Should We Use A Map Or A Blueprint To Understand Our World?

The most important is knowing the difference

Before I knew what a fountain pen was, I used to buy 32-page exercise books for a single reason — to draw maps.

I would crank up the volume on our small radio, listen to Kiss 100 FM, and open an atlas to draw whichever map I fancied. To my naïve self, the maps I drew were better than the ones in the atlas. They just needed a little bit of colour.

When I showed it to my sister, the artist in the family, she would smile. I should have noticed that this was the first hint that my map did not match the original versions.

If the atlas’ maps were the territories, my drawings were struggling maps. Maps and territories are different. They will never be the same. Never.

You might even know about the popular phrase — the map is not the territory. This article, however, doesn’t bother to stress this point. It introduces another interesting concept somewhat related to maps — blueprints.

But first, we need a compass.

Knowing the map

Our primary school teachers would insist on always scoring all the first seven questions in social studies. According to them, these questions were dead giveaways.

The first thing they would remind us to always take note of was the compass because there will always be a question asking:

What is the direction of the quarry from the school?

Or

What is the direction of the granary from the market?

Without the compass, you would likely fail this question. The north was not always pointing upward. It could point at the side. Failure to which you would be the only one correct with your instituted compass.

Maps are models of the real deal. They give us an outline for the territory we have an interest in. The map of any coastline will never tell us about the crabs that reside in a certain sandy corner. They are a guide. An approximate guide.

In a way, maps are like theoretical models in different fields. If it is physics, we can use the map of the standard model to understand particles. However, the standard model does not explain the people explaining the standard model. It cannot explain how humans emerged and evolved to the point of asking questions about the standard model.

There’s a subtle difference here which I will discuss later, but for now, let us take this example as a first approximation.

Maps are a good first approximation of the territory. You might look like a confused fella when you hang onto your phone hoping Google Maps shows you that pin supposedly that matched the location your friend told you about on that Friday evening where the party would be held.

Maps guide. They are lines conjured by guessing and streamlined by real outlines so that they can match reality as closely as possible.

The blueprint is different.

Knowing a blueprint

Blueprints are different.

I can have a blueprint for the cars my companies produce and the outcome will be nearly similar almost always.

What’s more the blueprint can be replicated with near-perfect fidelity. I restrict myself from using the naïve word ‘perfect’ because, in a world such as ours, there are no parallel lines. Our geometry is not Euclidean.

Blueprints, therefore, are better than maps.

The Watson and Crick model of the DNA is often considered to be a blueprint of how a cell replicates. Thanks to various cellular corrective systems, one DNA can replicate to form another with near-perfect fidelity.

There are some similarities between a map and a blueprint. For instance, the blueprint is a fine example of how a map should be. The blueprints of a space station tell its residents where certain chambers are and how to float from one to another.

In this sense, the blueprint is a map on steroids.

But there’s a difference that can be overlooked and which makes, for lack of a better term, the big difference.

Knowing the difference

The big difference is in the mind of the person who created the two — the difference is in the inception.

For a map, one has to survey the territory and calibrate it to fit the recording devices one has. If it’s a piece of paper or an extensive positioning system, one has to record what they observe.

Some of the earliest maps would bank on landmarks and smoothed outlines, likely because nobody saw the reason for being too detailed about the edges. Roads were not as intricate as they are nowadays. The paths created among the thickets, bushes, and forests were the variably the only parts one needed to know.

With our satellites and improving computing systems, our record-taking is better.

After traversing the territory, one then comes up with the map. It then proves helpful after you have recorded its outlines.

Blueprints, however, are not like maps. They are created inside a scientist, artist, inventor, or adventurer. They are guessed and created de novo.

One can then copy it on a t-shirt and claim to know the behavior of all the fundamental particles in our shared universe. Referring to the point I made earlier, the standard model is more of a blueprint than a map.

It was created inside the mind of a scientist and later fine-tuned as they waded through their universe of experiments. A perfect example of a blueprint at work is the prediction of the Higgs boson.

Using the blueprint, they predicted the conditions for its existence, and they found it.

Similarly, the biochemists, after understanding the metabolic goals of organisms, predicted the existence of vents where it is posited life should have begun.

These vents were found.

The difference is subtle but can be elusive. Knowing the difference might seem like a modest step but it has a big impact on understanding one’s world.

Both can need adjustments, but they are not the same. One will be imaginary and ascertained by experiment and observation. Another is created through observation and then converted into an abstract concept to help future navigators.

In short…

What I’m trying to say is…

Despite the differences, each will always need improvements.

Fractal-like patterns in maps may prove that improvements are pointless. Kenya’s coastline will be 200 kilometers or 20 kilometers, depending on your instrument of choice.

Knowing that it’s a map gives you room to give up in a futile search for the accurate length of the coastline. The blueprint, however, can continue getting iterations for as long as we aim to get a better understanding of our fields.

Maps are not the territory and they can never be the territory. They can always be refined based on one’s obsession with detail but one can never achieve the accurate match in reality.

Blueprints, however, since it is printed from the conception of one’s mind, can be changed, improved, or dropped altogether. In evolutionary biology, the first blueprint was Larmarckian, which was dropped for a better print, Darwinian.

A blueprint is not the best example to give for an ever-changing genome, but it helps to understand the difference.

Jay-Z’s Blueprint was a classic. But he produced other versions. The aim was improvement. They, however, are not maps.

Know the difference.

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