Wholesale Frontier Between the Map and the Territory by Manuel Varela

[Collective Ink Books] On the relationship between “things” and “ideas” — with a special emphasis on medical practice. Dualism has a long track in philosophy. Although often overlooked, it supports much of our worldview, and lies at the center of many frontline scientific issues. This dialectic has specific phrasings in different scientific areas, but it is arguably the expression of the same conflict in diverse contexts: namely, the framework between Matter and Information, or, metaphorically, the frontier between the Territory and the Map. This book attempts to analyse this Map/Territory frontier in several quite different settings, including its relevance in the present trans-humanist projects. It tries to draw parallelisms and similarities between diverse territories (e.g. the idea of Entropy as the distance between the Map and the Territory, the dependence on deep 'hyperpriors' such as Space, Time or the 'Me/Not-Me' duality, etc). It also points at certain resonances betwee