Whatever reality might be considered to involve -- mass, energy, entropy, time, whatever -- it's information that we actually consider in our minds.
In grade-school physics, it may be all too easy to confuse the map for the territory, because everything's just so simple that students might feel little compulsion to put much thought into things. But it's always been information.
If someone wants a string 2-meters long, they might measure out two lengths of 1-meter strings, then tie them together. If the result isn't close enough to 2-meters, then they might reason that they ought to be more precise -- they ought to better measure the 1-meter strings, consider the length-contraction due to tying the knot, and so forth. And then, they might think that there's a difference between the string and their information about it.
But further away, in more exotic contexts like in sub-atomic quantum-mechanical arenas or near black-holes, there might be less intuition about the things like strings -- folks may be pushing harder, working more heavily with information without a background sense of naturalness. Inferences may be drawn based on information, and then more built upon that information, until it seems like it's all information.
But, to be clear, this isn't some new quality of reality; it's how stuff's always worked. It's just how intellectual-computation works. It's just that, when things were simpler, folks didn't care to consider it.
That said, reality isn't quite "information"; it's just our perceptions of reality that're information. This is, reality's the territory, and our conceptions of it are the map. More involved computational-modeling just helps make that more apparent by undermining more naive modes of thinking about it.
I think there is an inversion here, though. The question implicit in this context is not whether the map is the territory, but whether the territory is the map. Now one can see these as homophonic statements, but is this the case? When is it or not?
"...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety
of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and
which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so
fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."
I find it interesting that today we can very easily make a digital map of the world whose size would not only be the size of the world, but more so, much magnified to be larger than the size of the entire world.
It's only a few extra zoom levels from the standard zooms on the standard internet maps and in terms of data isn't that much more, as cartography is mainly about what you don't show than what you do.
To explain: Normally, folks grow up seeing the world through the lens of [realism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_realism ): the belief that there's a "real world" being interacted-with. For example, if you see a table, then it's probably because there's a table -- in a true, objective sense.
You may have a friend also see the table. They may've perceived the table differently, having a slightly different notion of it. So, maybe you and your friend would have different "maps" -- though there's an objective-truth, the "territory", i.e. the concrete-existence of the table.
Realism can be compelling. For example, if someone denies that the table necessarily exists, you might feel inclined to pick up the table and hit them with it -- proof by demonstration! Or, should they continue to deny that the table exists, then clearly you didn't hit them with the table because there was no table to hit them with, and so you'd seem free-and-clear.
Except, the above-argument can fail. For example, what if you picked up the table to hit your friend with it in protest to your friend's denial that it exists -- and then, just as you're about to hit them, POOF! -- it disappears! Oh, wait, tables can't disappear... oh, blah, your alarm-clock's going off... weird dream, right? Okay, time for work.. wait, you're now waking up -- you were in an immersive VR-MMO that blocked your memories of the real-world, but apparently you were just playing a video-game. So the table was... a virtual-(dream-table), apparently. Except, wait.. you're coming to.. apparently you were in a coma, just imagining a VR-MMO in which you were dreaming. Except it turns out that you weren't in a coma, but rather just suspended as you entered Heaven -- and, by the way, Earth was sort of a virtual-testing-ground for AI before letting them into Heaven (and, also, you're an AI -- but then who isn't?). Hah, JK -- all of that was just a really trippy dream! Time to sit down infront of your actual, REAL table that totally couldn't possibly be a complex illusion created by the advanced alien-race that's studying you in their zoo (don't worry, they'll use force-fields to levitate anything you try to place on the totally-real table).
In the above paragraph, we referenced a few different things not normally taken seriously in Realism: dreams, coma-like-fictions, cognitive-alterations, deities, advanced-aliens trolling people, etc.. Realism is obviously incomplete if we allow that any of those things might apply to the current-moment, but if we just decide to ignore those possibilities, realism's fine, right?
Now it's science time! Huh, weird.. turns out that there're particles, e.g. neutrinos, that can go through the table. So maybe it's not solid -- but it's still there, right?
Except, there's General-Relativity apparently denying that there's an objective, universal time. So apparently the table doesn't exist with you in precisely the same moment of time.. in fact, it may be somewhat unclear if there's even a good notion of what it'd mean for the table to co-exist with you at the exact same point-in-time.. but.. let's ignore that.
Then there's quantum-mechanics.. apparently the table might quantum-tunnel outside, such that it's not actually there. ..or is it, just it's a delocalized thing? Except energy's not really conserved, so.. if we allow for delocalization, would it necessarily be a "thing" if it could actually just be nothing and disappear?
Now, if you ask a physicist how likely a large, human-scale object (like a table) would be to spontaneously disappear, they might not bother even trying to estimate the figure beyond just saying that it's basically zero. In fact, to quote the abstract of [this paper (2020-06-01)](https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-020-0371-x ):
> Quantum tunnelling is a phenomenon of non-equilibrium quantum dynamics and its detailed process is largely unexplored.
Even after consideration of the above, would a person necessarily feel that reality-isn't-real?
I'd speculate that Realism can make so much sense because it seems to work so often. For example, if you try to reach out to that table, perhaps you'd find your expectation that it'ld be solid justified. Perhaps you'll predict various things under the hypothesis that it's real, and perhaps you'll find yourself consistently correct.
This is, Realism seems defensible in every-day experience where we can keep testing it and it keeps working. And if it's simple-and-reliable, what's not to love? Why yield to weird, speculative-sounding non-realist arguments?
But for scientists working at the boundaries, there're frequently things discussed that may turn out to be phantasmal. For example, the dark-matter -- folks discuss it as though it's real, but if it's not.. then what? Or what about particle-physics, where folks are looking for new particles: if there seems to be a new particle, but it's not verified yet despite possibly having seen it many times, how does a realist handle that? Or, in Chemistry, what's the enthalpy of some mixture -- if it depends on the model, how can it have a precise value?
> I think there is an inversion here, though. The question implicit in this context is not whether the map is the territory, but whether the territory is the map. Now one can see these as homophonic statements, but is this the case? When is it or not?
In the domain of Realism -- when things are simple and near-human -- the map (cognition) might be mistaken for the territory (reality). But even in Realism, folks might tend to accept that that's a simplification of a situation; that the reverse doesn't really hold except as a simplification.
However, if Realism is rejected in favor of a more general perspective, then the notion of reality (the territory) is lost. It becomes more about maps of other maps. Folks might even recognize themself as unknowable and their cognition as potentially flawed, denying certainty on just about anything.
Then it's "non-realism" because we simply stop talking about reality. ..kinda -- taking that too naively can lead to all sorts of absurdities (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-09-08 ).
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It's hard to really talk about this stuff at any decent level -- stuff gets so weird that conceptual-correspondence is lost over time, making it difficult to discuss non-trivial things. So, instead, try to lay a conceptual-foundation that might be built from. Sorta like telling kids that the Earth circles Sol -- it's kind of a starting place.
But to try to answer the question directly: there's not really a solid territory to be a map, unless you're considering something cognitively-local, at which limit it might seem like a practical-fiction. At the most extreme, territory becomes the map when it's part of the mind -- the thing that a mind might most convincingly claim to know to be real (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum ).
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Alternative perspective, for a scientific-mind who'd tend to favor Realism:
Let's get back to Earth -- it's 2022 on Earth. We're talking about the real-world: no dreams, aliens, whatever. Reality is simple, clean, and objective. In fact, tomorrow, physicists will announce that they've disproven modern-theories and the world's actually purely Newtonian afterall.
We'll keep advancing AI. We'll make a huge super-cloud-computer (or whatever) that'll host many AI-minds in a virtual-world (like an MMORPG, but more realistic for the AI's; they'll have avatars as bodies and believe their world real).
We'll try to implement realistic-physics. But we might do some lazy-evaluation; we might not fully compute some stuff until it's relevant, at which time we might go back and calculate it. We might fill in the gaps with random-values.
We might make it weird. For example, if we're interested in what's happening in one part of the virtual-world, we might invent some sort of de-coupling to approximately break it off from other parts. Then we can devote our computational-power to simulating what we're interested in; we can back-calculate other stuff later. Perhaps artifacts that the in-world-AI might become suspicious of, but as long as we keep it realistic enough, probably fine.
The AI, themselves, are part of the world -- their neural-networks are also simulated in the world itself. So if we freeze part of the world, we freeze the AI there too. If we fudge part of the world, then we fudge the AI too.
So, obviously, those of us on Earth are real, and Realism is obviously correct. But for the AI in our simulation, what would they be correct to believe?
Then, if an AI's mind contains a mental-proxy for something they observed in their virtual-world -- what of that's "information" vs. "reality"?
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PS: I realize that last bit may seem to offer two different models for reality: naive-realism vs. we're-AI-in-a-simulation. To avoid that, I just wanted to be clear that neither of those models is even close to being correct. They're both just toy-models to consider.
> "A map is not the territory"
Whatever reality might be considered to involve -- mass, energy, entropy, time, whatever -- it's information that we actually consider in our minds.
In grade-school physics, it may be all too easy to confuse the map for the territory, because everything's just so simple that students might feel little compulsion to put much thought into things. But it's always been information.
If someone wants a string 2-meters long, they might measure out two lengths of 1-meter strings, then tie them together. If the result isn't close enough to 2-meters, then they might reason that they ought to be more precise -- they ought to better measure the 1-meter strings, consider the length-contraction due to tying the knot, and so forth. And then, they might think that there's a difference between the string and their information about it.
But further away, in more exotic contexts like in sub-atomic quantum-mechanical arenas or near black-holes, there might be less intuition about the things like strings -- folks may be pushing harder, working more heavily with information without a background sense of naturalness. Inferences may be drawn based on information, and then more built upon that information, until it seems like it's all information.
But, to be clear, this isn't some new quality of reality; it's how stuff's always worked. It's just how intellectual-computation works. It's just that, when things were simpler, folks didn't care to consider it.
That said, reality isn't quite "information"; it's just our perceptions of reality that're information. This is, reality's the territory, and our conceptions of it are the map. More involved computational-modeling just helps make that more apparent by undermining more naive modes of thinking about it.