There was a post a long time ago from Eliezer that I cannot find (edit: thank you Plasmon!) with a quick search of the site, where he had listed a set of characteristics ("blue", "is egg-shaped") and in the center a label for those characteristics ("blegg!"); and two graphs. One graph, which is the native description in most minds, has a node at the center, the label (blegg!) and nodes coming out (something is blue iff it is a bleg iff it is egg-shaped) and the other graph which had no label (something could be blue or egg-shaped; if both it might be a blegg!)
It seems to me that you conceive of maps as being the structural units of the universe. That is, there are a bunch of "map" nodes and no central territory node.
I have, in the past, felt a great sympathy for this idea. But I no longer subscribe to it.
There is one way in which this conception is simpler: it contains fewer nodes! One for each mapmaker rather than all those, PLUS one for the territory. Also, it has the satisfying deep wisdom relation that Louie discusses in his first point.
There are several ways in which it is less simple. It has FAR more connections; around n! rather than n. Even if not all mapmakers interact it has around n choose (i) where i is the average number of interactions. That's WAY MORE.
Also, it requires that we have a strong sense of who the mapmakers are; that is, we have to draw a little circle around where all the maps are. This seems like a very odd, very complicated, not very materialist proposition which has all the same flaws that the copenhagen interpretation does.
It seems to me that you conceive of maps as being the structural units of the universe.
Boy, did I fail to communicate! No, that is not how I conceive of maps. "Structural units of the universe" sounds more like territory to me. You and I seem to have completely diverging understandings of what those neural net diagrams were about as well.
I think of maps as being things like Newton's theory of Gravitation, QED, billiard-ball models of kinetic theory, and the approximation of the US economy as a free market. Einstein's theory of gravitatio...
An article at The Edge has scientific experts in various fields give their favorite examples of theories that were wrong in their fields. Most relevantly to Less Wrong, many of those scientists discuss what their disciplines did that was wrong which resulted in the misconceptions. For example, Irene Pepperberg not surprisingly discusses the failure for scientists to appreciate avian intelligence. She emphasizes that this failure resulted from a combination of different factors, including the lack of appreciation that high level cognition could occur without the mammalian cortex, and that many early studies used pigeons which just aren't that bright.