The unexpected fecundity of public relations: the generative art of spinning facts

In “simple”semiotic environments,if I want to tell you something, I tell it to you. This is ok, if I need to communicate to you that the glass is empty of full: binary code. Semiotic environments, especially if populated by biological organisms, tends to be slightly more complicated. In mammals and especially in primates, you can observe a terrific explosion of semiotic complexity. Just to mention some in group of apes: I want you to believe that I don't know you know I've seen you. This is called Machiavellian intelligence and apes proved to be able to use high level of deception, manipulating other (possible) thoughts. Or better the projections of the subject about others thoughts.

Then we have societies, human societies. With institutions, group of individuals, just individuals, theory about single individuals can collectively organize their individual knowledge through shared individual archives.....

The semiotic environment of human societies is actually quite complex, rich, articulated, chaotic even if highly organized (or highly infrastructered even if wild...as you prefer...). So it happens very often that an entity decides to communicate with group of individuals with a facilitator,a messenger.

Very often we think that the entity is actually giving the content of the message to the messenger, based on “facts”. Then we think that is just about smartness and honesty of the messenger “how the fact is delivered in to a message”.

In reality, in the semiotic reality, the message is always a case of generation.

The messenger is always generative, no matter the content to be delivered.

In our society the messengers are building a narrative universe of stories and characters, manufacturing faces of institutions, values of corporation, facts of people's life. Far from being liars,manipulators of fact, the public relations messengers are the artificers of what's happening in the semiotic-spheres.

Indeed, humans don't inhabit a world of facts, but a world of transmitted stories, in which the fluctuations perpetrated by the intermediaries are generative and genuine new happenings. The first human fact was mute, solipsistic and sterile. Only when someone started to spin the fact in to a story, the fact started to be vivid, observable and real.

In our societies, what a company does is much more than the facts related to the company: you want to know the opinion of the company, the face of the company, jokes from and about the company: you want to listen to an articulated speech, what the company is. But rarely companies are so semioticly complex to be able to communicate what they are in the semiotic-sphere. They are invisible worms, eating soil of facts, submarine of narration. Messengers will catch the worms and the hunting will transform invisible companies in dragons, doves or donkeys. We are fact-blind and the messengers give us eyes, colorful eyes. It's a long story, with a lot of philosophical interferences (ah, these philosophers of truth...), our good Xenophanes said that “if oxen were able to imagine gods, then those gods would be in the image of oxen”, and the too good Kant said that with green glass, things will appear green to us.

I'm saying that things appear narrated to us, so someone must have narrated them. Narrations spin facts, so if we live in a semiotic-sphere, someone must have spun the facts...

If you have a face and an identity, trust me, it is after spinning and spinning. Nowhere on earth you'll find the immobile, static fact of your identity.

So my friends, let's spin!

Copycats,replicas and serial actors: the suicide of the protagonist

Perfect crime: the quintessence of narration. Everyone has deployed at least once this game: as a rebel teenager with your mates, or the isolation of your murdering attitude (note: we include also self-murderer).

It's a game of logic and common sense: a perfect crime changes in different societies. You are required to know the context of the society in which the murder will take place. Planning a perfect crime is also a test of your narrativity. And something exquisitely human. Other animals slaughter their mates. They can organize traps: but none will plan a killing in order NOT to be seen by its mates. In the animal kingdom killing is something to be shown, not covered.

We like so much this game that for some (normally clever, disturbed guys) it's like a drug: they become addicted. And they kill in series, of course trying not to be discovered. Not soon at least. But we are such a funny species, that not only we have serial killers, but also copycats: killers who emulate other serial killers, normally less clever, seriously disturbed guys. Are we interested in a niche of narrativity for psychos? Well, yes, but not so punctually limited.

The killing game is limited, but the algorithm of serial doing and copycating is the essence of human nature. Consciousness is not a thing, an entity; what you call mind is a complex phenomenon of a primate brain, exposed in a narrative environment.

An empty primate brain will be exposed to narratives and will absorb a series of stories, a series of different details of facts, event. And characters, of course. At a certain point, your primate brain will be able to feel the stories, even able to replicate them. Impersonating the protagonist of his own story. Clearly is such the amount of narratives stored in our human environment, that every replica is slightly different.

You can start copycating your “hero”, not matter “who”: could be easily Ulysses or Jim Morrison, your daddy or Marylin Monroe (or both, of course). After your imprinting, you start to serially acting, pretending to be a specific character. Indeed you are a specific replica of the narrativity of human beings.Have you ever felt something is wrong, something is missing? Would you like to know the truth? Your a copy, a narrative, imperfect clone. Still interested in the logic game of common sense, get the rid of the protagonist: he doesn't exist.

You will find yourself liberated and much more tolerant about your mates.

You can also do these trick: because of our mirror neurons, if you smile to your fellows, they feel the urge to smile back. Cute, funny, story test dummies!

Technology of narrativity: art of surviving with monstrous brains

Living beings present a massive information growth in respect to inorganic matter: aminoacids, proteins are very complex molecules not to mention fishes, plants and mushrooms.

The complexity of mammals in particular, produce nervous system able to handle a huge amount of information.

The size of brains is important, but if we confront human and cetaceans brains, the difference is irrelevant. Still we can see a gigantic difference in dealing with information. Our information exchange is several times more sophisticated (viciously maybe...), complex (degenerated perhaps). What we observe is an infrastructure of information in which our human brains are plugged in: let's call it culture.

In culture we are immersed in a network of meanings and senses. Actually, they are virtual: a priest is a priest only by convention, nothing in his physical structure or in his behaviour can tell you he is a priest. This complex network is not objective like inorganic matter, but not even like behaviours of dolphins or other primates. Often it's based on patent absurdity, sometimes completely mad guys lead the majority, it happens also that some of our members find gods, kill gods, or are gods.

In general we invent senses and meanings in our virtual cultural world. We are huge producers (polluters) of meanings,senses and myths. We create myths and we start to “believe”. No other animal “believes”. Sure, it can be cheated, but you can make an animal to believe. You can trick to let him think something (sure you can deceive animals). Primates deceive themselves (I mean, also the cousins with fur). But it appears, only humans believe. And we do believe in senses,meanings and myths. Gorillas and chimpanzees cry for their dead sons; sometimes they can't cope with the grieve. But it's just us who truly add something to primate feelings and emotions. And after we invented and believed in senses,meanings and myths, they are there.

You start to see them in the world. We do see priests, politicians, characters. We see a cultural world, which actually is far from being objective. We see our myths, they are there for us. They are there because we put there and they are there because we evoked them. We see a world consistent with our culture, we see the sense of the actions (more or less, of course...)in the environment we live in. If you believe in god, you're able to see his hand in everything of the “created” world. You can also see numbers everywhere.

We invented stories, we polluted our virtual world of stories and we started to believe them, becoming crazy searching objective senses and meanings in the myths we created. So we created more: we invented a series of stories to placate our appetite for stories.

The question is not whether these food of stories, of gods are real or not.

But : can we digest them? Can we digest our gods, our myths? And equally: can we fast from our senses, can we fast from gods?

I guess a lot depends on the story you tell yourself: a kind of eating your senses, your meanings: self-cannibalism, to survive an overwhelming wave of information.

Rosa speculorum:the art of being human

The significance of human actions, resides in meanings. You know what is love,hate,proud, humiliation, pleasure and fear, because you understand these human meanings. You won't find any fear or humiliation in the physical world. Sure animals encounter something similar, but the proper human experience lies on the articulation of these sensation in their meanings. True, you feel love for someone, but you've been told about human loves in songs, movies, friends' tales, parent's model: after a training in human society, you become accustomed to what love is for human beings. We shape the meanings of human facts from human tales, from our experience (which is your story). You can see as normal human facts, because you understand them; otherwise it would be the a monkey delirium what men do.

We do understand even the most execrable and ominous facts, because we catch a glimpse of significance even in the monstrous action of psychopaths. We are terrorized by the most disgusting crimes and we are wondering “why, how could they do this”, precisely because we know it. Equally, when we admire the most sublime works of men (buildings, music, actions) and we reckon how superior is the prowess of these men, we subtly are admiring our ability to understand the prowess of humankind.We see others as monsters and artists, because we understand others. You can love another human being, because you can see that he's like you.

But if you try to investigate the consistence of human facts, you'll see a gigantic entanglement of drama and comedy, plays that imitate other plays. How do you learn what is betraying? From other betrayals. Some act as they know their act will be used as models; other prefer to act as they are unique; most act as unaware of acting. Every human act is an acted reaction. You can find the very first human act: the very first interpretation was unaware of the humanity of acting. An Ur-act is not an act: an act must follow other acts to be an act. Therefore only after many acts have been played inhumanly, finally you can have a proper, first human act.

We are so involved in human actions, that we don't see ourselves acting on the human stage:for good. Indeed it's important to take seriously your acting, otherwise you couldn't be that convincing. Of course sometimes the paramount interpretation is precisely the one showing awareness of the game. This is typical of arts, especially in drama, or film, where on stage, you allude to the fictional nature of your play. You can do it in your real life as well, but exaggerating could bring you the label of mad and not always is a good one. It's preferable to act as you believe in the norms regulating our human reality. But gravity is not questionable; integrity, reliability, discretion, for example, can be questioned. It's also a good norm for you to observe some sort of regularity: your mind needs to act with a decent amount of coherence to stay sane.To be human, you need to act as such: an original human fact is the imitation of other one.

Therefore our actions are copy of copies. Notwithstanding, it's us, we are the players. I cry and admire the human condition, precisely as other Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Jewish,Arabs did before me.And in my crying and in my admiration resounds like a warped replica their own.I can reflect on my self, because I'm mirroring other speculations, twisting a bit my own reflection, for my own ignorance and my own pleasure.

Your consciousness is the sensation of doing something when you think and then calling the actor of the thinking a self and this reflection, self consciousness. It's the optical illusion of mirrors mirroring mirrors, foreseeing in the vertigo of the infinite reflection, a glimpse of a mind. In reality? Just reflections of reflections. Only? Nothing more; but it's beautiful, like a rose, an infinite rose of mirrors. Enjoy your own rosa speculorum.

The writing of the Gods

"Angelus Silesius, a mystic poet of '600, said that the rose is without a why,

she simpl blooms. So it's vain your intellectual proud to discover a meaning in things: things simply are. In the “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”, a delirious poem that is the foundation of modern logic, Wittgenstein aimed to find the general form of proposition (well, of every possible proposition in every possible world uttered by every possible intelligent being), which is [ p-bar , xi-bar , N( xi-bar )]. In a novel, Borges said that Aztec Gods printed on the skin of the jaguar the secret meaning of the world.

So now, we can start. In the inorganic world, we don't have information: information is something that stand for something else. In the inorganic world, things don't stand for something, they are the things. To exchange information, you need a reading device and to have a reading device, you need a writing device. Living beings can do it. But you can have meanings only if you have a language. Frogs exchange information (can perceive pain, so don't be cruel with frogs), but they do not have a language. A rose, equally, exchanges information, but if you ask a rose, why she blooms, she can't. One good point in not asking yourself “why”,is that you can't get insane. Have you ever seen crazy roses? Neither I. The only safe salvation from madness is to be a rose. But of course if you're a man, this is not helpful: if you pretend to be a rose, you are definitely mad.

But men are interested in finding the ultimate meaning of things; this is for example the source of philosophical investigation. Some also believe that in the particle accelerator you'll find these kind of meanings, like a general form of meanings.

They pretend to be roses! In fact, you'll find amazing information and no meanings. The secret meaning of the world, is a fiction, to be precise a novel. Humans tell each other though novels, this secret meaning. The good news are that you can read in multiple ways this novel:it can be written by god on a jaguar skin or in holy book(s), but it can also be written by men as a tale. The bad news are that you can read in multiple ways this novel: a contradictionary delirious of primates, pretending to write meanings.

More or less, we are enchanting each other with stories, and we believe these deliria, falling in the enchantment we ourselves are telling. We create gods in our novels and in these novels gods create men. A narrator create a story and a reader believe to be created by the novel. But it is true! Our minds are created by the stories others tell us. When you read a story, a narrator is creating a piece of your mind. And when you tell a story, your creating a piece of someone else mind: men are the creative process of man, homo homini opus.

And creation is not a prerogative of god, is it? And is really such a blasphemy to call the world, the novel of god? In a Pirandello novel, we meet 6 characters searching for an author to write their story. What is absurd, to believe in a god? To search for meanings in protons? To tell stories? To search for your own author? To write about roses?

At the end of the day, it's fine: a bunch of monkeys telling stories, pretending to be roses.” Not too bad, fella; it could be a worst story...

Metaphysics and human rights: gambling in possible worlds and common sense

The statement “every human being is born with equal rights” is a wonderful display of a chaos metaphysics; of course we are proud supporters of it. The underlining concept is that you are the person you are for a very random cross of contingencies and chaos.

“You” is an umbrella term for several instants of space and time, with a certain refrain of occurrence. It's easy and helpful to label “you” that body and mind, but

Being white, being protestant, being transsexual could bring some intrinsic rights??? And what about the mix: say, being Muslim is at the top of its scale and being transsexual at the bottom of its scale, how would you compute the combination, in the middle??? What kind of algorithm are you using???sometimes you include in the umbrella term the delirious adventures of a twist of your mind; do you dream, don't you? As human beings, we decided to distribute rights in order to play our games, but the distribution to be fair has to recognize the contingent nature of the umbrella term “I”.

Therefore it would be absurd to give to a very random configuration of you, more rights than another:playing would be unfair. This configuration of me as, say, a white catholic homosexual man, should receive more rights to play than,say, me as a black Muslim heterosexual woman? A part from cultural reason, from a metaphysical point of view, can you image a consistent logic to assign rights and privileges to random configurations? Honestly, can you find a reasonable way to share privileges and rights to contingent and chaotic sets of properties, coherently?

The development of culture is a wonderful deployment of the random adventure of these funny characters that are human being. They have been involved for thousands years in their crazy tales and for centuries they distributed rights and privileges to play in accordance with their delirious contingent tales. No matter how fun you find this method, no matter how you love absurdity, after all this time, human beings accepted that if it's completely chaotic the corpus of their tales, it's pointless to attribute more importance to one instead of another. The impression of being led by absurdity is only

superficial: indeed the principles ruling your lives are absurd, but our primate-like brain tend continuously to adjust our actions.

Endorsing the universal rights, is a good way to spend less time and resource in this continuous adjustment. And accept the cooperation of our instantiations, even the possible one, will only empower our games. Instead of blocking and obstructing the development of your possible selves (including the ones you currently wouldn't label immediately under "your" umbrella term), can only be a wonderful empowerment for human beings. Including you; I mean, the strict umbrella term. The gain at stake? Well, as a gambler, try to image the possibility of playing at infinite tables.

So my friends, let's the instantiations out and give your bro' a chance!

Homo homini opus

Get a look at your hands. I suppose:5+ 5 fingers, good mobility (well of course if you don't have these characteristics, I beg your pardon). What's the buzz? Well, you are smart, in part because of your hands. Humans started to increase their smartness, when they started to stand, walking with feet and freeing the upper arts. Human brains became to explore the world with hands. Touching things and touching things with things.

Take a stick and try to test the ground. Very soon you'll be able to “feel” the ground with the stick: if it's hard or soft; but also if it's wet. Shortly humans begun to build tools.

The good thing in building tools is that you have to be smart to build one, but also that you can store “smartness” in the tool. Take scissors: the shape of the tool is shaping your movements.

Scissors are not just an extension of movements (in sharpness), they are also guiding your gestures. Manual prowess brings you a degree of smartness. Artisans are smart monkeys.

A good thing of smart monkeys is that they can communicate. And communication is another tool. You can build scissors, hammers, mainframe, tables, satellites. You can also build stories, narratives, legends, religions and jokes. Narratives are a kind of tool to extend gestures and guide movements. When you have a certain degree of narrative movements, you have a mask, a character. A mind.

We build minds with our narratives because we've been built as minds by narratives. We composed very long stories, really very long. Societies are this kind of stories. With societies you can tell very long stories. We tell stories about Egyptians, about Julius Caesar, about the man of Neanderthal. We always told stories about the beginning: of everything. Sometimes with fantasy, sometimes with proven fantasy. We spoke of an old man with a white beard “creating” the world; we spoke of a very strange event in which normal rules don't apply. In short we told ourselves a lot of stories.

We build tools to play with. We built hammers, scissors and minds. We built computers and programs. We program now. As we've always done. As soon as we stood on two feet, we started to program our environment with stories and with tools, because we were programming our minds. Now we program in these virtual environments, transferring intelligence in lines of code. As usual.

It's funny when people is afraid of technology, forecasting the times the machines will overthrow men. It's funny because men are nothing but the spirits evoked by hammers and scissors: it would be silly to say we

“overthrown” our tools. It's funny but to some extent our minds have

been created by our tools. “But we'd create with intention”. And intention what is? Don't be too philosophical. Of course we create with intention and dices says 7. God doesn't play with dices, we do.It's good, it's cool. It's our work. It's us.