The map of languages of Europe (as most such maps I've seen) has some very weird things. Why the hell would “Toscan” [sic] be considered a separate language from Italian and Neapolitan wouldn't? Describing most of Ireland as a “bilinguism [sic] situation” sounds like wishful thinking -- Irish might be official but very few people speak it regularly (not counting school classes and the like) except on the west coast.

It's just my experience of Doctor Who has been that it's a well of irrational story lines.

There does seem to be an awful lot of arbitrariness involved in the plotlines. For whatever reason it doesn't seem to contain much of the particular kind of irrationality that I personally detest so for me it is just a fun adventure with increasingly pretty girls.

For example why would the TARDIS have a soul?

It is closer to an extremely advanced horse than an extremely advanced car. That doesn't bother me too much. Some of the arbitrary 'rules' of time travel are more burdensome.

isn't Gaiman the guy who wrote Doctor Who episodes?

Many, many writers have written for Doctor Who. Gaiman has done many, many things in his writing career besides writing for Doctor Who. And Doctor Who is a cultural phenomenon larger than any trite dismissal of it.

I know this is probably an ad hominem but isn't Gaiman the guy who wrote Doctor Who episodes? The worst sci-fi show ever.

Doctor Who is one of my favourite shows (top five, higher if we count only shows that are still running.) I don't know to what extent knowledge of our different preferences regarding Doctor Who could be used to predict differences in our evaluations of the rationality of a given Gaiman quote.

The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and this would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.

This quote hides a subtle equivocation, which it relies on to jump from "you have X" to "you do not have X" without us noticing.

If I have a map I can look at it, draw marks on it and make plans. I can also tear it to pieces and analyse it with a mass spectrometer without it damaging the territory. Make the map I start with more accurate and I can draw on it in more detail and make more accurate analysis. Make the map nearly perfect and I can get nearly perfect information from the map without destroying breaking anything in the territory. Moving from 'nearly perfect' to 'perfect' does not mean "Oh, actually you don't have one territory and also one map. You only have this one territory".

As a practical example consider a map of a bank I am considering robbing. I could have blueprint of the building layout. I could have detailed photographs. Or I could have a perfect to-scale clone of the building accurate in every detail. That 'map' sounds rather useful to me.

Imprecision is not the only purpose of a map.

As an update, I've read the the Free Will Solution sequence. It doesn't seem like there is any punchline to the sequences, I'm found the area of timeless physics interesting but I'm not sure how it helps. I don't think I'm any better off intellectually from the sequences.

Brain emulation, how much do I need to understand and know before it makes any kind of sense?

Does anyone else find the free will solution sequence totally unconvincing?

I'm not familiar with enactivism in particular, but embodied and situated cognition seem like reasonable paradigms. I don't think they really necessarily contradict computationalism or cognitivism, though.

The wiki entry you linked is extremely unclear. Can you explain what enactivism is in simple words, using the vocabulary like http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ ?