This essay is going to be a big one. I have so many other things I want to talk about, but almost all of them depend on understanding this concept so I am going to lay this out as comprehensively as I can right off the bat.

There's a phenomenon I refer to as the Retreat to Cognition. I'm going to lay out the details below, but if you're anxious for a summary it looks something like this:

1. Life is too complicated to fully understand.

2. We compensate with mental models that allow us to function.

3. Those models are sometimes useful, but are never sufficient.

4. Nevertheless, many of us spend 100% of our lives looking at the maps without ever looking up at what they're mapping.

5. This leads to a set of predictable challenges and failures.

As Alfred Korzybski said, "The map is not the territory" - but the degree to which this is a problem is something very few people seem to ever fully apprehend.

It's About Maps

Borges taught us that the value of a map is not in its ability to fully represent reality but in its ability to compress reality to an intelligible size by ignoring everything that isn't serving the goals of the map.

…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

The map is not the territory. When the map swells to the size of the territory the map stops being useful. We need maps to navigate complex spaces - but it's essential that we remember that they are maps. A map is a model of the territory, and like all models, it's wrong in many ways.

Cognition as Cartography

As humans we have access to a wide variety of internal "tools" that we can use to navigate life. One of those tools - let's call it "cognition" - is the ability to construct models and then use them to derive predictions about the world.

Anything we observe we can simply add to our map, and then use that to better understand subsequent observations. Marvin Minsky wrote:

What is the difference between merely knowing (or remembering, or memorizing) and understanding? We all agree that to understand something, we must know what it means, and that is about as far as we ever get. I think I know why that happens. A thing or idea seems meaningful only when we have several different ways to represent it–different perspectives and different associations. Then we can turn it around in our minds, so to speak: however it seems at the moment, we can see it another way and we never come to a full stop. In other words, we can 'think' about it. If there were only one way to represent this thing or idea, we would not call this representation thinking.

What he's pointing out is that the whole purpose of cognition is to give us multiple ways to interpret experience. It allows us to make and then test predictions about how the world works, and allows us to construct "meaning" via association. This is really useful!

But crucially: none of it means anything if there isn't some experience to interpret, right? What good is a map that doesn't correspond to any territory?

So in order for cognition to mean anything, we have to feed it experiences. Well what are those?

They're what we get from our senses.

How Many Senses Do You Have?

This isn't a trick question, and the answer isn't 5 or 6 or 7. What's a sense? It's a somatic embodied experience that conveys information. Your eyes, your ears, your skin etc all generate sensations that you have learned to interpret. The cliche is that we have five senses, but ask anyone who studies this stuff and they'll talk to you about your sense of balance, or your sense of temperature, or etc etc etc. You have a lot of them.

But even all of those are just a part of the picture. When you get angry, what is that? That's a somatic embodied experience that conveys information. It's just that like other emotions, anger is a sense that is calibrated to communicate internal state changes instead of external ones. But it's still a sense, right? It's telling you "someone wronged me" just as surely as your ears are telling you about microvariations in air pressure caused by sound waves.

It's somatic in that it originates not cognitively but in your body. It's embodied because for the duration of the sensation it is "taking place" within your body. It conveys information - but does that mean it conveys meaning?

Cognition as a Meta-Sense

Well, not quite. Meaning is what happens when you cognitively interpret the information that the emotion is carrying. Because using the above definition cognition is a sense, right? You are having a somatic embodied experience that conveys information.

So cognition is the sense that we use to make sense of our senses. And as such we - especially in the West, especially after the Enlightenment - tend to prioritize it over the other senses. We say things like "trust reason over emotion", "it's all in your head", "this bullshit is reasonable" etc.

But that's just saying "the sense that makes meaning out of the other senses is important so we can pay less attention to those other senses", which is actually exactly backwards because without sensory input our cognition is just processing itself.

The Retreat to Cognition

Which is, for many people, a fairly accurate description of life. Modern life is unfathomably complex, we all have to walk around with partial understandings of partial understandings of what's going on around us just to function. Which, fine, okay!

But we have to acknowledge that. And here's the thing with cognition - it doesn't know what it doesn't know. Which is kind of obvious, when you think about it, right? You have to feed it experiences. For it to know anything at all about a thing you need to experience at least a reference to that thing.

Your map leaves stuff out, that's what makes it a map. To use a map successfully you must be aware that it is leaving stuff out. If you allow yourself to mistake the map for the territory then you're going to spend your life tripping over things too small to be included in the map.

What's the retreat to cognition? It's the belief that anything not already present in the map isn't real and doesn't need to be considered with the same rigor or seriousness that we apply to things on the map.

And I'm not joking when I say that the more I tug on this string - in my thinking, in my coaching, even in my software development - the more I realize that modern life is primarily characterized by the retreat to cognition at every level. This is partially because it's a very easy fallacy to fall into when you're born into post-Enlightenment Western society, which tells you from birth what sorts of thoughts are valid and allowed on your map and which ones are "woo" and nonsense.

Coming Home to Experience

I'm not out here to tell you that cognition is wrong or anything silly like that. That would be as silly as telling you that your emotions are wrong!

What I'm here to articulate - what this whole newsletter is about - is that cognition is only one of the worlds to which you have access. It's one sense, of many. It gives rise to certain ways of interpreting experience, sure.

But it is not itself experience, and that's the part where so many of us get confused. Experiencing the map is not experiencing the territory - thinking is not the same as being no matter how much we want it to be.

No amount of thinking about a feeling will ever allow you to experience that feeling.

Liberation lies not in finding the right way to think about things, but in realizing that many deep and valuable truths cannot be represented on the cognitive map.

We can escape by not thinking, just being. That's, umm. Easier said than done.

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