Friday, January 05, 2007

I draw, therefore I MAPMap

My Christman present from ~K finally arrived this week, and I picked it up today! It was a large triangular tube. She got me a giant Toblerone! I've always wanted one the size of my arm. Thanks, ~K!
Actually, it's not heavy enough to be a toblerone. I thought: poster? of what? and then I read the side of the box. MAP. oh, well, a map of what? a map that would have 17 dollars of customs on it??? I further read: Springfield Cartographic. hmmm, well, I won't look them up, that would wreck all the fun I'm going to have trying to guess what it is.
I'm pretty sure it's not my ultimate map fantasy, as I'm not sure that it exists, and I believe that ~K doesn't know what one is and/or that I want one. It's a Dymaxion map (a Fuller projection), with all satellite photography. I suppose I could look it up to see if it does exist (it didn't when I last checked), but I have very little concentration/persistence today. I have several other map fantasies, but I'm also not going to let you know what they are. If ~K got any of those, I'd wig out, because it would be like magic! From out of my brain, straight onto the wall, an eidolon made flesh! But I don't think these things exist either, but for a wider variety of reasons.

So, it's not going to bother me if they aren't in there. After all, an existant map is far superior to an imaginary one. This leads, naturally, into the Ontological proof of the World, and it goes something like this. We can conceive of a map such that no greater map can be conceived. This map, call it the Magicalist of All Possible Maps (the MAPMap) is everything great about a map that we could possibly want. Were we to imagine a desirable feature that our MAPMap lacks, than the map comprised of all the features of MAPMap plus the new desirable one would become the new MAPMap.
Now, it is a trivial thing to realize that this map must exist, as an existant map is obviously better than a non-existant one*. Therefore the MAPMap must have the property of existance, and therefore it exists. But the MAPMap will have other features as well. One of these will be perfect accuracy in correspondence of detail. We could, were we to peer close enough at the MAPMap, see everything that actually exists on the ground. Another would be adaptability, the MAPMap would accurately reflect all changes in the real world, in real time. You can see where this is going: the MAPMap is indistinguishable from the real world. Now, since we know the MAPMap must exist, the World must exist! This follows even if the World is NOT the best of all possible worlds, something which philosophers have agonized over for centuries.

*There are a branch of philosophers who suppose that imaginary maps are the best, for they allow one to conceive of possiblities undreamt of by reality. They live in some freakish moonbat world where nothing is really known for certain, and everything swirls in a whirlwind of competing interpretive narratives. I mean, come on! how can these guys even know what they are saying? it makes no sense! of course there is a MAPMap! sweet MAPMap.