The trinity in A feast of holograms:Same old story. The very same one

Dostoevsky gave me the string, but as a reader I pulse with the plot. The narrative beam of the fictional character hits me and my cognitive reaction bounces back a real person. From shadows cast on a mind, you encounter another consciousness in flesh and bone. From the narrative puppet, a guiding voice talks to you. Fictional characters populate your conscience not less than teachers of your childhood. When you do something shameful and despicable, your mum/master/ elder brother/ the monk Tichon resonate in your brain. Maybe JC. I think that you have enough information now about my mate Pinocchio to say something about him, to judge him. Unfairly. But still, you could make educated guesses about him. You could invite him for a party, but maybe to leave him your house during an absence. Does Pinocchio sound more real than my grandfather? And Stavrogin? And JC?

This is the ontological Doppler effect of consciousness. “Thickness” of reality is proportional to the proximity of the subject. Real persons are always closer to subject. Fictional characters are credible in proportion of their distance to a real consciousness. 

Pinocchio sounds less credible than Stavrogin. My grandfather sounds thicker than a totemic ancestor. 

“I” is more real than “you”. 

Yet the self is a projection no more and no less than the narrative unfolding of Stavrogin and Pinocchio.

Stavrogin is really a string of deeds and lines. 

So it is Napoleon and Julius Cesar. So are JC and the totemic ancestors. Hang on a minute! I can hear the boiling impatience of the skeptic, of the mundane pragmatic. Napoleon and Julius Cesar manipulated portion of real matter, they left traces of their deed that can be actually discovered. There is a proper causal chain. Buddhas and totemic ancestors are less real. 

Oh, so the manipulation of reality made by all those fellows under their influence don’t count? People are guided by deed and lines that they value and hold important. Your ideals, your creed, your beliefs support your consciousness with a scaffolding of meanings and articulations.  But there is more. Our cognitive highways, the series of thoughts supported by synaptic interactions, are string of deeds and lines.

Brains are controller of primate behaviours and habits. When they are accelerated in the cultural environment that support their cognitive augmentation, they make experience of their own complexity. Kaboom! A brain travels along the cultural structuration of its society and it is trained to make experience of other brains, already accelerated. A child’s brain is forced by other consciousness to step on the stage of human deeds, she’s dragged to play roles, to follow stories and to start to tell some. One representation after the other she acquires the technology of trailing narrative footprint and to leave traces of her own. One day, the day when Logos has always been, it appears consciousness, raining like an event in the brain of the child, but opening for the first time the space of self-consciousness.

 

We are “just” a hologram of the narrative crossover of our ancestors, our mates, our fantasies and our aspirations. This tiny circle where our nervous system is concentrating its focus is what it is making you say: “me”. When the streams of narratives, from the overlapping of other holograms finally reach the acceleration point in your brain, the excruciating tenderness of awareness about being there screams its presence in front of itself. “I’m” she cried, the consciousness. This is it. This is everything. Pure totality. And sooner that it takes Pinocchio to down a shoot of tequila, it is gone. I remember granpa for his 80^th birthday. 80 years, they are a lot. And where they all gone? Passed so quickly. Not THAT quickly. Yet very fast. And sadly for Chomsky, but I guess these propositions have been uttered many times in many languages, down till the first ancestors, when they started to realize about their being a being.

The excruciating pleasure of being alive and of knowing it brings the shadow of its fate to disappear. Always. This totality, this universe, will disappear, like the shadow it is. This universe is just the hologram of many narratives and when the perfect alignment of matter and words that permitted its ephemeral existence, will break the harmony of the projection, the totality will cease to exist. And that’s all right. Or so told me the dear fellows at the ENBELAUSOCLU.