Corn-pone $huck in a bottomless MIND-FUCK

Evil daemon

 The evil dæmon, sometimes referred to as the evil genius, is a concept in Cartesian philosophy. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes hypothesises the existence of an evil daemon, a personification who is "as clever and deceitful as he is powerful, who has directed his entire effort to misleading me." The evil daemon presents a complete illusion of an external world, including other people, to Descartes' senses, where in fact there is no such external world in existence. The evil genius also presents to Descartes' senses a complete illusion of his own body, including all bodily sensations, where in fact Descartes has no body. Most Cartesian scholars opine that the evil daemon is also omnipotent, and thus capable of altering mathematics and the fundamentals of logic.The evil daemon has a parallel with Bishop Berkeley's concept of a consensus reality supported by God. It is one of several methods of systematic doubt that Descartes employs in the Meditations.[1]

Another such method of systematic doubt is the deus deceptor (French dieu trompeur), the deceptive God. Cartesian scholars differ in their opinions as to whether the deus deceptor and the evil demon are one and the same.

Kennington[3][4] states that the evil daemon is never declared by Descartes to be omnipotent, merely to be not less powerful than he is necessarily deceitful, and thus not explicitly an equivalent to an omnipotent God. The evil daemon is capable of simulating an external world and bodily sensations, but incapable of rendering dubious things that are independent of trust in the senses, such as pure mathematics, eternal truths, and the principle of contradiction.

The accusations referenced a passage in the First Meditation where Descartes stated that he supposed not an optimal God but rather an evil daemon "summe potens & callidus" (translated as "most highly powerful and cunning"). The accusers identified Descartes' concept of a deus deceptor with his concept of an evil daemon, stating that only an omnipotent God is "summe potens" and that describing the evil daemon as such thus demonstrated the identity. Descartes' response to the accusations was that in that passage he had been expressly distinguishing between "the supremely good God, the source of truth, on the one hand, and the malicious daemon on the other". He did not directly rebut the charge of implying that the evil daemon was omnipotent, but asserted that simply describing something with "some attribute that in reality belongs only to God" does not mean that that something is being held to actually be a supreme God.[2]

That the evil daemon is omnipotent, and is seen as a key requirement for Descartes' argument by Cartesian scholars such as Alguié, Beck, Émile Bréhier, Chevalier, Frankfurt, Étienne Gilson, Anthony Kenny, Laporte, Kemp-Smith, and Wilson. The progression through the First Meditation, leading to the introduction of the concept of the evil genius at the end, is to introduce various categories into the set of dubitables, such as mathematics (i.e. Descartes' addition of 2 and 3 and counting the sides of a square). Although the hypothetical evil genius is never stated to be one and the same as the hypothetical deus deceptor, the inference by the reader that they are is a natural one, and the requirement that the deceiver is capable of introducing deception even into mathematics is seen by commentators as a necessary part of Descartes' argument. Kenney exemplifies Cartesian scholarship on this point, stating that the reason that Descartes introduces a second hypothetical, beyond the original hypothetical of the deus deceptor, is that it is simply "less offensive. The content of the two hypotheses is the same, namely that an omnipotent deceiver is trying to deceive." Scholars contend that in fact Descartes was not introducing a new hypothetical, merely couching the idea of a deceptive God in terms that would not be offensive.[2]

Janowski points out one reason for not accepting this interpretation, the same as given by Kennington, namely that the set of things that the evil daemon is stated as rendering dubious ("the heavens, the air, the earth, colours, figures, sounds, and all external things") is only a subset of the things that the deus deceptor is stated as rendering dubious (earth, heavens, extended things, figure, magnitude, place, and mathematics). The omission of mathematics implies either that the evil daemon is not omnipotent or that Descartes retracted Universal Doubt. Janowski notes that in The Principles of Philosophy (I, 15) Descartes states that Universal Doubt applies even to "the demonstration of mathematics", and so concludes that either Descartes' Meditation is flawed, lacking a reason for doubting mathematics, or that the charges of blasphemy were well placed, and Descartes was supposing an omnipotent evil daemon.[2]

W. Teed Rockwell, claiming to be a Deweyan pragmatist, argues that instead of being dualists or Cartesians, "philosophers should realize that the human conscious self is not reducible to the brain, nor to the nervous system, nor even to the human body. The thinking, conscious self is a nexus--or a "behavioral field"--of the brain, the nervous system, the body, and the world."[5] Rockwell contends that his position "can allow for solutions to certain philosophical problems such as the 'brain in the vat,' . . . a contemporary, materialist version of the problem introduced by Descartes's 'Evil Genius'".[5] "Both thought experiments are supposed to show us that human consciousness is plausible even though there might be no world in which consciousness exists," but Rockwell argues "that even in a vat the brain would have to be stimulated by some world, if only a world of electronic gizmos, and that such a world would have to produce a continuous experience. The brain, hence, would have to be embodied in some way.++++ 

Solipsism
  the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is certain to exist. Solipsism is an epistemological or ontological position that knowledge of anything outside one's own specific mind is unjustified. The external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist. In the history of philosophy, solipsism has served as a skeptical hypothesis.

The map is not the territory

The map is not the territory is a remark by Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. For example, the pain from a stone falling on your foot is not the stone; one's opinion of a politician, favorable or unfavorable, is not that person; and so on. A specific abstraction or reaction does not capture all facets of its source — e.g. the pain in your foot does not convey the internal structure of the stone, you don't know everything that is going on in the life of a politician, etc. — and thus may limit an individual's understanding and cognitive abilities unless the two are distinguished. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, in this sense.
in "Form, Substance and Difference," from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), elucidates the essential impossibility of knowing what the territory is, as any understanding of it is based on some representation:

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.

Elsewhere in that same volume, Bateson points out that the usefulness of a map (a representation of reality) is not necessarily a matter of its literal truthfulness, but its having a structure analogous, for the purpose at hand, to the territory. Bateson argues this case at some length in the essay "The Theology of Alcoholics Anonymous".

To paraphrase Bateson's argument, a culture that believes that common colds are transmitted by evil spirits, that those spirits fly out of you when you sneeze, can pass from one person to another when they are inhaled or when both handle the same objects, etc., could have just as effective a "map" for public health as one that substituted microbes for spirits.

Another basic quandary is the problem of accuracy. In "On Exactitude in Science", Jorge Luis Borges describes the tragic uselessness of the perfectly accurate, one-to-one map:

In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.

In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

A more extreme literary example, the fictional diary of Tristram Shandy is so detailed that it takes the author one year to set down the events of a single day – because the map (diary) is more detailed than the territory (life), yet must fit into the territory (diary written in the course of his life), it can never be finished. Such tasks are referred to as supertasks.

With this apocryphal quotation of Josiah Royce, Borges describes a further conundrum of when the map is contained within the territory, you are led into infinite regress:

The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: 'Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.' Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.

An alternative reason why we are bothered by the conundrum of infinite regress or the conundrum of maps within maps is that we fail to see that the concept of a "map of a map" is the same thing as the concept of a "map of a map of a map." In both cases, the concept is a metaphor for the faculty of reflection. We fail to distinguish that one's capability of reflecting is an enduring perspective and not simply a fleeting act of examining something. Each time I examine myself examining something (or in turn reflect upon my examination of myself examining my examination) I am exercising the same enduring ability[citation needed]. Husserl referred to this ability as the "transcendental ego," the mind's eye or the capability of a human to reflect and abstract. Standing between two mirrors, you will not be fooled by the infinite regress of the reflection of yourself in a mirror within a mirror within a mirror (ad infinitum) precisely because you are able to see (understand) that you are looking at mirrors facing each other and are not looking at an infinite queue of doppelgänger. Likewise characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators or any other fiction that can be imagined precisely because they are fictions, but the fact that you can reflect upon your ability to examine yourself and your thoughts means you are capable of abstraction and need not suggest that you too are a fictional character in a fictional work.

Neil Gaiman retells the parable in reference to storytelling in Fragile Things (it was originally to appear in American Gods):

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.

The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues in Simulacra & Simulation:

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory. (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1)

Philosopher David Schmidtz draws on this distinction in his book "Elements of Justice," apparently deriving it from Wittgenstein's private language argument.

The fundamental trade-off between accuracy and usability of a map, particularly in the context of modeling, is known as Bonini's paradox, and has been stated in various forms, poetically by Paul Valéry: "Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable."
[edit] "The map is not the territory"

The expression "the map is not the territory" first appeared in print in a paper that Alfred Korzybski gave at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1931: [1]

* A) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory...

* B) A map is not the territory.

It is used as a premise in Korzybski's General Semantics, and in neuro-linguistic programming.

Korzybski's dictum ("The map is not the territory") is also cited as an underlying principle used in neuro-linguistic programming, where it is used to signify that individual people in fact do not in general have access to absolute knowledge of reality, but in fact only have access to a set of beliefs they have built up over time, about reality. So it is considered important to be aware that people's beliefs about reality and their awareness of things (the "map") are not reality itself or everything they could be aware of ("the territory"). The originators of NLP have been explicit that they owe this insight to General Semantics.
The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves"[2] in a number of paintings including a famous work entitled The Treachery of Images, which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe").

This concept occurs in the discussion of exoteric and esoteric religions. Exoteric concepts are concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and language constructs, such as mathematics. Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood.

Lewis Carroll, in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), made the point humorously with his description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile." A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

In a sort of counterpoint to Lewis Carroll, the University of Cambridge economist Joan Robinson (1962) emphasized the disutility of 1:1 maps and other overly detailed models: "A model which took account of all the variegation of reality would be of no more use than a map at the scale of one to one."

Korzybski's argument about the map and the territory also influenced the Belgian surrealist writer of comics Jan Bucquoy for a storyline in his comic Labyrinthe: a map can never guarantee that one will find the way out, because the accumulation of events can change the way one looks at reality.

Historian of religions J. Z. Smith wrote a book entitled Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (1978, University Of Chicago Press 1993 paperback: ISBN 0-226-76357-9).

Author Robert M. Pirsig uses the idea both theoretically and literally in his book Lila when the main character/author becomes temporarily lost due to an over reliance on a map, rather than the territory that the map describes.

The map-vs.-territory distinction arises in a dramatic scene in David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. A game of Eschaton, a fictional geopolitical wargame played on a tennis court which is used to represent the surface of the planet Earth, dissolves into chaos when it begins to snow. The snow exists only in the real world and therefore is falling only on the map, and not on the territory which the map is representing; however, some players cannot understand this distinction and begin to claim that the snow affects the damage parameters of the game. One player then launches an attack and purposefully hits another player, instead of an area of the map, further contributing to the degeneration of the Eschaton game. Infuriated, an authority figure on the game rants:

Players themselves can't be valid targets. Players aren't inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They're part of the map. It's snowing on the players but not on the territory.... You can only launch against the territory. Not against the map. It's like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos. Eschaton, gentlemen, is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline and verity and order. You do not get points for hitting anybody real. Only the gear that maps what's real.

Disneyland - T.V. Diners - Pornography - WALMART - Sunday School

Both Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard refer to Disneyland as an exemplar of hyperreality. Eco believes that Disneyland with its settings such as Main Street and full
sized houses has been created to look "absolutely realistic," taking
visitors' imagination to a "fantastic past."^[7]
This false reality creates an illusion and makes it more desirable for
people to buy this reality. Disneyland works in a system that enables
visitors to feel that technology and the created atmosphere "can give us
more reality than nature can."^[8]
The fake animals such as alligators and hippopotamus are all available
to people in Disneyland and for everyone to see. The "fake nature" of
Disneyland satisfies our imagination and daydream fantasies in real
life. Therefore, they seem more admirable and attractive. When entering
Disneyland, consumers form into lines to gain access to each attraction.
Then they are ordered by people with special uniforms to follow the
rules, such as where to stand or where to sit. If the consumer follows
each rule correctly, they can enjoy "the real thing" and see things that
are not available to them outside of Disneyland's doors.^[9]
In his work Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard argues the "imaginary world" of Disneyland magnetizes people inside and has been presented as "imaginary" to make people believe
that all its surroundings are "real". But he believes that the Los
Angeles area is not real; thus it is hyperreal. Disneyland is a set of
apparatus, which tries to bring imagination and fiction to what is
called "real". This concerns the American values and way of life in a
sense and "concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus
of saving the reality principle."^[10]

"The Disneyland imaginary is neither true or false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this
imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us
believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to
conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly
among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster
illusion of their real childishness." ^[11]

Other examples

• A magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer.
• Films in which characters and settings are either digitally enhanced or created entirely from CGI (e.g.: 300, where the entire film was shot in front of a blue/green screen, with
  all settings super-imposed).
• A well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal).
• Any massively promoted versions of historical or present "facts" (e.g. "General Ignorance" from QI, where the questions have seemingly obvious answers, which are actually wrong).
• Professional sports athletes as super, invincible versions of the human beings.
• Many world cities and places which did not evolve as functional places with some basis in reality, as if they were creatio ex nihilo (literally 'creation out of nothing'): Disney World; Dubai; Celebration, Florida; and Las Vegas.
• TV and film in general (especially "reality" TV), due to its creation of a world of fantasy and its dependence that the viewer will engage with these fantasy
  worlds. The current trend is to glamorize the mundane using histrionics.
• A retail store that looks completely stocked and perfect due to facing, creating a world of endless identical products.
• A life which cannot be (e.g. the perfect facsimile of a celebrity's invented persona).
• A high end sex doll used as a simulacrum of a bodily or psychologically unattainable partner.^[12]
• A newly made building or item designed to look old, or to recreate or reproduce an older artifact, by simulating the feel of age or aging.
• Constructed languages (such as E-Prime) or "reconstructed" extinct dialects.
• Second Life The distinction becomes blurred when it becomes the platform for RL (Real Life) courses and conferences, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or leads
  to real world interactions behind the scenes.
• Weak virtual reality which is greater than any possible simulation of physical reality

Myth of Progress

Some 20th century authors refer to the "Myth of Progress" to challenge the Idea of Progress, especially the assumption that the human condition will inevitably improve. In 1932 English physician Montague David Eder wrote: "The myth of progress states
that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable
direction. Progress is inevitable..... Philosophers, men of science and
politicians have accepted the idea of the inevitability of progress."^[33]
Eder argues that the advancement of civilization is leading to greater
unhappiness and loss of control in the environment.
Sociologist P. A. Sorokin argued, "The ancient Chinese, Babylonian, Hindu, Greek, Roman and most of the medieval thinkers supporting theories of rhythmical, cyclical or trendless move­ments of social
processes were much nearer to reality than the present proponents of the
linear view."^[34]
Philosopher Karl Popper emphasized the inadequacies of the Idea of Progress as a scientific explanation of social phenomena.^[35] More recently, Kirkpatrick Sale, a self-proclaimed neo-luddite author, wrote exclusively about
progress as a myth, in an essay entitled "Five Facets of a Myth".^[36]
Iggers (1965) says the great failing of the prophets of progress was that they underesti­mated the extent of man's destructiveness and irrationality. The failing of the critics of the Idea of Progress, he
adds, came in misunderstanding the role of ra­tionality and morality in
human behavior.^[37]mmm
Hyperreality is significant as a paradigm to explain current cultural conditions. Consumerism, because of its reliance on sign exchange value (e.g. brand X shows that one is fashionable, car Y indicates one's wealth), could be seen as a contributing factor in the creation of hyperreality or the hyperreal condition. Hyperreality tricks consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance. Essentially, (although Baudrillard himself may balk at the use of this word) fulfillment or happiness is found through simulation and imitation of a transient simulacrum of reality, rather than any interaction with any "real" reality.

Interacting in a hyperreal place like a casino gives the subject the impression that one is walking through a fantasy world where everyone is playing along. The decor isn't authentic, everything is a copy, and the whole thing feels like a dream. What isn't a dream, of course, is that the casino takes your money in exchange for chips, which you are more apt to give them when your consciousness doesn't really understand what's going on. In other words, although you may intellectually understand what happens at a casino, your consciousness thinks that gambling money in the casino is part of the "not real" world. It is in the interest of the decorators to emphasize that everything is fake, to make the entire experience seem fake. The casino succeeds in turning money itself into an object with no inherent value or inherent reality

Hyperreality is used in semiotics and postmodern philosophy to describe a hypothetical inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. Hyperreality is a means to characterize the way consciousness defines what is actually "real" in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter an original event or experience. Some famous theorists of hyperreality include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Daniel Boorstin, and Umberto Eco.

Most aspects of hyperreality can be thought of as "reality by proxy." Some examples are simpler: the McDonald's "M" arches create a world with the promise of endless amounts of identical food, when in "reality" the "M" represents nothing, and the food produced is neither identical nor infinite.[1]

Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Baudrillard borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges (who already borrowed from Lewis Carroll), the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal. Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan.
Consensus reality is an approach to answering the question "What is real?", a philosophical question, with answers dating back millennia; it is almost invariably used to refer to human consensus reality, though there have been mentions of feline and canine consensus reality.[1] It gives a practical answer - reality is either what exists, or what we can agree by consensus seems to exist; the process has been (perhaps loosely and a bit imprecisely) characterised as "[w]hen enough people think something is true, it... takes on a life of its own." The term is usually used disparagingly as by implication it may mean little more than "what a group or culture chooses to believe," and may bear little or no relationship to any "true reality", and, indeed, challenges the notion of "true reality". For example, Steven Yates has characterised the idea that the United States Federal Reserve Notes (not "backed" by anything) are "really worth a dollar" as "part of what we might call our consensus-reality, [not] real reality."[2]

The difficulty with the question stems from the concern that human beings do not in fact fully understand or agree upon the nature of knowledge or knowing, and therefore (it is often argued) it is not possible to be certain beyond doubt what is real.[3][4] Accordingly, this line of logic concludes, we cannot in fact be sure beyond doubt about the nature of reality. We can, however, seek to obtain some form of consensus, with others, of what is real. We can use this to practically guide us, either on the assumption it seems to approximate some kind of valid reality, or simply because it is more "practical" than perceived alternatives. Consensus reality therefore refers to the agreed-upon concepts of reality which people in the world, or a culture or group, believe are real (or treat as real), usually based upon their common experiences as they believe them to be; anyone who does not agree with these is sometimes stated to be "in effect... living in a different world."[5]

Throughout history this has also raised a social question:

What shall we make of those who do not agree with consensus realities of others, or of the society they live in?

Children have sometimes been described or viewed as "inexperience[d] with consensus reality,"[6] although with the expectation that they will come into line with it as they mature. However, the answer is more diverse as regards such people as have been characterised as eccentrics, mentally ill, enlightened or divinely inspired [disambiguation needed], or evil or demonic in nature. Alternatively, differing viewpoints may simply be put to some kind of "objective" (though the nature of "objectivity" goes to the heart of the relevant questions) test. Cognitive liberty is the freedom to be the individual's own director of the individual’s own consciousness and is fundamentally opposed to enforcement of the culturally accepted reality upon non-conforming individuals. Effects of low cognitive liberty vary from indifference to forced-medication and from social-alienation to incarceration to death

A Neurally Controlled Animat is the conjunction of

1. a cultured neuronal network
2. a virtual body, the Animat, "living" in a virtual computer generated environment, connected to this array

Patterns of neural activity are used to control the virtual body, and the computer is used as a sensory device to provide electrical feedback to the neural network about the Animat's movement in the virtual environment.

The current aim of the Animat research is to study the neuronal activity and plasticity when learning and processing information in order to find a mathematical model for the neural network.

It leads towards interesting questions about consciousness theories as well.