What Are Maps Used For?

What Are Maps Used For?

I have always been passionate about the field of education. This semester, I'm taking a course on Educational Theory and Practice offered by the Sociology Department. In today’s class, the professor mentioned that in the humanities, students need to develop the ability to skim through readings. However, when the material is dense, like a 200-page reading assignment on Habermas, the professor needs to outline the framework of the content in class, otherwise, students wouldn’t know how to skim effectively.

In essence, the overall structure and framework of these theories and knowledge act as a kind of map of knowledge. Knowing this “map” doesn’t mean you’ve learned the knowledge itself, but such a map is very useful. Young Li wants to discuss what maps are used for.

Most people would answer that maps are obviously used for navigation. This indeed summarizes a major use of maps. With a map, you know where you are, what paths you can take, how to reach your destination, and what scenery lies ahead. Courses and textbooks are like roads; they are the modern navigation apps that guide us to our goals. But sometimes this isn’t enough. We are not satisfied with linearly acquiring knowledge; knowledge itself is web-like, intricate. We need a broader view to understand the overall connections between pieces of knowledge, the macrostructure, and where our current studies fit within the entire theoretical framework.

An example of Concept Map

This also applies to life. We are always given directions, told how to walk, what our next steps should be. But life is not a track; we need to see the broader, macro view. We need to know where we stand in life, in society, in the universe. So why should we engage in philosophical thought? Philosophical thinking is like a map of life, showing us what lies ahead and in which general direction to proceed. It also helps us make sense of many things. Sometimes, looking at parts alone, many things are difficult to understand; we feel forced to comply with certain systems and authorities, as if without a map, we sometimes don’t understand why roads are built the way they are. But holding a map of life, understanding from a macro perspective, we can roughly grasp the reasons and origins of things, the original intentions of those who laid these paths, and everyone’s motives. This does not mean total acceptance and compliance, but we aim to improve after understanding. As the saying goes, knowledge is power; a map of life provides the power of peace and happiness, foreseeing the end (like Doctor Strange seeing the end game in Avangers), seeing the ups and downs of life, the rise and fall of things, and focusing on what matters most across time and space.

What do we do when we have no map? How do we see the scenery beyond the mountain?

Then, we construct our own map. Using our ability to extrapolate from the specific to the general, we guess the overall shape from limited information. You might ask, how can you guess when every mountain, every road is different? This requires your belief in and understanding of the world itself. Different locations have different natural environments, but geographical and climatic conditions, as well as cultural environments, may be similar and thus inferable. Further, we all share the same physical conditions on Earth; the underlying physical and social principles are the same. The deeper the theory, the more accurate the predictions can be made with limited information.

This also relates to molecular structures and artificial intelligence. In the field of molecular structures, each possible configuration of a system corresponds to an energy value, and all possible configurations form an energy landscape. Predicting molecular structures involves forecasting these energy landscapes and identifying where the local minima are. In artificial intelligence, a neural network’s loss function also forms a landscape, with local minima corresponding to a network that has learned some representation. The learning process involves finding the lowest points on this landscape, reaching the smartest state a “brain” can achieve. One of my work is adjusting neural networks to make them “energetic”, “intuitive”, or smarter so that they learn faster and reach moments of epiphany sooner (See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.19044).

Perhaps one day, we can use scientists’ theories and the essence of all human wisdom to understand life. We are also part of the map.

In the physical world, the information you can obtain by observing your surroundings is limited. But in the spiritual world, everything is interconnected. Observing one thing, you can see its connection to countless other things, almost observing the whole world within it. Thus, from a small matter, you may see the entirety of life. This requires using your own spiritual perception, perhaps derived from your own sensibilities and emotions. Observing emotions, observing oneself, and its interactions with the world reveals so much.

With the wings of rationality and sensibility, make yourself more sensitive yet more resilient, sensitive enough to see the universe in a grain of sand, eternity in the palm of your hand, resilient like the calm sea, unafraid and unshaken. 

When you see to the edges of life, to the ends of the world, and witness the changing tides and the endpoint of time, everything disappears, leaving only light and warmth, with only love enduring forever.

If you ask how I know this, of course, I don’t. It’s just a perception from my own life experiences, feeling fully, as if it is so. Every moment in real life points to eternity.

As the Little Prince said, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” May everyone view life through our mind's eyes.