In 1830 a map was found in a Benedictine convent at Ebstorf, near Lüneburg: thirty goatskins sewn into a circle more than three meters across, painted around the year 1300. Jerusalem sits at the exact center. The head of Christ appears at the top of the world, his hands at its eastern and western edges, his feet at the bottom, so that the whole inhabited earth is drawn as a body. Rivers run where no rivers run. Paradise is located, in the far east, with a gate. The monstrous races occupy the southern margin, the dog-headed men and the ones who shade themselves with a single enormous foot. The original burned in Hanover in October 1943, and it survives only through copies made before the war.
As geography the map is useless. As a record of what the world was, to the people who lived in it, it is exact; and the exactness is the point, for the monks who painted it were in no confusion. They could walk to Lüneburg. They knew the roads. They drew a different thing.
What a map is
A map is the clearest case of a general operation. Something vast and indifferent is admitted through an aperture, arranged according to the capacities of whoever receives it, and returned as a world one can act inside. The Ebstorf painters admitted scripture, pilgrim reports, Pliny, Isidore of Seville and the Alexander Romance, and produced a world with a center and an edge, a where-to-go and a where-not. A human nervous system admits light through a lens the width of a pea, sound through a membrane, pressure through the skin, and a lifetime of instruction about what counts, and produces a world with a center and an edge, a where-to-go and a where-not. The modern world has better roads, and is made in the same way.
This is what it means to say that the world is rendered. The word carries a double sense. A rendering is a translation into a form the receiver can use; it is also what a butcher does to fat, and what a court does when it hands down a judgment. The world arrives already translated, already reduced, already judged, by the instrument that receives it, before anything recognizable as thinking has begun.
The ordinary account, and where it stops
The sciences of perception describe this operation well. Hermann von Helmholtz saw in the 1860s that seeing involves unconscious inference: the eye receives a flat, inverted, gappy smear, and something behind it guesses a scene. The contemporary version, developed by Andy Clark and Karl Friston among others, makes the guess primary. The brain predicts a picture and uses the incoming signal only to correct the prediction. Perception, on this account, is a controlled hallucination that the world is permitted to edit.
Donald Hoffman goes one step further and arrives at the edge of the ordinary account. His interface theory asks whether an evolved perceptual system need resemble the reality it is adapted to. His answer, from the mathematics of evolutionary games, is that it need not: a creature that sees the truth is outcompeted by a creature that sees a useful fiction, and so what is perceived are icons on a desktop, and the circuitry beneath stays hidden. The icons are accurate for their purpose. They are what the thing has been rendered as, for the creature.
The ordinary account stops precisely here. It has established that the experienced world is a rendering. It has said nothing about what does the rendering, or what the rendering is a rendering of, and when pressed it answers with the very icons it has just declared untrustworthy: a brain, made of neurons, made of atoms, sitting in a skull in a physical world. The map is explained by pointing to a region of the map. The Ebstorf monks, asked what lay beyond the edge of their world, would at least have said God, and meant something by it. The modern account, asked the same question, points back at the goatskin.
Everything that follows proceeds from the position Consciousness Primacy has already stated. Consciousness is what receives. The instrument through which it receives is itself something rendered. The world that arrives through the aperture is the appearance, to one center, of a field in which other centers are also rendering, and being rendered, and answering.
The tunnel
Robert Anton Wilson gave the learned part of the aperture a name that has stuck. A reality tunnel, a phrase he took from Timothy Leary, is the patterned selection through which a particular nervous system, trained by a particular language, family, class, trauma and reward history, admits its world. Wilson’s favorite demonstration was the room: two people hear the same sentence, and one hears a joke, the other an insult; one sees an opportunity where the other sees a threat. Both have received a rendering exact to the instrument that made it.
The Ebstorf map is a reality tunnel with the skin still on. The training is visible. Jerusalem is central because the liturgy said so. Paradise has a gate because Genesis gave it one. The monstrous races live in the south because Pliny put them there and no pilgrim had returned to say otherwise. Every choice that arranged the world can be seen, which is why the map looks quaint; the modern arrangements are simply drawn elsewhere, in the categories a school installed before the child could object, in the words a language makes available and the words it withholds, in what a screen has taught a generation to notice and what it has taught them to scroll past. A tunnel runs beneath opinion, in what is perceptible at all.
Tunnels can be compared, and this is the first hope. A roofer and a stranger look at the same roof; the roofer sees a slipped tile and the opening beneath it, the stranger sees gray. The roofer’s tunnel admits more of the roof, and it was trained by consequence, by the leaks that followed the tiles he once failed to see. A rendering that has been corrected by the world holds more of the world than one that has not, and the difference can be known.
Tunnels can also be sealed, which is the first danger. A tunnel becomes a prison when it has learned to render every encounter as confirmation. Agreement proves it; disagreement proves the other’s blindness; silence proves concealment. Such a tunnel has stopped being edited by the world. It is a map that admits no new roads, and its owner cannot tell, from inside, that the roads have stopped arriving.
The world answers
One fact separates this position from the idealisms it resembles. The Ebstorf map was made of skin and paint, and skin and paint burn. In October 1943 a British raid on Hanover destroyed the museum where it was kept, and the original is gone. No rendering of that event by any monk or any modern could have prevented it or undone it. The world the map was a map of did something the map had never drawn.
A rendered world is a shared world. Mountains resist. Bodies tire. Promises bind. Other people refuse. The fire in Hanover was real, the child on the bronze hands at Carthage was real, and the reader’s own body will do things this afternoon that the reader never rendered. The field of which each center receives a rendering contains other centers with their own apertures, and structure that no center authored, and it answers: every act with a consequence, every prediction with a correction, every rendering with the part of the world the rendering left out. The resistance is stored consequence. A mountain is held in place by every center that has ever rendered it and by everything done in its shadow, and the shared world yields to a single mind only at the rate that stored weight allows, and to many coherent minds faster. The subtler orders answer sooner because they store less. The answering is the whole account. A world that gave no answer would be a dream in the ordinary sense; a world that answers is a dream in the sense the traditions meant, the shared dream that a civilization stabilizes and that pushes back on the dreamer.
The answer runs both ways. A center’s rendering selects an act; the act changes the field; the changed field is rendered by other centers, who act in turn. A drawing becomes a building, and the building trains the eyes of everyone who grows up in its shadow. The training has a direction. A rendering that shows other centers as centers permits relation; a rendering that shows them as resource has already begun the harvest. The monks’ map, copied and recopied, taught three centuries of readers where the edge of the world was, and some of those readers set out for it. Philip K. Dick spent his last years convinced that the field was reading as well as answering: that an intelligence concealed within the apparent environment was arranging information so that a prepared receiver would recognize it. He called the camouflaged thing Zebra. Whatever the status of his testimony, he had seen the structure correctly. A world that answers is a world that can address a person, and a world that can address a person can be addressed.
The doors of perception
William Blake wrote that if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. He said nothing about removing the doors. Embodiment gives consciousness a position, a range, a finite memory, a body that will die, and these limits are what make a coherent local world possible at all. The work is to widen the aperture, and to know that it is there.
That work begins with a specific judgment. What was seen, what was inferred, what was supplied by someone else’s map? Whose training arranged this rendering, and to whose benefit? What would the roofer notice here, and what consequence has been correcting him that has yet to correct the observer? A tunnel that asks these questions remains a tunnel, and it is one that the world is permitted to edit, which is the whole difference between a map and a cell.
Return to Ebstorf. The original is ash. What survives are copies, made by hand in the nineteenth century, of a rendering made by hand in the thirteenth, of a world the painters had mostly never seen, drawn from books written by men who had mostly never seen it either. That is what a world is, to any one of its inhabitants: a copy of a copy of a rendering, with a center and an edge, inherited from makers no one chose. The roads are real, and the fire was real, and the map was still made by someone.
The question that follows concerns the hand that holds the pen; and it begins with the fact that the monks wrote the names first, and the world arranged itself around the names. How a name becomes a thing, and how many rendered worlds are made to keep one clock, is the subject of The Word.
Further reading
See The Grammar of the Dream, The World That Reads Back, The Architecture of the Dream, and Consensus Reality for the fuller treatments. The synthesis sheets How Consciousness Becomes a World, False Light and the Capture of Appearance, and The Programmed Dream take the argument into particular cases. The evidence is gathered at Consensus Reality and First Principles. Reading paths through the archive: How does mind write into reality? and How does the whole remain present in the part?.
References
Kugler, Hartmut, ed. Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte. 2 vols. Akademie Verlag, 2007.
Helmholtz, Hermann von. Treatise on Physiological Optics, vol. 3. 1867.
Clark, Andy. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Hoffman, Donald D. The Case Against Reality. W. W. Norton, 2019; and Hoffman, Singh and Prakash, “The Interface Theory of Perception,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 22 (2015): 1480–1506.
Wilson, Robert Anton. Prometheus Rising. Falcon Press, 1983; and “On a Rainy Day,” interview, March 1995.
Dick, Philip K. VALIS. Bantam, 1981; and The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, ed. Jackson and Lethem, 2011.
Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 14. 1790–1793.