Maps

There is a map in the mind, a sense of how the world beyond our immediate experiences works. This is a map initially organized around very broad assumptions & continually revised by the experiences of life, though for some more thoroughly-developed maps the openness to revision may be slight. Where we can interpret our experiences as consistent with our map, we accept those interpretations more easily; where they disagree, we suffer cognitive dissonance or delusions of good and evil, with the good being those experiences our maps say we should be having, the evil a road that really shouldn't be there if we are where we think we are.

There is another guide available, an alternative to intuition as described above, and it is logic; this is the principle that a sufficiently detailed understanding of the road we've travelled so far will empower us to predict it's future course; not so much a maps as a principle of map-making(hypothesizing). In this predictive function it is immensely more reliable than uninformed intuition, just as local city maps are more useful for navigating cities than are world maps for navigating the same. City maps are useless outside of cities, however, and logic likewise fails us when we don't have access to data with which to make new maps. So we make up stories, fall back on the maps of our childhood; we dust off our intuition as it was developed before we got it hooked on logic, and wonder that we don't still have the passion for exploration & map-making we had as children.

I think that the human capacity for forming & revising models of reality, for usefully criticising our own belief systems & those of others, is gradually atrophied by conflating what is logical with what we believe, or worse, dismissing our logically-inconsistent beliefs as simply untrue. Because everyone's beliefs seem illogical when you aren't the person who had the experiences they're based on; when you don't have the data available to distinguish an ordered grid from a scattering of random intersections, judging truth by how apparently logical it is leads to framing most ideas as those of fools & liars. In a world where no one considers themselves either, this practice may breed conflicts.