The cognitive plateauWhere everything began

A peculiar group of apes one day speeded up their brain in narrative accelerators, generating minds. It seems the narrative accelerators irradiate cognitive performances in the brains,accelerated on their infrastructures. But curiously, when a mind is ignited, beside some secondary cognitive abilities (numeracy or orientation, and of course the coupling with the specific technological augmenting tool), every human intelligence is nothing more nothing less than a human mind, a man.

In the Western the pale, lewd shamans of thinking (in the person of Martin “Boom- Boom – Put – your – Hand - Up –in- - the - Air” Heidegger) rediscovered (invented: it’s always the same trick…) the Geworfeinheit , or the being thrown in the world condition. No matter the sophistication of your narrative infrastructures, no matter the swankiest purity of your Greek thinking or your Japanese coolness in cognitive posture or your last brain augmentation founded by the Defense Minister of the US, your ignited mind remains the primeval self-consciousness.

Your augmented brain can’t overtake himself, therefore his acceleration always causes the being thrown in the world.

In the ancestral plateau, men are already always in the being thrown in the world cognitive condition. Cyclically they are enslaved, tortured, killed and humiliated for this. Yet they stand. Being thrown.

No matter how you try to lure them in the game of piling up infrastructures, putting the series of representations in front of them to seduce them, to corrupt them, to civilize them. They stand. Being thrown.

You cry for the misery which sometimes is caused by their condition. You exploit their incapacity of understanding the impossible difference between a lie and a contract. They stand and they throw in your face the condition, the same, unchanged since the very beginning when an ape conquered the fire of being ignited in to a mind by the recursive narrations of brain accelerators. That fire threw a brain ape in to the world and already always human minds are wandering on the plateau. And they stand.

Cognitive Investigations: the 10 little Soldiers of mind paradox

In 10 little Soldiers the interpret, the reader is brought to think of a paradox: there are multiple murders, but everyone is killed. Because we need to exclude super-natural causes (for respect of our intelligence and for a typical shortsighted tendency, very frequent in analytical minds), then we have an impossible scenario, which is a paradox: under the laws of reason, if something is impossible, it can’t happen.

The solution is that no every detectable clue is really what it seems. Indeed one little (bastard) soldier just faked his own death.

Now take a human mind. We know that a human brain alone is not a mind (in the history of evolution we have human brains that didn’t present the peculiar characteristics necessary to claim the presence of a mind) : it must be triggered to develop a mind condition. So we need to trail the cognitive tracks and find the consciousness- awakener. The first step is kind of easy: human brains are ignited in to minds by other minds. This sounds reasonable but it’s also potentially misleading. Moreover its partial clarification can overshadow the broader solution (indeed the brain rising to consciousness overshadows its own enlightenment …).

Human minds don’t transform a mindless brain in to a mind-added brain: they bring no material carrier of change in the human brain subject to their mind-generating influence. But this is impossible! A brain alone can’t turn in to a mind, but the mind evangelization is not touching the brain, it’s just a story! Well, a human brain under the cognitive fellowship of other brain-companions, is grazed in to the self-exploration of its own complexity.

There is no physical contact between the already mind brain companions and the mind wannabe brain companion, though their presence it’s a stimulus for the brain to initiate the extension in its cognitive surroundings. The mind-terraforming habitat hosting the newly born accelerates the brain to establish a semiotic irradiation, then the cognitive resonance of the neuro-connections will institute a representation complex enough to explore her own complexity. In other words the brain extend itself in to a self-deployment: it trails the cognitive tracks of its self-exploration.

Therefore the brain elevates itself in to a mind, in the magnetic suspension provoked by some brain companions. This sounds a lot like the Baron of Munchausen, who was lifting himself. But it was just a story. As a fact, it’s impossible. And because something impossible must be a story, we deduct that human minds are only stories: brains are only faking their own self-consciousness.

Little soldier-brains, handing down each other the story of the mind, are trailing the cognitive tracks of their neuro-extension in the semiotic environment. Recovering from the narrative surroundings the re-entry, the little soldier brains detect the destination of the message: a human mind. And through the cognitive investigation, a human brain deploys itself in the destination of the semiotic tracks it is trailing: itself. The story is to be written, because through its interpretation the reader will tell the story itself and the mind who will invent it. This is the sense of a mind as a representation: a little soldier brain…

The flight of the penguin or It happens men are falling

Men, including their consciousness, are facts of the world. So they happen. Like Stars and atoms, they fall in to the world. They also represent, as it’s typical of living beings. They also represent their own representing activity, that is, they are self-conscious of their representation. Indeed they are able to see their own representation, because their representing activity is leaving traces that they chase. This process is generating the interpreter of the self-representation.

The fall of men as facts is interpreted by their consciousness as a meaningful event. You can call the friction of being a consciousness with her mere happening , narrativity.

A mind can only see her own being there as the deployment of a story. But it just happen so.

This is neither meaningful nor meaningless. It’s like saying that penguins are dreaming to fly, where in reality they are just swimming. But the very funny fact is that penguins ARE flying, they are doing just in an alien world. Because they are alien. At least from the perspective of our apelike brain: understanding is a series of narrations. You can tell the story that penguins are swimming. Or they are inhabiting an alien world, where temperatures are far below zero, where conditions are prohibitive for not-poles animals like us.

Imagine penguins are living on an alien planet. They fly in the irrespirable atmosphere, but they need to land in the desolated territories, where the only benefit is that you can breathe.

Wouldn’t be easier to say that penguins are simply swimming???

Well, the point is we master the language we are using to describe the swimming of the penguin in water and the flying of birds in air. But the meaningfulness of our narrativity is showing the limit of our understanding. And it’s not a matter of theories or measurements: it’s not that we are lacking precision.

Narrativity is the light of our understanding, so for us it’s inevitable to see in this light. But that light is generated by our understanding. We happen to be aware, when we are seeing narrations in the happening of facts. When we are able to walk through the meaning of our world, we are seeing penguins flying. Maybe they are just swimming, maybe our understanding is the compulsive projection to see as with sense the human being there. When a concept prescribes its own application, you can’t say this is the right, this is the wrong application. The execution reverberates on the prescription.

Morale: if you say a penguin is flying, you’re not wrong. But you are changing our understanding of flying (and many surrounded concepts). If you say the human self-consciousness is able to understand her own projection as a mind, you are not saying a mind understands the surrounding world, but the understanding radiates a world in which being reflected. Hold your breath and fly brother,

The Laugh of the Universe

The laws of the universe are cold and precise, like the mathematic arts taught us. The world-clock rains facts: it’s ineludible. Things just happen. When a consciousness realizes this, like Heraclitus, you can only weep. Because the self-representation of a mind is becoming aware that the struggle of being there is just the head of a random toss.

Be or not to be is just the outcome of a coin. We are the heirs of the tradition of being there, because we are alive. Living beings are random objects that belong to the same story of keeping on being there. The first objects alive, that didn’t keep on staying alive, simply aren’t here to be represented.

We are the ones that stayed alive. For no reason. The logical connection is that the contrary doesn’t stand.

Being there is a serious case.

Or not.

You are alive and you can laugh about the absurdity of insisting in being there.

You can be laughing of your own absurdity in the disappearance of your being.

Representing the mere happening of your being there isn’t hilarious, is it? Convince the serious, bearded commentators that there is nothing so laughable in the being there. ‘Cause if we wouldn’t laugh, we would tear apart ourselves, which is not good for the being there we are representing….

Do you think you are the last representation? Good for you.

Quoting Lucio Dalla,an Italian songwriter: “ power of the opera, where every drama is a false. But when you see those green eyes….”. I love you.

It is said on stage. Does it matter, my sweetheart?

The handbook for mind-making Short version (printed with ink you won’t mind to have it in your brain)

When you are projecting to build a mind, you should consider that if this mind will be self-conscious, will start to investigate its own nature. So you need to prepare a mind that will ask herself: what am I? Our own capacity to develop a question like this can run in two directions. The first and obvious one is: prepare a material background. In other words you need to be prepared to (or to pretend to) supply your mind with a material support. When an entity becomes self-conscious, very likely she will ask herself: what am I made of?

Consequences for not doing it? This mind will think with good reasons of being a dream. And probably she will kill herself.

Objection: we are “authentic” minds, made of true material support. Nonetheless it happens we kill ourselves for this reason.

Answer: we destroy ourselves because we are not convinced ENOUGH. With less conviction, we’ll kill ourselves more.

And the reason is the second possible direction I mentioned earlier. When a mind asks “what I am?”, it must be possible to go up the logic of this quest. In other words a mind must be able to walk through her own cognitive architecture. If you can’t ask “What I am?”, you’re not a mind. In order to make it possible, you need to have a conceptual ground to walk on. The conceptual ground shouldn’t pre-exist the mind walking on it. The same walking of the mind could produce her own conceptual ground. But a cognitive or intelligent system who at least doesn’t generate its own conceptual ground, couldn’t ask the question.

Objection: why a pure intelligence should be bother to ask herself the essence of her own nature? Why not doing something else, more practical, more intellectual challenging.

Answer: well, strange enough for a pure intelligence to deal with pure theoretical question, isn’t it?

But the point is another. A form of intelligence self-conscious is made by her self-exploration of her won complexity. If you can’t go up stream your own complexity, you won’t be able to represent yourself to yourself: you can’t be self-conscious if you don’t ask yourself whether you are self-conscious. And the way to walk on this conceptual ground is to build it by your own. Through the making of the ground, you make experience of what it means to be a mind and therefore being able to question yourself.

So if you want to build a mind, you need to produce a creative form of intelligence, able to pose conceptual questions about herself.

The most complicated system, who wouldn’t investigate its own complexity, wouldn’t be that smart, would it?

Tell me the story of how we finally acceded pure facts

Human minds are the self-representing cognition of living beings, therefore they weren’t designed to perceive abstract, blind, pure facts, but to differentiate portions of facts significant for their surviving. We invented many ways to aggregate, to separate, to defragment and to assembly different subset of facts. Many more than our biological support could just detect. Indeed a mind is a narrative brain, therefore there is an infinite number of stories, that could describe the same falling of facts, in an infinite number of different representations: for the same collection of facts, there is a potential infinite number of stories that could represent it. Or at least this is what in no-narrative terms, said Quine.

The conundrum is: human minds build their knowledge in narrative forms. Therefore they chase the falling of facts through narrations. That means they represent facts. In history minds invented several systems to accede the purity of happening of facts. A single mind can be threatened by the nightmare of false representations; but a community of minds through cross-checking of narratives always find the nature of facts beyond representations. Of course different community of minds disagree on the level of purity. Some include spirits and ghosts; others photons and bosons. Some both. Which is closest to the purity?

During a narration there are contingent and important episodes. The prowess of a narrator is to master the deploy of a representation. Take fairy tales. Is it really important the plot? Is this the entertaining part? Or the depiction of marvelous gadgets, of exotic community, of extraordinary common objects? If you judge a narration without representation, you have a list of words, you can understand but you can make sense of it. Narrations are paths for minds to represent themselves in front of themselves. If you follow a narration without representation, you are not moving towards yourself. That’s why we are interested in some and not in other tales.

Do you want to accede the purity of facts, through the disembodiment of your cognitive being there? As a rule of thumb I’d suggest quantum physics. Or meditation. The story at the end of your deployment of representation, is where your cognitive being there meets the falling of facts. The limit of your mind is where representativity encounters the happening of facts. The journey at the boundaries of your mind is where your cognitive being there stops to tell about facts. This is also the end of the narrativity. So when we finally reach the pure falling of facts, there are no words to describe the purity of limit. The drops of happening of facts don’t make sound.