Tuesday 20 July 2010

The So It Is of Causality

(if you think so)

It's a point that things happen in a certain way, that is to say the very reverend, mainstream concept of causation. Oh well, so now there is still someone who believes in proper old-school causation???
Don't be afraid, I mean, we live in very liberal philosophical times, so if you're such a conservative about happening, what to say? You're in good company. I don't blame you more than Catholics who believes in transubstantiation of matter in a odd kind of biscuits, or bankers selling to humankind a collateralized debt obligation about their necessity “to grow”.

But it is a fact that most people think it is possible for us to detect a series of event divided in causes and effects,whose totality constitutes the world. This is probably what is considered common sense nowadays...
What is exactly the relation amongst entities, that is so obvious you would buy every product that follows from it?

We know that things happen...to some extent. We know that we know it, because we are self conscious: we appear to be happening in this world. What we call “we” is happening and is here. Two possible paths: the thing we call “we” is an amass of chaotic hallucinations (for courtesy I'm speaking at plural: when things are getting tough, I like some company...) or this golden boy that is consciousness has some degree of consistency. Therefore if we are not a nightmare, we are a stream of more or less organized representations (I actually subscribe this. Call me romantic). And the order we see is causation. I fooled myself. Damn. Wait, I was joking.


Causation is the way we look at the consistent way we represent things to ourselves (including the self representation). So if we look a series of facts, consistency must organize events in a straight mainstream way. There is a corpse. The person died after a violent fight; has been killed. There must be a killer. Causation. There is a guy who says he's the son of god and everyone of you is his brother; he's been killed because he said to be god. Causation. The majority of us thinks we are a thinking machine. Our troubles are just the heritage of some vagueness in expressing our needs. We are just involved in the mist of our misinterpreted needs. Causation. We will win the mist and bringing the light of causation, we'll finally satisfy our needs.
Well let me just hand you down a hint. It's not our brains talking. We are not our brains. We are the mist in which our brains are involved.



Do you think a human brain destiny is to reach knowledge??? Have you ever read Darwin??? Do you think that a brain goal is to live in peace and prosperity with other brains??? For what??? We are so (righteously) involved in humanistic mist, we forget why we like to have an organized experience. Have you ever asked yourself why? It's good to have this experience because, given the narrative mist we are, it would be impossible to enjoy our narrative misty adventures without consistency. We mistmen like to have experience. We have a consistent experience because we are willing mistmen. Causation. We are willing mistmen because we have a pure pointless contingent consistent experience. Causation. So it is. If you like it

Sunday 11 July 2010

Time of Representation


Minds are essentially representations producers and for this they easily develop the authorship feeling; this feeling doesn't equally account for the delay of the representation. If you're representing something, then this something must have existed before. Or not? Well, a mind is a representation of a brain accelerated in a semantic environment. The actual organ is per definition living in his present: it's living in the same time of its correlated heart and liver. But the representation is living as a projection in a semantic environment. So when a mind thinks of itself as a representation in a semantic environment,can speculate about its own reality. Actually being a mind is being the self representation of a cognitive projection in a semantic world. So a mind is the return representation bouncing on the environment of signs. A mind is a mirror of its times; it's also the (partial) producer of its times. You are moved by the sensitivity of your contemporary ages and you are shaping your contemporary ages with your sensitivity. A puppet moving its own strings.

In our times it's becoming more difficult to feel in tune with our ages: it's typical to feel not in sync, to feel the relation with the world somehow distorted, to feel the superimposition of different trends. This means precisely that our ages is characterized by a diffuse sense of asynchronicity, distortion, superimposition: there is nothing wrong in the feeling. On the contrary the feeling is accurately representing the contemporary age. It's always the case that a mind is the representation of its times; even when it shows a problematic representation; better: especially when it's problematic, it shows its representative nature.

In fact time is a product of representing minds: time appears when it is observed by a mind. And a mind can occur only in time. Representing is the flow of projection and this narrative stream is time.
So when a mind is reflecting about itself, it's producing time and when it's reflecting about its times, is producing mindness.


The time of representation is a mind.


The representation of a mind is time.


Take Time

(from "The Books").