The tricky thing about experiencing the territory beneath our maps is that we habitually map over the gaps as fast as we can find them. Every once in a while though, we'll run into a situation that blesses us with an undeniable distinction that persists long enough to be studied.
Once upon a time I went lobster diving with some cousins and uncles. My uncle Joe had a lot more experience diving for lobsters than me, and so it wasn't very surprising that he was coming up with two to three times as many lobsters as the rest of us. I asked to buddy with him for a bit, so I could see what he was doing differently. Surely, the difference is that he knows which rocks to look beneath, right? Or maybe he's looking deeper into the crevices?
Nope.
It's hard to convey in words how weird this experience is. You're swimming along, amidst kelp, rocks, and a sandy bottom. Definitely no lobster. This is not one of those "Wow, isn't camo cool!" scenes where you know there's room for a leopard to hide until you find it, after which it seems like you should have seen it all along. This is a scene of some kelp, a bit of rock, and a lot of sand. Definitely no lobsters. No place for a lobster to hide, even.
And then he'd just reach out into this picture and pull out a lobster. Over and over.
You know that magic trick where the magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat?
Imagine that, only instead of a rabbit, it's a lobster. And there's no hat. And no trick.
He's not pulling them out of his wetsuit while I'm not looking. It's not the kind of "magic" that dissolves into party tricks once you realize that there's no net creation of lobsters and you can't actually use this magic to feed yourself. He was grabbing them out of genuine nonexistence right in front of my eyes, and shoving them into his wetsuit.
Or at least, that's sure what it looked like, even after examining the experience in detail over and over. Yep, I can still read my dive watch, not dreaming. Yes that really is just kelp, not just mistaking lobsters for kelp. I've checked.
Yet over and over the experience would shift and no amount of "Just look under the rocks" or anything in my current experience was gonna find me the other ⅔ of the lobster. Because the error had already occurred in the perceptual ontology step. Not in the step where I see kelp and think "Yep, I'm seeing kelp. That's what my map says". In the step before where I see kelp.
The tricky thing about these errors is that by the nature of the problem, we don't experience them as errors. And therefore can't count them.
There's no "Where's Waldo" because not only is there no Waldo there's also no "Waldo".
Even as the seams begin to give, and evidence leaks through, we seek to sew faster than we rip.
"He probably knows where to look. Probably looking deeper into holes or something."
"Oh, I must have been spacing out, and missed that one. I'll have to pay more attention next time."
"Neat concept, but I don't sew things out of my perception."
It takes someone doing wizard shit. Right in front of you. Repeatedly. And even then, you best hope you don't believe in wizards, or have a similarly labeled catch-all box to toss things in, and resolve the tension without needing to see the gears that make it work.
The way out, to begin seeing beyond the seams, requires attending to a very strange question.
Is that piece of kelp — which is definitely kelp — about to transform into a lobster?