we make 'translations' between the two states)
The important point is that we can gain intuitive understanding about such things even without attaining to proper higher cognition. The reason is that through higher cognition we don't teleport into some other world but we gain higher order perception of the same world that we live in all the time. This high order perception reveals processes, dynamics and deeds of beings that throw much light on our otherwise seemingly random probing of the intellectual state. So the thing is that when we are communicated such things, the very thinking about them (especially if is deeply felt) is already traversing the same these structures that we are hearing the high-order descriptions of. When we hear descriptions from several different angles and when we live thoughtfully through them we gradually begin to feel that inner geometry - even though we are still probing it only pixel by pixel. This is called intuitive thinking. Thinking can be transformed into something akin to a sense of touch. We no longer think for the sake of the abstract things we think but thinking itself becomes a living experience, a living tactile groping of the structures that shape the moulds into which thinking experiences itself. Much can be achieved in this way.
When I'm working on a question I'm used to have calm time so that I can submerge myself in the matter, perceive the being of the question within its context, trace its relationships with its environment and then simply describe the landscape. I don't have the sharp-wit (like JP for example) needed to react momentarily and have something useful to say 
