Crucifixed by the Elusiveness of the Event

You realized it better when you wander. When you roam in the last hours of night, desperate for a woman and soaked in wine, you are walking randomly and uselessly, but this is not the wander I mean. When you erratically bang from one job to another deal, misled by your false judgement about money or fame, you definitely walk without a reason and good for nothing, but this is still not the wander I'm talking about. When your mind is so full of idiotic grievances about this or that idea, when you shout full of resentment against this and that, you are undoubtedly moving on Earth without even the remote presence of a meaning. Yet, not the wander.

Wander is when you really let it go. When you are here for no reason at all. Not even desperation. When your contingent position in a spot of time and space is truly random, when your location has been determined solely by the cast of dices, then we are starting to talk of wandering.

You see, human beings are thrown in the world, as our friend Heidegger was used to say. We wake up in a state of falling and our consciousness is the making sense of this precipitous diving. Heidegger thought it was the privilege of His Highness the human mind; true the rollercoasting complexity of a human brain accelerated in cultural environment is a unique self representation of such falling. But we share with any living being the fate of dissolution. No star, or planet or ocean or storm is concerned by what will happen. But a dog, a beetle, even an amoeba is designed to worry for its survival: life is designed to care for its preservation. The fact of being alive in human minds is accompanied also by the feeling that is precious this experience. We believe that our existence is so important that it must mean something. So it is a natural development for human consciousnesses to develop the idea of the event. The event of being alive. We are intimately forced to worship the belief of the event. The happening of something that is relevant. Like the advent of a god on Earth. The messianic coming is a correlate of our cognitive architecture. We must believe that something is happening when we are self-conscious. And this it the cross we are nailed to. To be alive means to pay attention to the happening facts. Indeed living beings introduced relevance in the indifferent flow of universe before life. Life is a Christ happening in the indistinct permutations of the same. We live the pain of being there, the tender torture of to be rather than not to be. But we are playing a role. And it doesn't take a great effort to see it; more difficult to realize it. Most of the trouble is in the actuation: how do you practice the fading away of relevance?

And here it comes the ritual of wandering. The most arduous step is the first: when you step out of the track. Maybe you wonder which track: any track. The paths that society prepares for you. The expectations of your fellows. The trail of your aspirations, of your plans. Finally: the projection of being there that your accelerated brain is forced to establish by its own cognitive architecture. If you are there, any decent author will have an explanation. Easy to say that it is a purely, materialistic chain that is leading to you. 

No other reason that banging of atoms. You pretend there is no narrative and that you are an enlightened spirit with no superstition or prejudice. Truly, a turkey invited for Christmas. The simple seed that placates your thirst for a reason, for a line of deployment, is satisfied by a chain of reasons, hanging on nothing. You smile, but the nail is still in your flesh. It's time to wander and when you wander, you come down from the cross. It is time to stop saving the world and let it go. If you are thrown, it is better to be blown. The world ends in the fluffy and gentle whisper of a breeze that take away all its sins.         

Agori-logics, Beef of presence and Guideline to treat fairly your gods What you are wandering in the desert for, if you are searching for something?

To the abundance of metaphysical biodiverstiy, Quine was used to say he preferred arid desert of a consistent logic of references. This remark intends to detox your imagination from entities generated by a fervid, feverish imagination. “Things” like unicorns, bold king of France in a republic period, caffeine distinct from teaine, the dreams of Ulysses, the healthcare problem of characters from a joke, but also entities with a more central role in our life, like god, the self or the family. Quine believed that it was better to have an arid world rather than a universe inhabited by any sort of fictional problem. We actually tend to endorse a universe over-inflated of such entities. Nonetheless the monastic sharpness of arid desert attract our lustful wisdom.

In fact we inject overdoses of fiction only to achieve the same objective of Quine. The Agori are a sect of Hinduism; they practice a very hardcore set of rituals: basically they do the opposite of what a regular saint should do. They live in cemetery, amongst the dead one, they eat human flesh, they engage sex with women during their period; in brief, they go the other way. We suspect that in a desert we are looking the same Quine is looking for: nothing. But we believe that to pursue nothing it's better to over-stimulate your mind to consume the fervour of being there.

You see , we are animals, we are livign organism and we are projected to look for something. Always. But given the extreme complexity of our cognitive architecture we get lost in our own projection. It's not that bad, I admit. But sometimes we are overwhelmed and fooled by them. Again, being fooled by ghosts of your imagination is quite entertaining. I have very very skilful ghosts haunting me. Some full of anger and rage, tormenting my poor consciousness like flames of hell. Others, super-funny stupid clowns, who tickle childishly my too serious self-awareness. Yet they are fictions. As they are god, self and humanity.

If you go to the desert, don't worship the joyful, scary emptiness of the equivalence between to be and not to be.

This is why I'm quite pissed off (well, in the spare time between horrendous monsters torturing my ego and the tiny, weenie-beanie puffy creatures who preside the normativity of my thinking), when people worship our alien origin, the virginity of Mary, the almightiness of gods too Spiderman to be cool. And the soul-searching in the desert. See, you must be a very poor believer, lacking any imagination, if you need these sort of things to arouse your spirituality. Look: alien intelligence designing ours? Are you nutters? We come from the combinatory permutation of hydrogenate carbon, which ignite a self-catalysis. We are the avatar of life, which emanate in fish as well as in dinosaurs. Our current posture is the result of a revolution, when lizardish beings started to walk on their back, producing the dorso-ventral re-organization of the vertebrates. Do you need human-like superior lords of creation? Really? And in the virginity of Mary: for Christ sake! It's just a statement about the value of children: when you give birth to another being, blossom of uselessness variety of combination, you can re-set your status as before having impure sex. It was just a poetic way in the old times to take it easy and celebrate a new life. And inviting to not bother the actual socio-juridical circumstance of conception. Now you are looking for the hymen of a demi-goddess you pretend is the biological mother of the lord of the physical laws? What a lack of tact and respect. Holy inappropriate.

Finally you go to the desert/ the monastery / the ocean to meet your true self, the uncontaminated entity to call “real ego”. Man, it's in the bottom of every pint, if you stare carefully. In the desert you should breath the lack of everything. There is nothing in the desert, that's what we are looking for. Every time you search for inspiration, you are asking for the beef. Dismiss your white clothes, the face in the pose of a sanctum prayer and join us in the desert. “Outside we are stoned, immaculately”. Outside, in the arid lack of any presence, with me, Quine and Jimbo Morrison, there is the logical answer to your being there. Be a poet, respect your gods and let them go, with your self, consciousness and greed for the beef of presence.

Guided by Wrong Questions,Tripping on Fake Answers:Tears of Foolish Joy on our Grimace

I always found quite funny when people say: “death is a mistery, because nobody has ever come back to tell you”. Now this attitude exhibits a clear worry, a concern directed, towards the event of identity annihilation. Which is quite understanble, no doubt. My issue with the sentence regards the way you put it: the contradictiory experience of the limit of experience. Without recognize it. That creates a lot of epistemic red herrings.

In fact if you tell them: look at the last raws, yes, that little hands up. You know whose hands are those? The Tibetans. When you state that nobody has ever come back, there is always a Tibetan raising his hand. And you always ignore him. But he's a nice guy and without anger or resentment, the next time he'll do it again, for you. But why you never pay attention to that little hand?

Of course, because these people, wise needless to say, are just too involved in their culture. They are not really coming back, it's just a tradition, a way of speaking. Nobody really believes that you close your eyes when you die and after a while (3 days? doesn't it sound familiar?), YOU re-open them. Not even the Tibetans believe that....

Yet you are more than ready to believe (with more than one doubt) that a Jewish guy of 2000 years ago is the creator of the laws of physics, he was slaughter for you, so your annihilation won't take place. All right. I mean, I have no problem with that. I love weird thinking. And I don't think the Tibetan is much more right than Jesus. I'm only inviting you to reflect. On the little hand.

The Tibetan is not saying “I'm back”. Maybe someone means it, but THAT is tradition. The Tibetan is offering you a way to deal with the limit of experience. What is fading away? Structures most of all. The structures that link your body with projection of society. For example, your national security number, your pension, your properties. Human societies deal with actual carriers of identity, especially with regards of material property. Assets. Money. But on the other side of the spectrum they heavily encourage continuity amongst selves far beyond the material support. Culture. Nationality. The tribe, the clan. We love to give our name to a future buddy. We like to believe that we belong to the same kin of a guy lived 1, 2 ,3 or more thousands years ago. And after Darwin we ignited a lustful odyssey of tracking down. Millions of years back. 

We are handed down the same flame of curiosity , the same malice of Australopitheci, who were walking in Africa very long ago. I really like it. Do you believe in continuity or disruption? Well, the primary experience, the feeling of being there, is very attached to the beef, to the moment. Here and now. So, we happen to be and we'll happen to die.

Your driving license, yes, will die. Your memories. Kind of. Many are very excited now with the potentiality of technology, they want to store information, the more the better. If you could store all the information, you'll never really die. So any picture is a prayer of immortality. Good. But then it is true that a photo is stealing your soul: if you want to stand firm against mortality, shooting pictures you'll be so screwed by the limit of experience, that yes, death will grab you by the balls.

We fall in love with being there, with the impersonation of being there. When on stage, no matter what, we increasingly focus on the character, rather than with the acting. The acting is a recursive role-playing of human brains, which step by step assumes a specific identity. When we first walk on stage, we are following the same footprint left by our ancestors many years before in the Valley, in Africa. The very same. It's always the same walking. You are literally playing the role that your Australopithecus ancestor was playing, you are back. Breath, my friend, those very lungs belonged to Ichtyostega and the mud skipper fish. Stretch your back, a bit more: can you feel it? You are your backbone, you developed from it, you rearranged from it. Before, without such axis reference, you were growing like a starfish, radiating. Then you grow, your head like a bit a turnip-flower springing from the dorsal spine. 

Yes, you are back. What is the limit of death then? That you won't afford to go somewhere? Or no more sexual encounters? A chance less to gamble? What is tomorrow denying you today? The self is always back. That's not the problem. The problem is when you call self all the small actuations that entertain men in their walking on stage. And I admit, they are absolutely funny. But when you want more, you lose the meaning of their smallness. And if you chase the small habits of being there as the most important thing, you miss the opportunity to join the beauty of being there. It is difficult to join the universe with all your national security number, your passport, your archive of pictures, music, your expectations about yourself, your partner, your offspring, your resentment against the government, your parents, that bitch in secondary school. Very difficult. 

Breath, stretch the spine and smile. See, you don't have to smile because life is beautiful. Fuck that. Smile just to flatter the muscles of your cheeks. Smile to show your primate gum. Smile to give sense of a central nervous system. Do you know what is the best posture ever? Squatting. Dawkins thinks that our ancestors started bipedism because of that. Feed-squatting. For Westerns is quite painful at the beginning. Take it as an exercise for immortality. 10 minutes a day, squat. After few weeks the excruciating pain in the knee will pass. The thigh pressing the chest will go from unbearable to pleasant. And you'll have a chance to feel like the first Australopithecus, who started to walk the walk. If you don't find it cool, you deserve many more re-incarnation, or a million year in purgatory. Or whatever.

The self must pass to be in her place

A mind is the representation of herself; clearly this recursive reflection would be like the blank staring of a mirror reflecting a mirror if it wasn't for a trick. And that is the lack of grace. First of all consciousness is thrown in the world, thanks to the blind case and Heidegger. We arrive in a universe that pre-existed us, we need to learn its rules. Step by step we engage ourselves in the game, till we connect. Connection means that the mind wakes up, it is there. Someone could argue that this entails children don't have mind. They would be right. But I wouldn't make such a fuss about lack of mind. Don't consider yourself such a great man just because you are a mind. Your mind is also the projection of your actions, so bullying infants (or animals) just because your a self-consciousness is really not cool. So if you think yourself as superior just because your brain can project itself in a cultural environment, shaped by its own representation, you're an asshole.

Back to consciousness. The process is never perfect. Since you became yourself, you are there, but rarely you feel to be in control of the world. The few times it happens, it because you're a psychotic. A delusional one. Just because you have a title, president, or many confetti in your pockets, you are far from being in control. You are in control when you realize that the world is a representation and your mind within. So basically it is true that everything is a projection of yours, but your identity and biography are included. If you think that you can command everyone, or shag anything, you have a misled idea of control. When you project yourself in the game, as a player, you will be on the run for the match and you can only be that way. Until you are within, also giving up to play, won't change the anxiety of run.

It's only when you see your consciousness as the spring of generativity of your representations,that you can claim the control. A bit like Rutger Hauer in Lady Hawk, when at dawn is able to see his lady. Kidding.

The fact is that your mind is designed to project a player. She couldn't project without being there as a protagonist of the play. Indeed she learns how to deploy the representations, by the enactment of being on of them. Now, if you think that seeing the source of representations gives you access to any form of transcendency, you drink too much. Yes, of course this twist it's like playing the role of god. But if you think that is impossible to be a god, it's not because it is difficult, or amazing, or high-octaned empowered of special features. It's just because you are overwhelmed by the tradition of religions, which invented this kind of superhero gods. Religions are the Marvel of spirituality. I'm not saying that you shouldn't find any fun, but take it with a pinch of salt. So yes, you're god and you're the same dude, just you take it cosmically easier.

Of course it's good a step back from the traffic of the game. I'm not saying going in the desert, becoming a monk. Well, if it helps you, good. But sometimes dressing the robe becomes a play itself, so be careful. It's just that when you step back, you start to see the projection of the representations. You didn't make the world, but trust, in your life you are responsible for a good chunk of the representations. What's good, what's bad, what they'll think about me. I mean, yes, they obviously think about you. But they don't care so much as you do about yourself. There are exception, in love affairs, in teenagehood, in the Catholic Church. But generally it is ok.  

Designed by rain

Things happen. It's just the way it is. You would like to push purposes and reasons in the way things happen. But it's just a waste of energy. Things happen, this is just the only way.

Take life. Do you think life is marvellous, astonishing, the product of intelligent desing? Ok follow the rain. Raindrops fall, one by one. They are not angry nor unhappy: they are just raindrops.

Let it rains for, says a billion years. You seem the problem is that just sitting and watching raining for a billion years it is a very long time. A very long time. So long that is almost impossible for us to really conceive it, so we just say “ a very long time”. But this is source of problem. You don't know what is a very long time. Office job? Long time. New Delhi-Chennai by local train. Each station. Very long time. Anyway. This is human long time. But for things to happen “universally”, long time is a different matter, much longer. So, let's happen life.

At first, go with hydrogenation of carbon. How fun is that??? Well, it is. You have very long chains of “things”.They are pretty smart, they self-catalyst themselves, it means they started a trip and they maintain it through feeding produced by the trip itself. Some of these self-spinning are also mirroring themselves. In their spinning they express the spinning itself. Sorry Mary, but this is biblical. A spinning that run its own memory of spinning. Someone very smart must have conceived it!

Acutally, it was the rain.

Let's things happen. Let's have some ammonia and carbon and oxygen. Let's adunate them, with random calls every thousands years. What happen? Nothing. Then wait. If you wait for a long time. (A very long time) these bubbles of stuff, sometimes, will stick together. Why??? Well, stay for a billion years in the same position ,then tell me if you don't look for another posture. Our aminoacids friends thought the same. They stuffed together after a million of different combination. Like raindrops. Molecule after molecule, they fall together. But it rained combination after combination. One day the protein chain folded in a way that was mirror-spinning. The rain of facts assembled that chain. In a very long time, life was designed by rain. In a very long time.

A Running Consciousness

Run, run, run. For a running creature, it is rare to have the time to think. Run run run. But after a corner, in a cave, silence and refuge. Your temples are pounding and the few instants of clarity can't be wasted, you need to concentrate, no time for funny games. You need to focus on the thing. Damn if only they give me time! Time. Concentrate. Damn! It's easier to spit your heart running, than to squeeze the thing out of brain. Concentrate! Evoke the god of running, ask him. On the altar of my blood and breath: Am I fleeing or chasing?

Rarely, after you find the answer, you keep on resting. Like a darted arrow, like a hungry wolf, like a drop of rain, when you know you're chasing or fleeing, you go. But in the cave, if you wait a second, just meters away, there is a fire. Sit for a while. Ask again your god of running. Ask him why you can ask. Do you need a mind for fleeing or chasing? What do I get after I catch or escape? Nothing. There is just more running. So why do I need a mind in between my running?

What is your mind for? To be self-conscious. To discover the universe. To love a woman (a man, or both). To meet god and say “hi”. To enjoy the pleasure of being incarnated in a body. No.

All these motives are worthy of praise and laudable. But they are at the very most, side-effect. Mind is the shadow of cognition, a fire in front of which, the animal intelligence is dancing, during a glimpse of relief. The dance is the deployment of cognition in front of herself, the measure of changes in the movement.

So, if you are still asking your god of running, reflect (but don't stop dancing). In her divine intelligence, her existence is not menaced by anything, is immortal, is living unchanged by the perturbation of the world. In a word, she doesn't care. She cannot care, because changes affect you, not her.

And if you are affected by changes, you need to spot them. Living beings are constantly on the verge of dissolution. If they don't care, they'll fade away. But a god doesn't care. And she doesn't know a thing about caring. Immortal gods don't know death, so they don't know anything. There is no such a thing as divine knowledge. Even if they had an archive with all the facts of the past and the future, they wouldn't know a thing. Because they don't care. You can't learn if you don't care. And no gain if there is no pain. So now, stop asking your god of running. It doesn't care. But if you don't care, you fade away. Let your gods go, for once let them run away.

Now it's just about us. For us, entities deemed to die, the measure of changes in the movement, is everything, is our nature. We need to navigate in the transformation of the world and guiding the ship, we manifest a mind. What is a mind for? It's the deployment of animal cognition in front of the fire set on by the very activity of deploying it. The shades are dancing like children running on the grass. Children gods, ask those! They running with a touch, the chase turns in a flight. And they spot more and less than it is necessary. Cause, the white can be round and the red is funny. They don't care if you chase or flee, only that you run with them. Those gods, you can trust, they don't tell and command, but play and laugh. Their knowledge is that the white is round and the blue is ugly. That now you go there, then you run, then you stop. That's it. This knowledge, try to respect. Because this is in essence, the best you can get from immortal intelligence.

When you start to see with your mind, that chasing and fleeing is only a game of running with children, then you become a god of running. And then I let you go.

Mind is a fake and the meaningfulness dragon

We live in the assumption that our consciousness is true. Actually we can believe something because our self awareness is the ground of what it means to have a meaning. Our mind stands before the possibility of being true or false: it is the horizon of meaning. And it is fake.

We start to establish meanings, by a scaffolding of stories and narrations. We are taught the game of believing in what we are told. We don't even pay attention at the beginning of the game: in fact it would not be possible. Before the game and long afterwards, we are simply apable of believing or not. Wittgenstein once said that we swallow concepts. It's before having an intellect. Indeed you are building an intellect.

When the game is advanced enough, you acquire the understanding. You mastered the conceptual navigation, you are able to travel from one narrative place to the other. It is something that requires various features. A body, for example. Up to now, we never encountered a disembodied intelligence. So I suppose it has some relevance in our game. The other thing is that we play the game from within. We learn to play in a determined setting, namely a human society, with human players.

The board of the game is made of concepts, which are the product of fantasy. A king, a godfather, a hero, true love, honor, compassion, a president, the most beautiful girl in the world, all these, don't really exist: they can not. They are per definition fictional. They are inventions for our games. Now, our minds can ride only when the beast is provided. We ride narrativity, this is our meaningfulness dragon.

We start our career in forgery with ourselves: it's always the firs step, the bearer of responsibility. Our names are misappropriation of identities. You think it is authentic to bear a name, because it is legitimate to identify a unique consciousness. Have you ever thought that your unique consciousness takes much of his authenticity by having a name? You start to misquote ourself with a name and the rest comes with it. In fact it is more than logic to attribute all the actions which happen to you as the sound and robust line of episodes which belong to your life: your narrativity.

What is a fact in life? I felt warm and happy, a small sun was rising inside my chest and it was dragging me, and so on you call this falling in love. Wonderful. But how is that? Well, your body is designed to like the company of a fellow human being and the idea of that company as well. You heard by other people using that word and you decide that this particular experience falls under the category of love. You don't realize you invented love. It's because we invent things, we give them names and afterward we attach backwards a long tradition. We give nobility to our feeling by attaching ancestors. I fall in love and this is what many other human beings called fallen in love. I'm quoting the past experience of human beings. It is like calling for the authenticity of your feeling by bringing a venerable and respected document. I'm entitled to call this love, because it belongs to the ancient series of the class with the same feeling. But your sentiment is no more than 5 days old.

And the sentiment is the feeling of someone. Now, you must be a mind to be someone. And falling in love, is one step to prove that you are a mind. We collect a bunch of this evidences and after a while there are enough to prove beyond any reasonable doubt, that you are a mind. Try to go in your archive and take a honest look about the “proofs” of your unique consciousness. I'm not suggesting that you are not there. Insane! I'm only suspecting that all the “facts” of your life, are stories, told by you or by someone else. I'm just saying that the linear narrativity that is your consciousness, is just a collection of quotes from your biography. Your mind is such a story of stories. But which are the sources? Other minds telling stories. When you say “it happened to me”, you are taking anecdotes of someone else and saying: this time it happened to me. You don't realize that in the same instant in which you say something, you are inventing the protagonist of the episode. You create the mind by quoting what happens to her. So when you state a feeling, you represent the subject in charge of feeling and say: that is me. The collection of episodes that belongs to the human experience, this time happens to me! Well, every time you say “I”, it's a quote from the old book of identity, which is nowhere. Every mind is the fictional creation of an accelerated brain and to be real, it must be traced back to the past. There is no narration without past, so our history is our forgery.

Ask the electron. A ballade of epistemological narrative on a quantum tune

I'm deeply fond of quantum physics for many reason; the main one, I don't understand it. Which means that I'm better place in making sense of it than someone who does. According to Feynman at least. Only this would be enough to place it in the top five. But there is more. It is a wonderful metaphor for the mind. Not a big surprise that many feel an intrisic connection between quantum physics and consciousness. Which is wrong. The last reason is that Einstein didn't like it. And Einstein is almost a pop star of science. And if you think he's a genious, you're grossly wrong. I think people under-estimate Einstein. He was much, much more. Anyway.

I love the gentle epistemic touch of particle physics on the very essence of being. When you speak of electrons or nuclei, you should always smile. In fact they are not properly there. They are not properly...When you try to point them they fairly elude you and behave as pure energy. But under many circumstances they are there. Not lastly because we are! Notwithstanding our honourable testimony, it's impossible to touch an electron. I mean in Newtonian terms. The fact is that particles are not thing! And when we try to weight them, we found ourselves entangled in their energetic arch-enemy, antimatter. Physics gave us an unprecedented insight about the world. Before there where Greek philosophers talking of water and fire, even worst religions and myths were classifying our real world with fairy tales. At least we have the means, the methods and the tools to label the world. Dark matter. It's a bit ungenerous, but I find ridiculous that our frontier of exact understanding clash against “we don't know what”. But we do understand what's going on. It's just that words are not fit enough to express it. Better: at present the physicists don't have a clue about what their procedures mean, but they work. What strikes me is that they don't even care: meanings are evicted by understanding. Pure manipulation of symbols is giving us the most precise control and prediction over the material world.

Is this understanding? Well, I suppose that from a mathematical point, it is. And maybe even from a deeper, more subtle, more hidden way of wisdom, it could be true. Again, I giggle in front of the idea that science swept away all the old myths because it finally decided to ground its believes on real things and not dreams. Now there are not even words to describe the real things these hypotheses are attached to. Still....

Still everything is fine. The biggest problem is not in any notion, but in our will to attach a descriptive theory. This is in part fault of contemporary science which has no interest in spending time on words. The fact is that we have an apparatus of understanding based on Newtonian entities. Things. And they behave erraticly only because we have an epistemological narrative that is dragging our quantum entities to bizarre realms. Actually particles and waves are the simplest idea to image: they are vibrations of nothing, entering in resonance with they own going back and forth from existence.

See, similarly the thing most present in front of our eyes, is our consciousness. And we are pushed by our own narrative to establish a mind beyond that self reflection. Only because it fluctuates, it doesn't mean it's there. Most of all: only because the fluctuation of mind signals, it doesn't entail that it means something. Beneath a mind twinkles, most likely there is nothing. Which is good. Ask the electron.

Crooked Wisdom

You're walking down the street, it's night and of course it is one of the worst neighborhood of the city. A limping silhouette approaches you. An old alcoholic. Or a young drug addict, for what matters. For some of you, this is a nightmare. For others it's just week end. For two or three maybe it's simply Monday. Nobody is thinking that there is something to learn.

Oh yeah, that too many benders and this is where you end up.

Or that a human being is worth it, no matter how many banana skins on the top of the head.

Anyway: no, it's not this kind of learning.

The poor fella of this story (and this is a story, bear in mind), is hardly able to articulate a word. He's disconnected, there is no sense in his utterances. OK, his interior life could emerge fragmented and also his neuro-connections are trying to make (desperately) contact again with some configuration that were lost during New Year's Eve, 1991 (for the old guy). Reality is: the train of thoughts of the brother is simply going nowhere.

Now it's time for the lesson on stage. What do you see in front of you? A deranged consciousness, lost in the intricacies of his own convolutions. Thanks for him, he's facing a consciousness in order. The train of your chain of thoughts is on schedule, you know where are you going, right? Your mind is fully aware of his own presence to itself. No kidding: your consciousness is reflecting her own efficiency in being herself. Good. Now, I would say that the deranged fella is honest at least. In fact between the two is definitely the luckiest: because he is much, much closer to the TRUTH, to completely grasping the wisdom. 

 

So really you think that the configuration of your neuro-connections is your confident self and that is you? Let me understand: an organ of a biological being, say a liver or a brain, is producing a complicated pattern of (electro)procedures. This liver (or brain) is so sophisticated that in collaboration with other livers (or brains) has managed to establish an architecture of fictions where its body and the bodies associated with the other organs, livers (or brains) are living exploiting the augmented possibilities of those fictions. Now you are confidently thinking that you are someone. A liver! (or a brain, for that matters). Well done, my friend. I think that the brother fellow who drank himself, or that erase himself in his own circulatory system, he's probably more in the game than you.

One last thing: I'm not suggesting that you annihilate yourself with a liquid or a powder. I know we humans always love magic, but this is not the case. I'm just trying to give you a reason to be happy. A happy organ, one step closer to be perfectly centered in wisdom. Ah, I forgot to tell you: wisdom has been made to available for everyone. I mean not just you and your deranged friend (please don't eat the banana skin...). Even the asshole and the deliptuous. It's a party for everyone. You know why? It was meant to include also worms and cabbages, cockroaches and ivy. In other words no need of legs to reach wisdom: it's there! Feel happier? Hug the deranged, you wiser, miserable! Or adorable, for what matters...

One Man Gang of Minds or the Honorable society of minds How many brains does it take to make a mind?

Well, if you think that a mind is the brain, the answer is ONE. Now,it is fair and correct to assume that a mind is associated with one brain, in fact you have memories of things occured to a specific brain and you can move your hands, but not someone's else, though all these obvious confirmation of the thesis, well, there is something misleading in the One Man Gang theory about mind.

You observe a brain, you see is reacting like a mind, it's done. 

The problem is, you abstract the brain from its environment, but isolation is in the theory, not in reality. First thing, try to make a cognitive vacuum around your supposed One Man Gang. In linguistics, if you don't expose a child brain to a linguistic community during the time of a window of development (usually teenagehood), your subject will be severely impaired. In his mind. Another case: put a man in jail, alone, deprived of contacts, for many years. He will go mad, right? Oh yeah, you can bet. What happened? He's gone emotional. He has no friends. Be more specific: his brain lacks feedback, literally feeding from other minds: he's mentally starving.

OK, so we'll agree that to have a healthy mind, you need companionship. Good. But it's not enough.

Do you know how the brain itself works? The most recent model is of a parallel, distributed, decentralized system. It means that the brains is doing several times the same things, from different departments, without direct supervision. A good detail is the distribution: what does exactly mean different departments? 

Well, your brain is made of several, overlapping configurations of neurons. Further on it is possible to distinguish areas dedicated to work on specific tasks, like language, visual processing and so on. But most interestingly, the brain is operationally greedy. Yes my friend, the brain wants to process and he doesn't give a dime about how. Take calculations. Despite the limping metaphor of the brain like a computer, a normal biological human brain doesn't like too much computing. Why? I tell you why: it has been evolved to live in the savanna, jungle or mountains. He had to run, to aim, to manipulate tools, to express aggressivity, to conquest females, to strike deals and alliances, to gain control of a tribe and so on. In the wild, there is more action than numbers. So if by any chance you put an electronic calculator in front of a brain, he will use it merciless. Does it account as distribution? No? Yes? When you want to remember something, you write it down. Good. Your brain retrieves the information from the notepad. Or from a neuroconnection associated. Where is the difference? The skin. If you think that cognitive process are solely the ones occurring within the boundary of your skin, then you need give me stringent definition of how the brain delegates function within his boundaries and outside: how does it defragment the procedures?

If you like to live without boundaries, then you can enjoy the procedural liberalism of the brain. This is in a nutshell the extended mind thesis of Andy Clark.

If we have an extended, distributed mind, we are probably in good company. I mean, the restless delegation and negotiation of procedures by your brain is also an interminable communication with other brains. If you want to remember something, you can write it down or ask it to a friend. If you want to move the hands of someone else, you can always ask him. Trivial? Maybe, but who are you? You don't consider yourself a bio-circuit, but a curious human being, in search of adventures, following interests, instinct: you have aspirations, ambitions, you are deluded by many aspects of society, you are disillusioned by others, you hope for a better future, you love, you hate, you are someone, it's you. Now, all these things are done in negotiations with your peers, beloved, friends, parents, colleagues, neighbors, co-commuters, acquaintances, perfect strangers. Yes you learn what does it mean to be you, by a constant negotiation with the others. Your mind is the product of this negotiation amongst the many brain interconnected in your time space social region. Of course the brain associated with your identity has a lot of privileges, but not exclusively. You don't decide who you are entirely. And you don't decide what to think entirely. Many of your thought, many of the thinking paths of your mind are borrowed, stolen or granted from others. 

This is the honorable society of brains. So the answer is MANY.

Of course there are rumors that the society doesn't exist at all, but it is an invention of the foreign press to discredit the humans...

In this case the answer is: NONE...

The spectacular show of the Brain - In prose

If someone says that he never feared death, not even once, he would be a liar. There are a lot of reasons, but the most sound is that human consciousness is awareness of mortality. Heidegger was so convinced of that, he stated that man is being for death. You could say that what really defines mind is consciousness of being limited, that is, doomed to finish, to die, to go kaput.

The argument goes that self intelligence realizes the impermanence of everything and recognizes of being part of that everything. So, intelligence is a self realization of impermanence. And that's scary.

Because we are designed to look for pleasure and impermanence is not pleasant. We see everything that we can perceive as incomplete: it is nice, but impermanent. Sometimes we can make up this by ignoring impermanence or projecting indefinite permanence. In a word, we'd like the story to be continued. Somehow, at least. We seek fame, fortune, we hope our sons will do great, we keep telling stories, the story.

The big problem is that we are incapable of accepting a fragmented story. A story that goes nowhere. Bear in mind that a story can be unfinished. That's more than possible. An author that doesn't finish his novel, a young death, a sudden change of fortune on the verge of a big hit, ending with absolutely nothing. But in all cases, the story is unfinished, not incomplete. The difference? You can easily project a segment to the story, you can image how it could go on. It's because our self consciousness is a narrative intelligence. You probably don't pay attention to that, but we are distributing narratives all over the places. We spread narratives in our environment: we inseminate every meaning in our habitat as a piece of a story. And we love to see stories! We find that to be a story generator is great. We find corals very cute, but would like to swap your life with theirs??? Boring! We are dreaming of flying, because it's so amazing to fly over the places and ... would like to swap with a pigeon? Would you appreciate flight as much as if you were a pigeon?

Being human is super fun, because is intriguing, there is a lot going on, threats and promises and ways to change the plot. Most of all because we can reflect about it. We can laugh about it: human life can be so fun because we can have fun: we can superimpose irony on facts and that's really funny. Sense of humor is super fun. And it's a big shame everything has to go to the bin.

Our brain is so excited by the show is projecting to himself, that it doesn't want it to stop. Or better: the brain is so excited by the show that it is triggered to create a spectator for the show. The show is so great that the brain design an audience for it. And here it comes the mind. Because the mind can observe the show insofar it's the show. 

Of course when the mind realizes she's the show, she doesn't want it to finish, it's an addiction for narrativity. It is painful just to think that the show one day will end. So painful that the mind would consent to remain spectator of pure nothing, but still being. In fact this is immortality: to attend an endless show where plot and stories are becoming meaningless. Do you think you will pay attention to the intricacies of a man and woman relationship, after several millions of years? Why I say millions? Just after some hundreds years: the same stories all and all over again. 

The mind game is designed to make sense in one lifetime. Immortality is tasteless. You already have what it takes to be satisfied. You are the biggest show on earth. 

Congratulations!