(January 24, 2011)
Alfred Korzybski Series #2
The story of Alfred Korzybski and NLP begins with story of how we create our mental-emotional maps. The premise that “The map is not the territory” distinguishes two facets of our lives—our life in the world and our mental maps about that world. These occur at different logical levels. This premise also identifies a key facet about us humans—we map things. To understand ourselves, others, the world, etc., we have to make a map about things. And that means that we are in our nature— map-makers or meaning-makers.
Now from the first NLP book to every NLP book, you will find the quotation from Korzybski on the map-territory distinction. For the field of NLP this establishes several things: first, the philosophy of constructionism. This refers to the fact that we do not deal with reality directly, but through our mental models. And that leads to the next fact: we act, respond, and deal not with reality, but with and through our maps about the territory. Here is the fuller quotation:
“A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map… If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they mut be considered only as maps. A word is not the object it represents; and languages exhibit also this peculiar self-reflexiveness, that we can analyze languages by linguistic means.”
“Antiquated map-language, by necessity, must lead us to semantic disasters, as it imposes and reflects its unnatural structure… As words are not the objects which they represent, structure, and structure alone, becomes the only link which connects our verbal processes with the empirical data.
“Words are not the things we are speaking about… If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone. The only usefulness of a map or a language depends on the similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map-languages.”
“That languages all have some structure …we unconsciously read into the world the structure of the language we use…” (Science and Sanity, 1980 Edition, pp. 58-60).
And there’s more. Korzybski didn’t stop here. He also created a model that he called The Structural Differential by which he described the mapping processes, the self-communication processes, and the logical levels of the mind. If indeed, structure and structure alone is the only knowledge that we can attain about the world, then the Structural Differential provides a Communication Model of the mapping processes.
I find that absolutely fascinating on several accounts. First, while Bandler and Grinder used the mapping metaphor and quoted Korzybski in part, and they launched NLP as a communication model, they seemed to not even know that Korzybski had created a communication model from the modeling processes. So it took the field of NLP many years before Robert Dilts began mapping out the logical levels that was there in Korzybski from the beginning.
The Communication Model in General Semantics is based upon what your neurology does with the “energy manifestations” that are in the world, outside your nervous system. This refers to the physical vibrations that make up the electro-magnetic spectrum. In fact, in Science and Sanity Korzybski included a Table of Physical Vibrations (p. 237) and listed the wave length of those vibrations and how the “number of vibrations per second” influenced our various “receptors” and the “sensation” that we experience.
When the vibrations are very slow to 1552 per second, the energies of the electro-magnetic field is registered by our skin and elicits our sense of touch and pressure. When between 30 to 30,000 per second we have “tone” that affects the receptor of the inner ear. The retina as a receptor picks up vibrations (400,000 billion to 800,000 billion) and we experience this as the sensation of light and color. Beyond that level of vibration and we have no receptor in our neurology and so no sensation in our experience for sensing the vibrations “out there.” To detect these we have to use extra-neural machines that can detect ultra-violet rays, x-rays, gamma-rays, etc.
What we can detect is first experienced at the unspeakable level inside our neurology by our nervous systems. At the unspeakable level, the first level of sensation is “before words” and unconscious. Here your neurology is abstracting from the world of vibrations and encoding it, yet it is not translatable into words. If you read Korzybski, he spends a lot of time describing these pre-conscious levels and the “nervous” processing, registering, and sensitivity. He describes it as the very nature of protoplasm.
Then using the verb abstracting he relates how our neurology keeps on abstracting level after level until the “sensations” created by our nervous system. Eventually our nervous system and brain abstracts the sensations so that we become aware or conscious of the world out there. Not directly, of course. We aren’t aware of the vibrations out there, we are aware of the transforms inside our neurology (our “maps” about transforms). So as is now well known, color does not exist out there in the world. Color is a transform created by the rods and cones in our retina as it translates (abstracts) a certain vibration level of the electromagnetic wave length. So when we see color, we are dealing with our map about the world, not the world directly.
Reality “Reality” Beyond the Nervous System
The Territory Beyond
What Korzybski calls the unspeakable level and devotes many chapters on, Grinder calls “first access” in Whispering in the Wind. Yet from what I can tell, John Grinder has apparently never read Korzbyski although he certainly feels free to criticize him as he does here:
“There is an ambiguity in Korzybski’s writing as to whether the territory he referred to is what we call here FA (first access) or the actual world itself.” (p. 46, footnote number 6, again pp. 131-132)
We map the outside world by abstracting from it as it impacts on our neurology— our nervous systems then transform the stimuli as information of the world into its own information code. And it does so time after time, level after level. At first it is all below consciousness. Yet eventually it becomes conscious and at that point our map about the world is a map several steps removed. It’s a map, not the territory. And yet in all of this process, the human mapping process that has begun is now under our control … as we become aware of it, we can begin to direct it. And with that science and sanity begins.
Ready to read Science and Sanity? Layton Payne, an associate and a consultant in Houston, Texas, recently informed me about the following link.
There you can find the entire Science and Sanity text online!
There you can find the entire Science and Sanity text online!
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