[Neurons] 2011 Meta Reflections #5

[L. Michael Hall]

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Meta Reflections 2011 - #5

January 31, 2011



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THE ART OF MAPPING

Alfred Korzybski Series #2





The story of Alfred Korzybski and NLP begins with story of how we create our
mental-emotional maps.  The premise that “The map is not the territory”
distinguishes two facets of our lives-our life in the world and our mental
maps about that world.  These occur at different logical levels.  This
premise also identifies a key facet about us humans-we map things.  To
understand ourselves, others, the world, etc., we have to make a map about
things.  And that means that we are in our nature- map-makers or
meaning-makers.



Now from the first NLP book to every NLP book, you will find the quotation
from Korzybski on the map-territory distinction.  For the field of NLP this
establishes several things: first, the philosophy of constructionism.  This
refers to the fact that we do not deal with reality directly, but through
our mental models.  And that leads to the next fact: we act, respond, and
deal not with reality, but with and through our maps about the territory.
Here is the fuller quotation:

"A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar
structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.  If the map
could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of
the map...  If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they mut
be considered only as maps.  A word is not the object it represents; and
languages exhibit also this peculiar self-reflexiveness, that we can analyze
languages by linguistic means.”



"Antiquated map-language, by necessity, must lead us to semantic disasters,
as it imposes and reflects its unnatural structure...  As words are not the
objects which they represent, structure, and structure alone, becomes the
only link which connects our verbal processes with the empirical data.



"Words are not the things we are speaking about... If words are not things,
or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible
link between objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure,
and structure alone.   The only usefulness of a map or a language depends on
the similarity of structure between the empirical world and the
map-languages."



"That languages all have some structure ...we unconsciously read into the
world the structure of the language we use..." (Science and Sanity, 1980
Edition, pp. 58-60).



And there’s more.   Korzybski didn’t stop here.  He also created a model
that he called The Structural Differential by which he described the mapping
processes, the self-communication processes, and the logical levels of the
mind.  If indeed, structure and structure alone is the only knowledge that
we can attain about the world, then the Structural Differential provides a
Communication Model of the mapping processes.



I find that absolutely fascinating on several accounts.  First, while
Bandler and Grinder used the mapping metaphor and quoted Korzybski in part,
and they launched NLP as a communication model, they seemed to not even know
that Korzybski had created a communication model from the modeling
processes.  So it took the field of NLP many years before Robert Dilts began
mapping out the logical levels that was there in Korzybski from the
beginning.



The Communication Model in General Semantics is based upon what your
neurology does with the “energy manifestations” that are in the world,
outside your nervous system.  This refers to the physical vibrations that
make up the electro-magnetic spectrum.  In fact, in Science and Sanity
Korzybski included a Table of Physical Vibrations (p. 237) and listed the
wave length of those vibrations and how the “number of vibrations per
second” influenced our various “receptors” and the “sensation” that we
experience.



When the vibrations are very slow to 1552 per second, the energies of the
electro-magnetic field is registered by our skin and elicits our sense of
touch and pressure.  When between 30 to 30,000 per second we have “tone”
that affects the receptor of the inner ear.  The retina as a receptor picks
up vibrations (400,000 billion to 800,000 billion) and we experience this as
the sensation of light and color.  Beyond that level of vibration and we
have no receptor in our neurology and so no sensation in our experience for
sensing the vibrations “out there.”  To detect these we have to use
extra-neural machines that can detect ultra-violet rays, x-rays, gamma-rays,
etc.



What we can detect is first experienced at the unspeakable level inside our
neurology by our nervous systems.  At the unspeakable level, the first level
of sensation is “before words” and unconscious.   Here your neurology is
abstracting from the world of vibrations and encoding it, yet it is not
translatable into words.  If you read Korzybski, he spends a lot of time
describing these pre-conscious levels and the “nervous” processing,
registering, and sensitivity.  He describes it as the very nature of
protoplasm.



Then using the verb abstracting he relates how our neurology keeps on
abstracting level after level until the “sensations” created by our
nervous system.  Eventually our nervous system and brain abstracts the
sensations so that we become aware or conscious of the world out there.  Not
directly, of course.  We aren’t aware of the vibrations out there, we are
aware of the transforms inside our neurology (our “maps” about
transforms).  So as is now well known, color does not exist out there in the
world.  Color is a transform created by the rods and cones in our retina as
it translates (abstracts) a certain vibration level of the electromagnetic
wave length.  So when we see color, we are dealing with our map about the
world, not the world directly.  Figures 1 and 2 are diagrams for the levels
of abstractions.



Figure 1

Abstracting





                 Unconscious      Conscious
Unconscious



World  - Unconscious-  Conscious - Sensory-based - Evaluative-
Meta-evaluative-   Etc.

                  Sensory               Sensory         Language
Language        Language

                    Reception            Reception




Figure 2

Levels of Abstraction



Etc.                  -   Beyond Words

↑↓

Evaluative words

↑↓

Linguistic         Evaluative Words

maps
↑↓                         Intensional

of ↓    Evaluative words

↑↓

Sensory-Based Words

(Ad)

↑↓

Neurological   Sensory Representations

maps
(V.A.K.O.G.)                       Extensional

of ↓    ↑↓

Sense Receptors

↑↓

       ______________________________________________Before Words



Reality "Reality" Beyond the Nervous System

The Territory Beyond





What Korzybski calls the unspeakable level and devotes many chapters on,
Grinder calls “first access” in Whispering in the Wind.  Yet from what I
can tell, John Grinder has apparently never read Korzbyski although he
certainly feels free to criticize him as he does here:

“There is an ambiguity in Korzybski’s writing as to whether the territory
he referred to is what we call here FA (first access) or the actual world
itself.” (p. 46, footnote number 6, again pp. 131-132)



We map the outside world by abstracting from it as it impacts on our
neurology- our nervous systems then transform the stimuli as information of
the world into its own information code.  And it does so time after time,
level after level.  At first it is all below consciousness. Yet eventually
it becomes conscious and at that point our map about the world is a map
several steps removed.  It’s a map, not the territory.  And yet in all of
this process, the human mapping process that has begun is now under our
control ... as we become aware of it, we can begin to direct it.  And with
that science and sanity begins.



Ready to read Science and Sanity?   Layton Payne, an associate and a
consultant in Houston, Texas, recently informed me about the following link.
There you can find the entire Science and Sanity text online!

 <http://esgs.free.fr/uk/art/sands.htm> http://esgs.free.fr/uk/art/sands.htm









Figure 3           The Structural Differential

Differentiating the Levels of Structure in Human Neuro-Linguistics





                 ...........................

                     .....................

                       ..................            Event

                         ..............

                            .........

                               ....



                               ↓  ↑

                             .......

                                ...........

                                               Object Level

                            .............

                        .........



                        ↓

                        ......

                       ......

                        ......  Descriptive

                          ......          Level

                          ......



                          ↓   ↑

                          ......

                          ......

                        .....        Inference

                          ......       Level

                          ......



                         ↓   ↑

                          ......

                        ......   Generalization

                          ......



                               ↓   ↑

                               ......

                              ......          Et Cetera

                               ......

                               ......









i














L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Neuro-Semantics Executive Director  ----   <http://www.neurosemantics.com/>
www.neurosemantics.com

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA                             ----
<http://www.self-actualizing.org/> www.self-actualizing.org

1 970-523-7877                                               ----
<http://www.meta-coaching.org/> www.meta-coaching.org





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