| | Hi Paticca,
To me, the maps and models are a motivation for practice first: to see if what they describe is really there.
They are also a great consolation: I'm not the only one having these kinds of experiences, I'm not alone, I need not be bewildered, there is the possibility of guidance.
For me, faith has got very little to do with it - if the maps are bogus, I'm no worse off than before, if they hold true, so much the better.
What they are not, to me at least, is a cookie-cutter for reality to fit into. If my opinions about reality are off the mark, well, I can't make reality responsible for not accomodating my opinions.
BTW, a computer's lowest level of 1's and 0's is what it is only because our convention. Underneath the 1's and 0's there are physical phenomena which, within certain bounds, exhibit certain logic traits: but it is our, the observer's choice to understand it so (a voltage in a memory cell and a magnetic moment on a disk have little in common, yet both mean "1" or "0" TO US). Thus, the 1's and 0's are not fundamentally different from the pictures on the screen, which are meaningful only because we give them meaning. So the A&P "of a computer" really is still the A&P of the person thinking about computers, observing them.
Cheers, Florian |