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DSimon comments on Poll results: LW probably doesn't cause akrasia - Less Wrong
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As can certain marriages.
E.g., my husband and I are married as far as the state of Massachusetts is concerned, but unmarried as far as the federal government is concerned. We're married as far as we and our friends and families are concerned, and unmarried as far as various people we don't really know are concerned.
I don't worry about it much, except for practical purposes. Marriage is a property of maps, not territories.
I believe I agree with your general point here, but I am pretty sure I disagree with this precise formulation of it. I would consider "X is a property of maps" to mean "X makes claims about maps" - a key example would be "uncertainty". Marriage, for any given use of the term, is a claim about interpersonal relationships; this may be between two people, between two people of differing genders, or either of the aforementioned plus relationships (of, typically, a different form) with a broader community. These are reducible in principle to mental states, which are properties of the territory.
The fact that there are multiple competing sets of properties that lay claim to the label in common use in different portions of our society is relevant to the broader discussion, but should not be taken to indicate that "marriage" itself applies to anything but the territory. Nor should the fact that there is nothing but social usage and practical considerations to map the phonemes to the concepts - this is true of any word.
Doesn't "uncertainty" also reduce to a mental state?
Yes, in humans. And granted, in any other reasoning engine it will reduce to a physical state. This is mostly irrelevant, however. It reduces to a physical state because your map reduces to a physical state. This makes it still a claim about the territory when you're a part of the territory (as is true for us, but wouldn't necessarily be true for an entity watching our simulation or whatever), but it doesn't make it not a claim about the map. Marriage, I assert, is not a claim about maps at all.