Monday, 27 February 2012

Exploring the Darkness of your Substantial Consciousness: the Pinocchio Chronicles

Ah, pleasures of consciousness. We are convinced (damn, if we are convinced!) that we are here. It's not just that we are a self-monitoring Turing machine. This is not the “feedback” we are receiving: in fact we consider this more a feeling, to be more precise: “The” feeling. We feel our awareness of being there. This is our existence. A chimpanzee is pretty much as smart as we are; he's definitely there. Join the dots and you have an intelligence with information re-entry of being there. Why this is not consciousness? At the end of the day our 4 hands pal knows that he's there. Well, not that the difference counts more than a beauty contest, but we know that we know we are there. Attention: the second order can be misleading. We know the guy who knows he's there. And per pure coincidence it is the case that guy is us. (Or “that guy is we”, if you need to pass an exam, to prove you master naturally a language, by cheating artificially. I love human societies...).

Now, in order to construct a knowing guy, you need to give him a lot of gadgets. It's exactly like secret service enrollment: training, fake identity, following meaningless orders, producing false evidence. Of course, lying. Yes my friend, you can say that a newly born brain receives a pat on his shoulder and from that point onwards, someone will start to teach him things like: your name is, you must do this and that. Most of all, he will receive implicit lessons. He will start to live amongst the others. Eat like them. Walk like them. Make love like them. And of course, lying like them.

The curious thing is that our brain is not just an amnesiac to whom everyone is telling bullshits.The brain doesn't play the game of the mind. It's a support role.The world of meanings is the location. Many masters put those meanings before.And like any sign, a meaning generates the interpreter who'll decode it. It's like a king-maker sword in the stone. Who touches the meaning, he becomes a self-conscious Adam (or King Arthur). If you follow semiotic crumbs, you'll get mental home. Interestingly (and almost semitic), you've never been at home before losing the way to it. And only when you're lost, you can get back. Absolutely Heideggerian!

Anyway, when the puppet begins to play fake identity, he launches a breakneck chase to pursue semiotic reminders spread in his world of meanings. Little by little, trailing the encoded traces, he's reminded of being there. The more everyone tells him about the world, about all the false evidences that burn to heat the hot air for human actions balloon, the more he starts to reckon a pattern, the more he embodies that pattern, he feels it, he finally acknowledges the puppet adventures as memories. The puppet turns in to a boy, a young, human mind.

Convinced of being someone.So let me just remind you that after all,...they lived happily ever after!

Take it easy, my puppet bro. They say "marvellous Opera, every drama is fake." Let's sing then!



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