Difference between revisions of "Mind projection fallacy"
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Revision as of 11:22, 4 September 2009
"The map is not the territory, but you can't fold up the territory and put it in your glove compartment".]
Our minds are not transparent windows unto veridical reality; when you look at a rock, you see not the the rock itself, but your mind's representation of the surface of the rock, reconstructed from nerve impulses resulting from photons reflecting off the surface of the rock and being absorbed by your retina. Sugar in and of itself is not inherently sweet; the sugar itself only has the chemical properties that it does, which your brain, making inferences from cues given by your tongue, interprets as sweet. Physicist, polymath, and Bayesian philosopher E. T. Jaynes coined the term mind projection fallacy to refer to this failure to distinguish between the map and the territory.
- E. T. Jaynes (1990). Probability Theory as Logic. (PDF)