celerati

Mind Rider

2012-01-05T12:46:00.000-08:00

Men are beings of merits. The normal self-organization of living organism is enhancend in humans to the level of consciousness. We are aware of our being there. Not bad. We have many advantages for that: we can plan entirely new scenarios; we can design brand new circumstances; we can construct further cognitive architecture. One brain alone couldn't do that. But also a bunch of brains wouldn't do the job. Why? Many buckets of cerebral matter and their information exchange is not enough to generate such a computational variety. Of course you need to take in to the account the embodied structures of those transactions. But tribes of apes are precisely that configuration and still they lack our ohmygoddishness factor of creativity.

Our brains are initiate by already accelerated fellows to evoke “the beast”. The cognitive beast springs from the cultural habits and slowly takes over the cognitive architecture. Before your ape brain can realize it, it is fully immersed in the many narrative hallucinations of our society. We become generation something, a class of characters. We assume masks and roles to take a playable function in societies. Most of all, we become the awareness of our being there. When we start the game, we awake the beast and sooner than expected, you are riding the mind.

It takes a while, often you need some traumatic experiences: a broken heart, a swollen pride, several quantity of psychotropic substances, being the attraction of older dysfunctional cognitions, like teachers. But around full consciousness, you realize that the mind you are, is a construct. On one hand you are that thing. On the other that is the bunch of social reflection, the holographicsum of social reverberations. On the other you realize nothing in what you feel is real. Pure fiction, sometimes of a very cheap quality. When you are able to step back from your awareness, you start to feel the beast. Or better you start to feel the ride. You are riding the functionalism. Before you were dragged by events, the unwilling witness of happenings in a determined time space social region: you. But when you are able to detach yourself by the parade of social forces, you start to experience the sense of control. Self organization becomes something handy.

The ride is beautiful. And you shouldn't stop to thank every slice of the time space region that you are unifying in your riding (this is for you Immanuel: you deserve it dude!). But the joy and the glory of being a consciousness must not stop your cognitive horizon. Yes, you are riding the mind. So let disappear all the tricks and smokes of mirrors. Saint Paul is right when he claims to see though mirrors and enigmas. But after this cognitive frenzy of a teen brain, let's be serious. If you ride the social hallucinations of your brain and you are the holographic convergence of those social forces, it seems to me that you are the horizon of those hallucinations. You are the ridden beast. Enjoy the riding, but focus: there is no beast, there is no riders, there is no ride.

Impossible you say: at least the false impression is there, so even as a mistake, I'm there. This is the delusional happiness: I'm at least a mistake. Come on! This is just philosophy and there are many more things in the heaven and earth, as I was saying to Hamlet, when the rolling world threw me as Horatio. In those days I was planning to write a novel about a writer, named William S., who was supposed to tell our story with inverted roles. Ride my brother, ride. The beast won't stop until you tame her. And misquotes are the sign of dragging: make wise use of them!

I Crossed the Line

2011-09-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

Be always mistrustful towards transcendence. Always. It's easy to see it when is crawling in religious clothes. But it could be near also in logic perspective. Transcendence is always ready for the ambush. Why? Just reflect about it. Transcendence is another dimension. Separated by ours. Completely. Per definition, a transcendent thing doesn't belong to this dimension or to this series of dimension. If you are referring to a parallel universe or another plane of reality, you are not talking of transcendence. You see, transcendence is another dimension that springs from the grammar you are using. Indeed transcendence is a categorial difference in your physical dimension. It is born in the language but it goes on outside.

Like the the paper characters coming out from children book. Bear in mind that something happen when you are urged to use the transcendent highway. But you are misled. The language generates something, a monster, a hope, a landscape and the new bi-dimensional shape triggers your mind to see a transcendent element. Why not? Well my dear, from a transcendent hole, everything can come out. Because it is separated by our dimension. Completely. If you could tracking it down, it wouldn't be transcendent. Therefore you can't touch it. So when you see a transcendent phenomenon, it could be God. Or everything else.

But why we are supposed to see transcendent things? Well, because there is a transcendental situation. Sorry for the word play, but I didn't invent it philosophy. At least not under this form...

I give you an example: your sight. In front of you there is a tree. The tree is there; it's objective; it's not created by your mind. It is contained by your sight. What about your eyes? Well, in front of a mirror, they behave like the tree. You can even put eyeliner on them. Nothing strange. Only when the eye coincides with the first person perspective as the sight of that person, we have a transcendental situation. In fact the eye is not contained by the sight. Or in other words the sight cannot see itself. But you can in front of a mirror. Exactly. But you see a reflection.

Take your mind. Can you observe it? Of course you can write down your thoughts. You can ask a person if he thinks you are a mind. You can see your mind in many reflections. But can you encounter your mind? Well well well. The mind is the horizon of your ability to understand. The mind is embodied understanding. So can the mind understand herself? Of course, being a mind is self-understanding. Transcendentally. The difference with transcendence is that in this case, you are on the line from which is coming out what is supposed to come out. Because you are that line.

So normally you don't see yourself and you claim that there is another dimension from which is coming what occurs in front of you. But it's happening because you generate it. You are the line that opens the transcendental experience. Indeed everything that is transcendent is categorial, it means that springs from the language. Your language. The horizon of grammar that shines from the being there of your awareness. So next time you encounter a transcendent, wink: it's daddy brain in the disguise of some grammatical adventure. Pray and enjoy the beauty: the world beyond the line is unimaginable. And it's the same of in front.

Impatience of Dharma My amino acid chain is longer than yours

2011-09-04T02:47:00.000-07:00

When we discuss of wisdom, there is a very tempting attitude: the underlying force. You see, I'm calm and peaceful but it's just from the virtue of the underlying truth of my wisdom. Do you believe in Western medicine? Oh poor fool. You agree on a practice that disentangled consciousness and body? If it wasn't for a superior respect for myself, I'd definitely have spitted in your face. Do you believe in quantum physics: please. Do you believe in a wisdom that is saying:we cast our dices, we read the dices, we made the prediction. But you don't understand how, why and where. And when. Well, in quantum physics, we don't really understand a lot...But it works! Anyway. You shouldn't believe in it. And here is coming the Dharma impatience.

Your wisdom is defecting? I know, we have incredible more powerful gigastronic wheel of prayers that will embarrass your limited resources. Of course the more you understand of western medicine and quantum physics, the more you would like to approve the Dharma impatience. But this is a mistake so colorful as the ass of a mandrill.

Dharma wisdom should appeal to the dissolvence of your epistemic itch. The thin line is with ignorance. Dissolvence of wisdom is not ignorance, but is the grammar fading. Like repeating a word until it loses its meaning, which doesn't equal to no having a meaning at all. A flower has no why, but it's precious our way to reach the silent smile of a lotus. Before sleeping in to uncosciousness, like Jim Morrison sang, this is the gate. Not being unaware. A stone is unaware. Respect it, but don't take it as a master. While, the dissolvence of wisdom, is the gate. And you should take the fading of grammar that entails quite seriously.

When it is stated that god doesn't exist, it's not atheism. It's saying that god is nowhere you can touch him (please, keep your suspicions). When it is stated than the universe doesn't exist, it's not saying that a punch in your face won't hurt. It is saying that the self is building pain from the punch.

When it is stated that the self doesn't exist, it's not nihilism. It's saying that the self is not precious as you deem it to be ( please, keep your suspicions).

Dharma is not beneath the structures. It is not hidden behind a photon. For god sake, do you think that there is a dharmic world behind ours? Do you think that with super dharma particle accelerator we'll see a dharmic world? So maybe a dharma microscope powerful enough will scout the buddhahood? Let me order another pint for you first. Second dharma wisdom is in you grammar, in your language. Deeper is not microscopic, it's simply clearer, in its meaning. So when dharma says that there is no good, be surprised and joyful, because no god will punish you anymore. When dharma says there is no world, be surprised and joyful because there is no ground for sufference. And when dharma says there is no self, take it seriously. And of course, be joyful.

Shine On You Scarabeusque Diamond

2011-08-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

Stars, Diamonds and cockroaches. Who is the most brilliant? I'm afraid for the ladies, but stars and diamonds can only dream of the cockroaches' shining and I know that, very wisely said by Beyoncè, "if you like it, put a ring on it", won't work with a beetle. And saying to your lover that her father is a thief, because he has stolen stars to put in her eyes, will definitely sound different with our Blattaria friends instead of celestial bodies. Nonetheless the cucarachas are luminous: they are living beings, so they are intelligent.

Ok, stars: do you now how much energy they produce? Joule, joule, joule...A lot (Harvey Keitel in Reservoir Dogs). But they don't have the slightest control over the process. It simply goes. Stars are not inventive in their job: pile up enough weight and you'll light as well.
Diamonds. Are they reliable? Oh yes, they are very well organized. Very hard joint. But they don't move at all. No dynamics.

Cockroaches? They run like hell. And they adjust their actions constantly. Try to catch them: they'll escape. Do think this is trivial? No my friend. It' genius. Because only matter that is alive can change its path, not because of a collision, but because the forecast of that collision. Still not impress?

Ok, I'll spell it out: living beings manipulate the causal chain, without necessity of touching everything. They are oracles. I give you an example: your hand is in front of a fly. You make a small jerking. Microscopic waves of air and tiny packages of photons are running like demons to antennae and eyes of our small winged friends and they whisper their demoniac mantra: "Buzz off". My hand was far from start the movement. But the fly read telepathically my intention. Seriously, what was it? Don't you buy the demons parade?
Ok. Information. Disappointed? Why? Living beings are superimposing on physical properties a semiotic environment of information.

Information is evoked by organism with their being there. In the universe, nothing needs information. Photons don't carry it: they carry themselves. Bodies are not exchanging information: they exchange energy. But if you are alive, it makes a difference exchanging less or more energy. So you need to be careful. Moreover you need to have a plan. Otherwise entropy will crash you, so you need to escape. And energy alone doesn't have a clue: you need to rely first of all on the normative procedures encoded in the self-organizing application that is your genetic code, the story of your execution. There is always time to elaborate non-linear plans like in self-conscious intelligence. But first, you need to come out with something. This something is the information processing that a living being represents with its own being there: primeval intelligence is procedural.

I love when a plan comes together, especially when the very existance of being a plan happens to be for pure chance of energy permutations.

Rat intelligence: A Rodent Road to Knowledge

2011-08-22T05:42:00.000-07:00

Where there is a possibility, there is a rat. Life can find many ways to spread, from space bacteria to billions of insects. This is a strategy of numbers. Bacteria are simple, so simple that they don’t need strictly a planet to survive. Insects are many, so many that the swarm intelligence of an organized bunch of them, an anthill or a beehive, is by far more than the sum of the individuals. But rats are different. They are mammals. In mammals, individuals count.
Rats are cognitively simpler than us, but their intelligence is quite sophisticated in problem solving (comparing to bacteria and insects. Well, to individual insects…An anthill is pretty good compared to ourselves). Rats are so epistemically hot, that I want to found our best euristic strategy with them.
Every sentient being has a cognition, so even an amoeba is endowed with a minimum degree of intelligence. An ant a bit more. Dolphins, a huge lot more. Humans? We hit the zillion swankiest score in town. Rats: they are ok.

It’s true that rats are many, but much lesser than the billions of insects. Many rodents can behave like a swarm, but a single rat is able to earn his living alone. What do they do?
They investigate. They are curious. They check their own environment. Constantly. They don’t particularly like to die, but they go the closest as it is possible to elements in their habitat. They try, they push their cognitive knowledge to the limit, to the maximum limit allowed for a living being: they push it to the very limit of their own existence. They rarely sit in their comfort zone, especially because to one extent they are comfortable in extreme situation, to other because their curiosity is restless. The cognitive life of our rodent friend consists in checking his environment, in re-adjusting constantly the cognitive map of his world. The world is born every new day for an investigative rat, because he questions the new limits. Nothing is the same of yesterday.
What are rats doing? They are understanding. This is old, pure, Hegelian understanding. A bit mixed up with the disgrace of the sewage, but Idealism is materialistic at its conceptual heart.
Hang on a minute, I sensed it from the beginning, but I was suspecting “a coupe de theatre”, a paradox, a metaphor. Where is it? From rat intelligence to a hyper-sophisticated German “verstehen”? Nothing in between???

I’m afraid not. I’ve been surprised by the epistemic resilience of rodents and I start to ask to myself, to which extent our understanding was similar to them. Then I realized that the question needed to be rephrased: to which they are not similar! What we have more? Sure, we have a very complex technology to deal with a semiotic environment. Powerful, marvelous, gigastic. But we have a much bigger brain. And we started 35 000 years ago to manufacture environment able to shape our capacity of manipulating the symbolism of our cognition. This is quite a thing, I don’t deny it. But in essence, the cognitive agents that are travelling in our semiotic sewages, the many of them, are not that dissimilar to the rats exploring their environment. “We are intentionally building our own environment, they are more parasitically inhibiting it. We are intentionally exploring and shaping future configuration of this environment, they are locked in a constant present search ”. When you start to use intentionality to make a difference, in my experience it’s a good sign that there is no difference.

Rats are "commensals" of our societies: kind of parasites, but not (directly) harmful. Basically a commensal is living on the leftover of his guest. Like a rat! Well, you can see our minds as commensals of the semiotic production of all the human brains. A brain is polluting the environment with information, that a mind picks up and cognitively digest as conscious artifacts (that's proper food for thought). Don't think that there is a big, underlying difference between our minds and rats: true we are associated more closely with our brains, but don't expect too much from ownership or responsibility. I know our society has a great esteem for both, but I'm not so sure about brain ownership or mind responsibility. It's a rethoric that is working (badly) in our times.

In comparison to rats, our brains are not less locked in the constant present of our mind horizon. I can easily project myself in the future and I can do that also with products and procedures of my intelligence. But my cognitive life is still anchored in the present search that is my self-conscious awareness of being here. The exploration of our own limits is pretty much the same corner-turning and switch-actions of lab mice. We are forced by our own cognition to engage in epistemic activities: our need to know is very much rodent-like.

I’m not suggesting that we are the guinea pigs of a superior intelligence (though, it could be possible). But simply that we are more similar to rats than we think. At the end of day the only thing I wouldn’t expect from a mouse in a lab, would be to stop, to sit down and bursting in to a big laugh, patting his lap with his paw. This is the difference between human and rat intelligence, but I rarely see it every day in humans as well.

A Flourishing, Pandemic Laugh of Immortality

2011-08-18T05:53:00.000-07:00

The Turritopsis nutricula , is a particular kind of hydrozoan (a jellyfish). Hydrozoans in the adult sexually mature stage are jellyfishes; they produce eggs and sperm, which spawn embryos, growing into larvae, which subsequently form a colony of polyps. The colony grows as a stolon, let’s say image a coral. The polyps produce asexually the medusa, which when adult will start again the cycle. Medusas normally have a very short life-span. Not so for our Turritopsis. Our hero is able to grow into the adult stage. And back! Yes, under specific (adverse) circumstances, the Turritopsis can reverse, “un-age” from the medusa status to the polyps. And it has been observed that it can do it many, many times. So, even if the mortality is still present for predatory or disease, the Turritopsis won’t die of senescence. This is pure, 100 % biological immortality, on the rocks.

From species to individuals, now our delirious parade will come to Pando. Pando is…how to definite him( he is a male…of course)? Pando is a joyful, enthusiastic, rascal of his kind. He is, give it or take it, 80 000 years old, but some estimate he could be even 1 million years old. I don’t dare to image the birth candles. Especially because Pando is a tree. Ok, I’m not a botanist, so they will definitely prefer to call it: Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides). Our friend as a system of roots that can be dated as back as 80 000, though the average age of his trunk is 130 years. Pando could live so long for a coincidence of lucky (clearly…) events: frequent forest fires have prevented its main competitor, conifers, from colonizing the area, and climate change, transitioning from a wet and humid weather pattern to semi-arid, has obstructed widespread seedling establishment and the accompanying rivalry from younger aspens. Now just a pinch to the most zealots of the Darwinians: this is fitness for what? When your individual survives one or maybe more or even all the glacial period of the quaternary??? You’re clearly quite fit if you are 1 million, but in these case is the environment adapting to fit the longevity of Pando!

After the flourishing, the pandemic. Epidemics are infectious diseases are the resulting infection for the presence and growth of pathogenic biological agentis in an individual organism.

Buddhism occurred for the first time in India, around, say 5^th century BCE. It then spread to the whole sub-continent and from there, to the South-East. For many reasons, the benign epidemic gradually disappeared from India. But before that, many blessed vectors made it to China. Around say the 1^st century BCE or even a hundred years before. Then, around say the 7^th century CE, China truly “liberated” Tibet ( Time is a toy of a tinker boy, as uncle Heraclitus always said) bringing the golden breeze of enlightenment to the mountains.

I suppose you are ready for the morale now. I’ll try my best, so it goes: you’ve seen that immortality is a strange fish in the pod and that sometimes is easy to bark to the wrong tree of longevity. You also observed that not necessarily every contagion is pathogen (and that not everything that is coming from China to Tibet has bad intentions).We talked about medusa going back to polyps, that is to say an old granny coming back as a child; we entertained ourselves with the story of how roots can deploy themselves underground for thousands of years here and there, and we DIDN’T bother us with too many philosophical questions (is it the same tree? Are they clones of the same individual, identical, but distinctive? A conceptual colony can still be referred under one name?). We didn’t.

I hope you enjoyed this Carnivalesque parade of concepts…because clearly you got that there is symbolism going here. I mean... one thing is winking to the other, you got the subtleties…

Ah ah ah, I’m joking, I’m not German enough, I’m not Colonel Landa, there is no symbolism at all. There is just a jellyfish, a tree, a sneeze. And China as usual invading Tibet (I know that time was for good…). There is nothing else. As usual, there is nothing else. There is nothing!

Dwelling at the end of the world

2011-08-11T20:51:00.000-07:00

The mind is the technology of representing to the brain his own complexity. A mind is the own representation of representativity. If we chase the mechanisms of representation, going up stream the cognitive architecture of consciousness, will we be able to understand the mind? Fortunately, this is not necessary (though it’s very interesting!). The easy aspect is that being a consciousness means your brain is able to understand himself. The hard one is that this is meaningless. Or to put it with philosophical class: representativity is meaninglessness. Philosophers worship grammars. And they are blessed with blindness from grammatical clarity.The curse is when they claim to see better.

Your consciousness can align herself with the pure representativity. This is the peak of a long cognitive tradition, started (initiated) by the very first sentient beings. All along the living beings’ history of cognition it's about mastering the capacity to differentiate. The edge of this development is the deployment of representation in front of the representational engine. A mind can see her own projections as herself. What for??? The non-philosophical answer is that you don’t ask the why to rose as well as you save your life tasting a cherry. Or smiling at the lotus.
My philosophical mind is so shadowed that I know the answers and still being unable to see. Or to rest the mind's eyes.

If you realize consciousness is the deployment of cognition in sentient beings, you’ll get that a mind is just the limit of representation. If you want to cross the line you’ll travel through the many mirrors of representations, fooling yourself with reflections of reflections. Or you can throw away the ladders after you climb to very same place you started. This is nothing more than the narrative grip of your representations. It’s ok. Calm down your paranoid, you’re just a sojourner on the limit of representation, that is the end of the world as consciousness sees her own reflection. But is it good or evil? It’s simply beyond the good and the evil, the conflict of negative and positive ceases in the emptyness, like a small kids fight.

We should (or not!) simply learn how to live in proximity of the end of the world, that is, living at the edge of representativity. If you know of any community that dwells at the end of the world, they are probably minds realizing the meaninglessness of consciousness. I’m so stoned by the grammatical clarity that I’m still struggling to find that place. But believe me, if you find dwellers at the end of the world, they are probably smiling.

The other face of the miserable human falling or The gentle landing of a lotus on a water surface

2011-07-11T22:05:00.000-07:00

Human minds are cognitive machine that can manipulate symbols and their own symbolism; to handle their own re-writing, they must figure out themselves as the narrative projection of an authorship. This turns out to produce the feeling of self-consciousness. The problem is, when a machine turns out to be self-conscious, this strikes her as a panic attack. Indeed the human condition can be described (by itself!) as falling. S.Augustinus spoke of cursed amass referring to humankind; Heidegger defined this state as geworfheneit or being thrown-ness. Indeed self-consciousness lures to a promised land of meanings, but the sense of meaningful never comes.

At this point a consciousness can face the abyss of meaninglessness and feel all the misery and sufferance of human condition. In a Kafkian sentenced universe, minds realize that there is no plan, no line, no reward. Not even punishment: everything happen by mere chance. If you are a cognitive machine that produce meanings in order to fuel your self-conscious intelligence, those are bad news.

Memorandum: when we’ll build self-conscious machine, we’ll face the same problem. You can’t build it without illusions, but you need to call that fiction reality if you want your machine to play.

So we’re back to our inside devastated mind. As a reaction to the shocking discovery, the denial procedures create a backyard space of meanings: the logical extension of the promised land of sensed world. We are sentient beings, we need a world with sense. So our idols are ready to be believed. Or, gently and with civilized manners, we can hold the hand of the mind (our mind) and conduct tenderly to the acknowledgement that the world is meaningless and so it is the mind. Sufferance for non-sense is illusionary as the false promises.

The fact that your salvation is nothing, is not bad news. The highest shelter consists in the absence of peril. And if you are nothing and your god is nothing, you are god (this sentence is proudly brought to you by the Association of Universal Reasoning, trademark). Of course you are not the kind of god with super powers. I’m sorry, you’re not that kind of divinity. You can only be compassionate for your condition of empty self-conscious intelligence. You’re still falling, but it’s the harmonious going down of a flower on a river. I’m joking: you’re still nose-diving like the dork parachute-less you are.

Remember the next time: if you are a self-conscious intelligence and this provokes a falling, provide yourself with a better understanding of the nature of mind. Your mind is wondering about sense, isn’t she? So you do feel the falling! All right, don’t worry: my petaled friend, you can easily see your condition as the gently surfing on the falling of your self-conscious intelligence.

The class of handing down contradiction

2011-06-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

Contradiction

Wittgenstein, commenting about logical contradiction, reflected: what does it mean for our life’s forms a contradiction? Why should we avoid it? Would it possible for a human community to live in the proximity of a logical contradiction?

Consciousness

If you are a consciousness, you represent your representational activity. The fact is, your representativity is not a further content, in addiction to all the others: you are that representation of representativity.

Classes

Russell elegantly treated the class of classes. Should we surprised that in the class ontology, there is a class entity, whose elements are classes? And should we scared by the fact that a class contains itself?

What have in common these three little stories? But most important: what do they diverge for, what is the difference?

The theory of classes is good to treat math objects; but to consider consciousness a class is a much more slippery concept. Am I the summary of the all the concepts my mind thinks of? Not really; concepts are traces of mind. "MY" consciousness is the hunting for that archaeological passage and, through that chase, a brain discovers his complexity as his own representation. You are more appropriately the limit of your thinking. And what is “you” and “me” is a cultural narration.

Your brain is accelerated by the narrative environment hosting him, to deploy himself as the narrativity inspired to him by the manipulation and manufacturing of the semiotic scenarios surrounding him. You are trained to have a mind by the stories of your community. Peculiar communities can develop peculiar stories. If I train your brain to recognize himself as a mind in a continuous path of narrativity all along different material bio-support (i.e. brains), it’s quite tempting to say you embodie the same emanation of consciousness. On the other bank of the river (the same, constantly changing river), if I train your brain to call the awakening of consciousness in the acceleration process, the unique creation of personal, individual mind, you’ll be tempted to have a Western belief about your consciousness.

The flow of consciousness is a technique the first men came across; they started to hand down that fire from generation to generation. Is this reincarnation or constant new creation? What I know is that the development of your brain is unique. So individual that it would be impossible to establish common ways of interactions amongst different brains. We hand down traditions since millennia. Every mystic, is a magician; his trade is stealing. For the good(?)

Narrative Echolocation and Superimposition of Mental States

2011-06-04T00:26:00.000-07:00

Whales practice echo-location: they send signals in the environment and from the coming back response they figure out what the surrounding look alike. Now take human brains; they send out semantic radiations and when they encounter concepts (conceptual interpretation of the surrounding environment), they receive the re-entry for an interpreter. Every concept is a reminder of an underlying interpreter.

Indeed concepts are “fossils” of a mind’s previous passage. When a mind moves in his habitat, she left traces of her explorative extension in that environment. Therefore a following human brain tracking down that cognitive walking receive the semantic re-entry of a consciousness. Subsequent explorations shape and design concepts interwoven in a such a way they form infrastructures a brain can walk through. The viable conceptual architecture is a narrative world and a human brain navigating in that cognitive track is accelerated in a mind.

This is the technology used by human brains to walk in their own complexity, through the projection of multidimensional layers of cognitive exploration. Therefore what we call mind is a cognitive performance in the form of narrativity; the phenomenon is quite unique because the subject experiences a very centered cognitive feedback: consciousness.

This experience is so vivid, the brain is completely immersed in the circumstances of that projection. Given the fact we express ourselves in that representation and therefore we coined concepts within that cognitive environment, that experience is the definition of real and fiction. The practice of walking in that experience establish our conceptual ground: it makes no sense then to call it true or false. Nonetheless the brain experience of being there as a mind, is representational; and to the extent that representation is narrative, the self-recognition of the brain as a mind, is fictional (which doesn’t entail it is false).

Human minds are extremely active in the narrative vicissitudes they’ve been presented to, because they emerge from playing those events. In fact the technology of mind is the practice of handing down from brain to brain the experience of being a consciousness. The interwoven narrative infrastructures present many different sub-goals and narrative lines for the mind inhabiting those semiotic environment; a human consciousness is also able to walk on the very projection of her representation: namely she can be aware of being a representation. In this case she flows along the limit of her representativity; that border is the limit of being there and its crossing produces the meaningfulness to fade. But properly there is no other side to the limit of being there (of meaningfulness).

Some cultural traditions more than others are interested in inhabiting more closely to the limit. One consequence, apparently, is the superimposition of mental states on the single brain representation: in those particular accelerations, the vicissitudes of the brain are trained to play consistently with projecting more than one consciousness. The risk of exploring conflicting characters, producing cognitive friction, is overcome with the “emanation” strategy: the same consciousness emanates from brain to brain. So instead of the mere mind technology, what is handed down from brain to brain is an already centered consciousness. In this way a broader mind horizon can be passed, while the focus of a single consciousness dissipates the cognitive friction (and the relative schizoid symptoms).

The community handing down already centered consciousness is per definition searching old companions under new forms. The contingency of an individual psychology is no better placed in a new creation than in the transmission of an old one: for a brain learning to impersonate a new mind or rehearsing old ones is not a big difference of performance.

Under this respect, the Western echolocation of an interpreter experience a narrative empowerment: not only the semiotic environment is talking to a consciousness, but the semiotic feedbacks are personal. The multiple layers of meaning in the environment is telling me my own story, the story concerning very much my own experience. Of course “mine”, “myself” should be reviewed: the contingent embodiment will be definitely much more respective for the ancestors and for the future generation. Not such a foolish idea as we thought at the beginning!

At the end of the day it’s a sub-category of the extended mind theory, in the temporal dimension. And time is the elapsing of movement under mind breath (a kind of Aristotelian definition).

Thermodynamics of Prayers or Mind as a recursive operation of narrative brains

2011-05-30T21:10:00.000-07:00

Sentient beings are led to create differences in the world by their own very living nature. The differentiator engine is called cognition and the development of this architecture produces in accelerated human brains the mind technology.

Brains receive semiotic re-entry to chase their own projection as a narrative; they start to explore their own complexity manufacturing a world of stories. At the beginning they are scared of the portentous vastness but they learned to evoke a cognitive guide to walk in this narrativity. Soon they learn that the infinite dimension of possibility they may encounter is long as the breath of their brain and so they discover themselves as minds.

Here we are with our consciousness. Slowly we start to recognize cognitive differences and the inescapable happening of facts. We are either very curious to see the true face of facts and either we are freighted by the mere falling of things. Our narrative mind looks at the happening of facts as the abyss of meaninglessness: facts happen without a meaning. This is pure sufferance for a semantic cognition.

As the time goes, our mind mirrors herself in her narrativity and find that consistency and linearity are asked by narrations not by the happening of facts. Slowly, she starts to think that maybe the line of happening, is a requirement of storytelling. As narrative sentient beings, human minds are forced to weave the continuum. Most of all they inhabit the continuum they created. Of course the continuum is in the mind, but what exactly sustain the continuum? At the end of the day it is pure narrativity…

You need to weave the continuum to preserve it. It’s like a dynamo of narrations. Every recursive narrative operations is rolling this world, the environment hosting our search of self-consciousness. Prayers for example. Or repetitive habits. Even the worst ones. Like to play the same character. Yes my friend the “identity” you preserve all along your actions, it’s first of all a technology handed down from human brain to human brain. Not bad, but far from unique. Yes you are wearing a mask and your perseverance in wearing it will convince another young brain to do the same. Actually as educator (even the good ones) tend to re-affirm the uniqueness of identity. The Christian concept of persona, or the psychological concept of psyche.

Newly born human brains are the recursive operation required to establish the continuum. But very easily the mundane tendency to wear an environmental mind will eclipse the pure recursive action. Like a prayer wheel, the sentient brains weave the consciousness of the world. When they are accelerated in the narrative environment, they will adopt the mind technology and forget the recursive permanence.

Names are World's Permutations

2011-05-29T19:41:00.001-07:00

Human minds are distributed in the environment, shaped by their own stories. The mind then is “outside” or in other words, what we see is our consciousness. (This smells of idealism from miles. I know).

Indeed the world we experience is the superimposition of semiotic differences. The physical dimension is augmented by layers of meanings, the narrative sedimentations that constitutes our conceptual ground. Differences are invented by stories.

The world then is called by the many names human beings used in their stories. The fact is stories are not momentary episodes of recreation but the very infrastructures of cognition. To be more precise, a mind is the narrative deployment of a brain; that means the cognition itself is the entanglement of differences invented in the stories. What we see is our consciousness and it’s a narrative deployment. The world in front of your eyes is the emergence of converging stories. And the focus is a consciousness.

When the first men discovered the convergence of narrative in one’s brain deployment, they saw a mind in the surrounding world: the series of semiotic re-entry in a human world converges toward a brain in the form of a world calling for a mind.

A semiotic environment shapes the cognitive extension of a brain in narrations: the brain going up stream towards the coming stories experiences the deployment of his own narrativity. The cognitive extension becomes an exercise of narrativity. Mind is the collective term of narratives deployment from a single brain.

When a mind is in action, she will start to give different names to the world, she will make more differences. A semiotic world is made by the given names and every mind is rolling permutations in the world.

This is why the entrance of every newly born human minds is casting a new roll of permutations in the world.

The convoluted thirst of an organism with a complex cognitive architecture

2011-05-18T21:06:00.000-07:00

What is the meaning of a need for an organism? To get something in order to rebalance the disequilibrium their mere existence provokes. That’s why plants eat light. So: do human beings need oil? This strange species of primate apes raid its own planet, torture the environment hosting it and rape the womb that nurtured it.

The cognitive architecture of human beings is coupled with their cultural and technological environment. The extended mind theory is concerned with the cognitive aspects of that. Moreover on the neurologist Damasio is interested in the relation between emotions and neurobiology. A step further should speak about the cognitive emotions of the technological augmentation in which a human brain is hosted: a mind is hosted in her cultural environment and contains it.

So we should see these human raiders who predate their own Mother Nature in terms of technological needs, endogenous infection and the sacred ritual of a subconscious nightmare. These primate apes are compulsively forced to hyper detect differences in their environment, de facto inventing them. After that they are doomed to chase the needs created by their own ingenious, condemned to be pursued by the demons of their own cognitive architecture: the human mind is haunted by her own complexity.

So the escalation of this cognitive thirst extends herself scavenging her own environment. Vampire-like thirsted of natural resources, men are inebriated by the smell of elemental fluids and organ of Mother Earth.

They cannibalistically lick the dark blood of their fossil ancestors, stabbing deep the bowels of Nature. Like maniacs, they gut the internal organs of metals present in the entrails of Gea. They eat literally every single animal companion they can possibly find, they infect every single corner of the planet. They are the powerful infection a living being can catch. But also this predation, this rape is sacred, which doesn’t mean is less dreadful and guilty, quite on the contrary the holiness of this crime deem herself as a monstrousity generated by nature herself.

Engineers who look at themselves like the most rational employees in the human division of labour, are indeed the sacred criminals, the untouchable executioner who execute the rituals, the incestuous rape, the horrible dismembering. But the rotten kiss, human brains are given to their earth, is the circle of purification they invented themselves to open the eyes of self-consciousness. They are sinners pouring their guilt consciousness, de facto pouring “a” consciousness.

Without foul murder, stone guilt and execrable conduct, you don’t have purification and elevation. Without the circle of crime and punishment, you wouldn’t be able to accelerate an innocent primate brain in to a pervert human mind. Without their convoluted thirst, human brain couldn’t see themselves as the consciousness mirroring their minds.

The ultimate need, of course, is being able to see that there are no needs at all. This is the final, sacred, crime: the dismemberment of consciousness.

The Mind of the Author

2011-05-17T21:30:00.000-07:00

What facts are made of? This is a question of a mind and for a fact to be observed by a mind, it means it’s a story. Mind-observable facts are narrations; humans invented every sort of technology to see beyond narrated facts. Philosophy, quantum physics, casting Yi Jing or stretching your spine. At the end of the deployment of your technology, you’ll find always what is left after all visible fictions are cast away: a mind.

Funny, isn’t it?

Karma-narrativity The mind beyond the scenes

2011-05-08T20:38:00.000-07:00

The Western metaphysics instituted a subject, whowill able to bend and to manipulate facts of the world following a plan, constructed by a self-will in a god-creation style. Our current understanding of the brain and of its cognitive resonance in the semiotic environment, the mind, tells us that the situation is kind of different.

Image you’re starting to behave following the harmonic pattern: don’t mess up the universe order, but gently rhyme with its infinite breath. After perseverance and patience, taming with discipline your impetuous mind, you probably will start to see facts happening to you following the pattern.

What happened? Did I encounter the will of the universe? Well, this is an horse-face argument generated by the incestuous mating of western and eastern tradition (nothing wrong of course: we love hybrids and in general every kind of fecundation. This is just being proud of contraceptive ability, while you’re impregnating all over your surroundings). I’m cheating the happening of facts, with tricks of my ingenious (that is magic: we love magic too! But it’s like preposterous prediction: no fun in betting).

I’m not bending the universe to be surrounded by harmonic facts. On the contrary I’m shaping my mind to see patterns of harmony. In other words the universe, who by the way doesn’t give a dime about your manipulating strategies, remains the same. What is changing is the presentation of the series of re-entry that constitute the universe as you see it as a world. You change the limit of understanding the happening of facts. Quine and Wittgestein would say that your mind as limit of the world is giving a different theory of the collection of facts as you perceive it as YOUR world. Lewonthin and Bateson would say that your cognitive system re-programmed itself to be sensitive to an alternative set of differences, hence inhabiting a different environment.

I would say that you re-wrote your narrativity.

And if you see the switch of narrativity, you are able to see the representativity of the being there of living beings. You can see the convoluted expansion of living beings, in the attempt to escape the irrelevance of inanimate being. In that glimpse you see yourself as the projection of a living being that is forced to make a difference of its being from the irrelevance. When your consciousness represents herself just as a mere happening, a mere representing fact, she coincides with the happening of facts.

So to some extents you represent the universe as its consciousness: you really encounter the will of the universe!

Oh God of reasoning and logic, have mercy of my argumentation.

Posture Addiction

2011-05-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

It is now common sense that the mind is embodied. Only some geeks so world-disconnected can think that intelligence is a pure, Cartesian entity: like a ’80 jacket, it doesn’t suit you well. Moreover intelligence in the form experienced by human beings as a mind, is generated by an informational extension in the environment and folded recursively in itself. This is massively biological, hence bodily.

For us that means that our postures are cognitive attitudes; conversely every posture is twisted around a narrative support. Why do you need to knee for praying? It’s the perfect tension for your joints and your backbone in order to develop a fierce submission: devotion. Try to knee, squeezing out from your western stiffness some respect for your body, without hedonistic self-indulgence. It is difficult to be in a mental state with the wrong posture. And vice-versa. In the western tradition of metaphysical disembodied intelligence, like the Christian, Cartesian and ’80 Cognitive tradition, it’s easy to detach a mental state from the material carrier. Actually it is normal to think of a carrier. This opens the doors for a 3 penny philosophy: “the mental state is in the carrier”, or “the process of carrying IS the mental state”, “ the message is in the second ring of the postman”.

The fact is postures are shaping the cognitive face of a brain. The problem is that postures are addictive.

When you start to stretch your muscles, to squeeze your joints, to massage your internal organs, you feel good (which is good). The misleading of a disembodied mind is very well known in the field (pubs in down town Singapore are loaded with cognitive pirates). What is less described is that posture aren’t disembodied as well. From their narratives. When you knee, you feel a strong, warm wind of devotion coming to you: your blood circulation is reinforced by a better posture. And so are your beliefs. Submit the pride of yourself, to rise stronger as a devotional warrior. Pray and feel to be on the right side. Believe and knee, and let flow your sense of being superior.

The paradox is that “God” is closer to your knee and spinal cord than to your devotional tools (but remember that an extended mind can easily transfer power from devotional postures to devotional items!), but is absent from narrativity (authoriship is generated by the deployment of narrativity: the remembered beginning comes after it started). So when you feel God in your narratives because of your posture, it’s your posture addiction kicking in. Recreational devotion. You read it here first!

The cognitive plateauWhere everything began

2011-04-30T07:01:00.001-07:00

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

2011-04-27T08:57:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-26T17:39:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

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)

2011-04-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

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.

A Reasoned Guide to Labyrinths

2011-03-27T15:20:00.002-07:00

Labyrinths are not built to get you lost. You can get lost in unknown situations. And when I’m putting you in a labyrinth, I’m generating an unknown environment for you. But the similarity ends here. If I’m challenging you with a labyrinth you could not finding the exit OR not playing at all and remain steady. Same outcome? Of course not! That’s why labyrinths are not made to get you lost: they are designed to make you explore complexity.

A designer wants you to try. The eventual success is not per se a lost for the designer. The fact you walked through the expected path and complete in the expected time, it’s a good reason to consider the designer happy. Moreover, labyrinths are not simply in the space. The concept of a labyrinth can be text, or a love. An object can be labyrinthic. The designer wants the exploration: that’s why if you solve the labyrinth in unconventional way, you pissed off the designer: if you go through the walls, you are not following the orthodox path (unless, of course, that kind of labyrinth must be solved that way!).

The fact is, a designer of labyrinth, testing your complexity, is asking to be tested. So, while you are exploring the complexity of your resolving abilities, you are chasing the complexity of the designer.

Until now the implicit definition of a labyrinth designer was of an intelligent one. But what about not-intelligent designer of labyrinths? What about random, chaotic labyrinths? At the end of the day, a mind understanding herself through the exploration of her own complexity, is playing the cognitive labyrinth designed by chance.

Indeed The struggle to solve the mind labyrinth consists mostly in the absence of finding anybody. The mind during her own exploration generates the expectations to find the agent of the cognitive being. Call it the subject, god or simply the author. Step by step in getting her bearings, a mind keeps telling herself: there’s must be somebody. But the self-consciousness of the mind is the self-representation for herself. Walking the labyrinth of mind, generates the mind. But if you expect to get out, you’ve fallen in the tricks of the designer: chance, the mere falling of things in the universe, is laughing of this ambition. Pure contingency put us in the mind, pure random made us the mind to explore the complexity. Here we are. Bearing in mind: labyrinths are not made to get you lost. So, enjoy your complexity, you deserve it!

Homo narrativus:Exploring Latest Frontiers Endowed with Narrative Tools

2011-03-24T16:14:00.000-07:00

The Man of Similaun is a guy, who lived circa 5000 thousand years ago in the Alps. If you think our ancestors were only hunters, dressed with animal skin, naïve and with a very limited technology, well, think again.

This man was very brave and wise, a kind of shaman in charge of impossible missions. He had a couple of amulets, the ancient version of I-phones, GPS, MP3 gadgets. He embarked alone in crossing the Alps (that would be difficult for us WITH our technology), carrying on a mission, dangerous and sensitive. In fact he was either spying or chased by spies. In the Alps. 5000 years ago. They wounded him to death, but they weren’t able to catch him. Did he succeed or fail? We don’t know.

Our man was a mix of Gandalf and Jason Bourne, an expert, a rainmaker (probably in the literal sense), a specialist. He was simply the protagonist of a thriller adventure.

If animals of the same species can stand such a monstrous load of convoluted risks, they have good reasons, hyper reasons. For a cognitive system in order to be involved in such a complexity of situations like being part in an intrigue amongst two or more groups defined by equally complex set of information, can only mean one thing: he has a very sophisticated device to control, manipulate and generate multiple and multiverse set of information. In order to navigate in this complexity, you need to be able to generate it: to be part of that story, you need to be able to tell it.

The cognitive system of our ancestor was going really fast. He used conceptual highway to move fast in a multiverse world of information. To project multiple information in our environment is to perceive and manipulate an augmented reality. The human way is narrativity.

Music for a missing orchestra:Variations on a discontinuum idealism

2011-02-11T02:37:00.000-08:00

The universe generously doesn’t care; it is its nature. Only when you have living beings, you have a sort of care. And when you have minds, you have the representation of being there to care, that is, to be a consciousness. One of the side effect of being a consciousness is filling gaps. A cognition detects gaps in the uncaring universe and it is puzzled, because from the caring point of view, everything is either friendly or hostile, but there is a horror vacui for interest. So the consciousness will ignite a narrative construction of habitable narrative environment. This is the mind-terraforming of brains. Because when a cognition accelerates itself in a narrative construction, it manufactures his own minding generation: giving meanings to events is also giving a meaning to the perceiver of meanings.

Things surrounding you can tell you something, because your mind extended itself in the environment as a narrative developer; hence everything is telling that you are the narrative recipient of the stories around you. Asking for consistency is unfolding the narrative. Indeed there is a narrative because a mind is unfolding its cognitive deployment. This is the narrative continuum.

Very easily a mind will deduct that because everything is the story told to a consciousness and the tale is generated by the consciousness itself, then the universe is the mind. This is crazy and the conclusion of the German idealism from Hegel. But…first of all: is it that crazy? Yes. Ok, reformulate is that wrong? No way. Nonetheless, it is wrong. And the reason is that there is a confusion between mind as the deployment of narrativity and mind as the author of narrativity.

Your accelerated brain projects itself as mind through the deployment of narrativity. But it is not the author of the consequent narrations. In other words you generate your narrations but you are not the owner of them. So consciousness is the spirit and it is universal. But it’s not absolute. Is the spirit absolute? I don’t know, I’m just a dude…But consciousness is the representation of the spirit. Because the spirit is a narration. And the narrative representation is “universal” for the human beings; your single consciousness is the individual instance of this technique, handed down from generation to generation. Your mind actually appeared for the first time, roughly speaking, between 50 and 150 thousand years ago. It did appear because the convergence of a bundle of stories generated by a flock of brains.

But if you draw the line of continuum you’ll see the universe as a consciousness. Actually as your consciousness. But the universe is much cooler: it doesn’t care. It’s like the struggle to make your mind blank: no effort is required.

The orchestra finally starts to play in sync. No effort now.

Puppet’s Ghost

2011-02-06T22:58:00.000-08:00

Many talks about consciousness and what is left? Science and modern philosophy (moat of all, Anglo-Saxon) tell you that there is no such a thing as consciousness. This is mythological talking, it’s past, it’s French. There are no spirits. It’s a belief for primitive people, poor guys from the old times, a tribe thing. Take the Australian aborigines: it’s not them, they are not stupid. They lack appropriate knowledge, that’s it. Now we have science, we have neurology. We have quantum physics (which we don’t understand, by the way. I mean: no human being understands it, properly). We have big bang theory (bang a gong).

So is brain just electrocuted soft tissues?? Actually,yes, I agree with this option.

Our brain is a biological puppet, maneuvered in cognitive postures by the narrative forces in which is immersed. The narrative environment radiates on his cognition the response of a character. A brain in this semiotic atmosphere is accelerated in a mind: the semiotic rays turn cognition in narration. That’s it.

What else???

Oh, I forgot. When a brain turned in to a mind, it represents itself to itself in a narrative mode. He becomes a long journey chasing the narrative tracks that generated him. He runs on the semiotic trails, that are the passage of a consciousness. Finally he reaches the source of the narrative radiations: a mind telling a story. Or a brain self-representing to itself. Meaning???

You can say that a brain to explore appropriately the permutative and multiverse complexity of his own architecture, needs to project itself in the extended environment generated by other mate brains.

Or you can say that the narrative forces haunt the brain and the cognitive infestation evokes hallucinations and deliria in the neuro-architecture. A cerebral fever calls the projection of a ghost. Is it real? Like any ghost…( I think that the Anglo-Saxon audience has a problem with ghosts: Hegel was really meaning that ideas are more real than stones: spirit is more real than matter. Catholics really believe in the transubstantiation of the wafer. Ontic as pragmatic in Heidegger is bad in comparison to ontological or theoretical…).

I’m confused: brain is a puppet, consciousness is a ghost…. Don’t tell me that….

Yes.

Mind is the puppet ghost.

I mark two red strips under my eyes, beating my chest. Outside there is battle of ghosts. And gods and demons. And I don’t want to miss it. Hóka-héy.

Mind Terraforming

2011-01-28T00:57:00.000-08:00

When a brain lands in a narrative environment, it starts the cognitive terraforming. Everything is alien and harsh. And new. The neuro-connections spread their experience to entangle the environment. Wave after wave of cognitive exploration, a brain infects its world of its cognitive extensions; the narrative world answers shaping the soft tissues of a will-be character. Day after day the narrative forces manipulate the brain to assume cognitive posture and manoeuvring the strings of neuro-projections in the environment, a brain starts to walk like the representation of itself: a character. The prolonged acquaintance with narration gives a brain the practice to experience the being of a human figure: stories are shaking brains until they drop out minds.

Conversely, when narrations detect a brain, they inoculate the practice of living like humans: the colonization of stories begins. A brain is an alien world and the stories need to work out the cognitive atmosphere to survive. Step by step a brain is mind-terraformed by narrations and when the process is completed a consciousness rises.

Indeed the mind is a narrative technology handed down generations by generations. Narrations are mind-terraforming newly born brains. This was the urgency provoked by an immense representational capacity by the Homo Sapiens Sapiens cerebra and the cognitive magnitude found the way to stabilize the frantic tendency to represent itself by narrations. A mind is the viable and sustainable way for a brain to represent itself and this technique is handed down in human communities.

Ozness of Mind

2011-01-19T22:43:00.000-08:00

A mind is the centre of gravity of concurrent cognitive forces (at least this is the explanation given by Dennett...) and the stream of subjective experience is narrativity (at least this is the misinterpretation given by me...).

So your experience of being an I, is stretched all along the narrative your life is. As you might have observed, your life looks like a continuum, with a strange plot that deploys itself while you live. Sometimes the thread seems repetitive, sometimes pointless. It's not uncommon to perceive of being in control of the events in your life, exactly as it's not uncommon to feel the opposite. And not matter how messed up you're, or how many fella do you hear in your head, it's incorrigible the sensation of seeing the world from the first person.

The thing is, your accelerated brain, (or the cognitive projection it gives to itself) in order to interact with others projections in a virtual semiotic cultural environment is forced to exercise the practice of being a mind. The effect is to produce narrativity. And quite logically, where there's a narration, there's a narrator.

And so, yes my little friends, probably you already gotcha: narrativity produces the side effect of authorship. It's just our misguided perspective that when it sees a generation, thinks to a generator. Quite the opposite: a generation casts the shadow of a generator.

Not that this distinction really matters: if there's no one who cares, what is exactly the point? Nonetheless, we are completely convinced of being there. We have the incorrigible belief to be a consciousness. It's like in kingdom of Oz: your action are giving significance to entity you could call courage, or intelligence, or love. Our narrative interaction with the world makes us thinking there's authorship and we are searching it in our lives. With our lives.

We are artists, believers, researcher, easy-goers, because we are forced by how our brain is shaped to see us as minded bodies. So what we can do know? I mean apparently if we are fictional, then our job is done? Rub your little red shoes and fly away to help other children-like metaphysical entity with problems....

Stranger than your brainAn unlikely,long line between Delphi and Johannesburg

2010-12-02T11:34:00.000-08:00

Moses told me the story of Vera the Ghost, a perfect urban legend with a thrilling twist. He was more entertained by his own storytelling rather than stating a proper commitment about the belief; nonetheless he is convinced that ghosts do exist. I giggled a bit, condescendingly to his naivety. Then I remembered the Greeks. Long time ago, the same very wise men who discovered the technique of investigating the true nature of fact, many times said that along the streets of Greece, you could meet gods, heroes and other semi-divine creatures. Should I respect more Heraclitus than Moses (Moses intended as my friend...)? Xenophanes was metaphorical, while my Zulu friend simply lacks a good western education? Or maybe am I really arrogant both with the Greek bunch and with my friend?

What does it mean that the stranger you meet along the way could be a god or a ghost? Pump up the metaphorical interpretation: your attitude with a stranger generates goodness or evil; this powerful reaction can shape your days AS IF you met a god or a ghost (ghosts could be like values, take morality or virginity...). Because we know for sure that no material entity matching a semantic description of a god or a ghost can be encountered on a physical street.

But maybe calling something a ghost is a good strategy to name a feeling your brain grab, without a clear correlation, something like a phantom feeling. Which of the following do you choose as a good naming:“I'm still scared: I'm sure a ghost was following me” or “I'm totally in control: I know that my brain is sending me hallucinations after my nervous breakdown.Though one second more with their company will prove unbearable for my mind and I'm seriously thinking to terminate this agony with a logical, metallic, non-metaphorical bullet in my brain, I perfectly know this is not real...”

Phantom feelings are clearly projections of our imagination, which we suppose is a product of our brain. Our brain extends its informational ecosystem wiring neuro-connections with the semiotic infrastructure of the narrative environment hosting him. The being there of your brain and his representation to play with, is your mind. Though it sounds odd, your brain encounters his mind as a stranger on his way. And gradually accept it, becoming you. You are the encounter of a brain with his mind.

Technically speaking, you are haunting the brain of a Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Moreover we face the hardcore self-esteem question: do you believe in yourself (in your existence)? Say that the response is positive (no matter how insecure you feel at the moment: I'm sure you think you exist!). Now: how ghost are you, in comparison to the entities on the street of Delphi or Johannesburg? Speaking of meeting the strangeness:

On which side of the physical clarity of your brain do you sit?

Master of the Universe: When a fellow with impaired equilibrium grabs a lamppost, does he it for standing or for spinning the world?

2010-11-01T06:33:00.000-07:00

What is that makes the world goes round? There are sex and money. And generally all the serious business. Right. So we see a world as meaningful because we are occupied in serious activities. Ok tell me what are the serious activities: working, loving, fighting, having fun? Is that all? For sure then our shaky fellow is just one of the unfortunate (for that night). You can pass by, no problem. But what if the meaning of the world comes from the pure gratuity of being there? What if the meaning is just the absence of a goal in being there? What if being there were already the completion and its representation an eternal fractal interpretation?

Try to see the world of men as a wheel of stories. Try to see all the pain and the joy as (true!) projections of representing brains. Try to see goals and targets as painted background on stage.
Now look at the shaky fellow. He grabs a lamppost because this is his job. He pushes walls and blows boulevards, because he's moving the world. Seriously. I'm sure you're nauseated by this confusion of metaphorical speech.

The answer is: do the disarticulated gestures of our friend make the planet accelerate? Do they play a big part in human society? No. This is the simply answer. Still they are spinning the world: they are spinning the meaningfulness of the world. The meanings you consume are not eternal ideas, nor some sort of quanta: there is not a single meaning in the physical world (and outside lie pure spirits!). So, where our concepts come from? They haven't been there since the beginning, so they moved. Someone moved them. Meanings are spun by human beings, actively playing their form of life. But when you are totally in to your character, do you play your role or do you move meanings? I suppose you already got it. Yes my friend. All the “normal” persons are playing their roles. Some mystics are playing the meanings.

The very posh ones are poets, but all the queers, weirds, addicted, all the life juggler, all the convention acrobats, all the monotony burglars are precisely blowing the meanings. Their unstable, staggering steps, with hands barely grasping a hold, are moving the world. Next time a man falls down, help him: you'll be lifted!

The Story of Neuro-ecological Connectivity:A Semantic Esoskeleton

2010-10-23T06:19:00.000-07:00

The complexity of human brain is not an adaptive response to a multiplicity of information to be understood. Quite on the contrary the complexity of the environment WE perceive is the reflection of OUR brain complexity. Am I saying we create things outside? Am I? Bloody German slippery idealism...No no, we are not creating the stuff (of course: a momentary lapse of Anglo-saxon empiricism relief...). Like the demiurge is just manipulating basic matter of the universe, the khora, not creating it. Ops...demiurge is a platonic concept! Maybe I'm really slipping in to idealism...By the way this is precisely not the point! “Outside” complexity is a reflection of “inside” complexity of the system,able to detect such complexity.

Our brain shapes itself with re-entry information and the circumnavigation of its own complexity extends with its environment. Neuro-connections self organizes their relationships and project in their surroundings a tracking system of their interaction. Surroundings in the context of a brain is a broad term: eyes are in these surroundings, as well as hands; but with a stick in your hand you can perceive how deep is the water in a pod. The bottom of the pod is in the brain surroundings. Moreover, our brain perceive its pertinent hands(and sometimes he's even wrong about which is its proper hand; an experiment from phantom limb master Ramachandran proves this), not its own neuro-connection. Or better, the representation of its own projection, us, perceives his own hands, not his own neuroconnections. So “brain surroundings” is a fluid term.

Our brain marks its surroundings to track its projection in the environment. The brain tracking system of the interaction with its surroundings is semantics. And the practice of living with other minded beings produce the context, the stability and the sense of interacting with the environment. This is the projection of the brain in to its surroundings: the ecological esoskeleton, a brain wears to understand its environment. Your brain wears its world to perceive it.
The semantic environment is the story of the passage of a mind, tracking its interaction.

Therefore the semantic esoskeleton is the space time extension of the brain in its own projection: a mind. We have a backbone to support our posture; arthropods have external structures to do the same. Cartesian dualism has an inside backbone to support thinking, we have a semantic esoskeleton to support the deambulation of our brain in its surroundings. Would you call it this idealism?

A Giant Grammatical Vampire Squid is sucking generative power from the brain of humankind?

2010-09-07T06:05:00.001-07:00

We speak our language in a very peculiar way: we invent the proposition we speak. This is the generativity skill Chomsky proposed to describe the algorithmic richness of natural languages. We are so inventful, that no two identical proposition have ever been uttered.Or at least this is a famous quote of the Chomsky's generative grammar. After the first astonished seconds, they clarify that very similar propositions are spoken constantly, but it's mathematically rare to utter the precise sentence more than twice and not just you: in the total history of the language you speak. You can feel uncomfortable with this thesis, but the chomskyan revolution did the same in linguistic as Einstein did in physics ( odd to say but I still think that Einstein is underestimated...).
Now in the ages of speed of light distribution of content, we are experiencing a bottleneck of production: we are overwhelmed by replication of content, but consuming is outnumbering creation. What are the consequences on our generative grammar? Some scenarios then:

1 Proposition changes with the context, so grammar is not a system of internal relations. This is good, in grammatical terms it means that even when you replicate a concept, you generate its semiotic surroundings, so the proper utterance is the compound, always different. Chomsky will hate it: you should admit something like extended grammatical minds.
Heretical.

2 Humankind is close to a grammatical apocalypse: in order to be meaningful again, grammar will bend our semiotic “spacetime”. We'd pretend to say the same, but the internal grammatical relations will “twist” the identity: if you say the same proposition twice, it will change autonomously the internal relations with the linguistic system. You say the same, but its meaning is different. This is the fall of main stream: no one will be able to follow a trend because even chasing the same, will be actually chasing something else.
Alternative.

3 We lost control of our mastering a language (idiolect): our brain has been sucked by a vampire grammatical squid ! If you can't say the same proposition twice in the same language, but you're saying twice the same proposition, then you're changing the language. This is by far very acceptable. At the end, you can say every one is speaking is own language, just very similar to the other mates with a similar dialect. The problem of this convergence is that you could start to speak different variation of your own same language: in different times you will speak different dialect of the main version. Technically speaking you'll destroy the concept of native speaker of at least our own language (idiolect). Everything stays the same, but no one is understanding.
Incomprehensible.

Self Interpreting System: living beings are stories that narrate themselves

2010-09-01T01:40:00.001-07:00

Image you're an instance of state of things. Image you're occurrence is purely random. Image you're a mess. Image your bloody, chaotic, disfigured state of being is actually making sense as it's able to sustain itself. God blessing! Seriously, it helpful to have the concept of a allmighty player of permutations like God, in order to understand the mere casuality of being a self-organizing system. From a MiddleEast(Sinaian)-Mediterreanian(Roman-Vatican-Empire-mafia) point of view, being able of making it without any help from hyerarchical superior entities is pure metaphysics!

Now you're a self-organizing system:really good my boy! Ok, in order to stay stayed, you need to counterbalance thermodynamics; it's a real pain in the ass, I know. Amogst the Tughs you could have found in physics, that's pretty bad. But in the series of self-organizing systems, only the ones able to handle their own energetic trade (metabolism) AND to impose the replication of their scheme of action, can pass to level two: living beings. The difference? Just this: if you don't pass your misguided scheme of action, not matter how good, it will dissolve. Further on, passing scheme of action is passible of misquotation, misinterpretation, code-deception, that is: mutations. So if you're passing your scheme, the bastards new generation can actually improve it. I can't believe it!

Ok buddy, now you're a self-organizing system, you improve (if you're lucky)(well in billions of years, because we're speaking, you have been lucky...). So you can detect state of things: you represent. In order to handle interaction between you and the world, you need to have a map of the place, yuo need to get the bearings. Represent. Map your bloody environment. Good. So now you're able to preserve yourself, to hand it down through generation AS a representing scheme of action. Congratulations pal:you're a true organism now!

So what you do? Well you pass your scheme of action (partially encoded in your DNA: sorry mate, but developmental systems theory in biology thinks that the scheme to replicate a whole organism is encoded in DNA and the contingent situations generated by the environment; that is to say: the scheme is all over there: DNA, temperature, other organisms you're parasitizing and you're parasitized). Ok scheme of action, that is: representation. I'm representing myself right? Pretty much. DNA (and environment) are reading themselves in order to execute the processes leading to the proper actuation: DNA (and uncle environment) is interpreting himself in order to perform himself as the scheme of action leading to the self-organizing system we know (and love).
Sometimes I miss religious explications: it's so blatantly naïve it's moving you to make an effort. Another item in my collection of turtles.

Entropy of Truth:Shuffling Facts

2010-08-25T00:57:00.000-07:00

What would you say if I tell you that all along history the little Devil Boltzmann mixed true quotations with false ones? Our little devil likes just the sake of it; he doesn't have any strategy nor he wants to deceive human beings, not in particular. He simply wants to have fun.
History wouldn't be credible anymore? Is it now?
Now let's say some people know he did, but they have no way to systematically discover it; they found some of samples of wrong quotations, they corrected them or did try and that's it. The lesson is that now they know.
History wouldn't be credible anymore? Is it now?

I think we are ready to change game: what do you do with genuine quotations? What do you do with truth in general? Don't take me too radically: it's not this game. I know that truth can be meaningful if in the majority of cases, it's more or less what we think. Call this the basic notion of truth. Now keep on the game. After you know the meaning of truth, after you collected a vast sample of true propositions (and a lot of true quotations), you're ready for the game.

Do you think that at the end of the series of the true sentences and the true quotations, there is something? Or someone? There is a price? Do you find the sense of truth at the end of this...rainbow? Do you know really something more? Do you know everything now? Are you wise?

It's a thin line this. Radical deceiving is pointless: it transforms your words in verbalism. Fine. But a mixing false quotations, just to shape a new sense, a new meaning, is that evil? I don't find evil, but patronising. You have your mystical agenda and your false quotations are supposed to lead me to your imaginarium. It's a game.

You have also an alternative: mixing false quotations randomly. So precisely, even you don't know which are the good, which the fake ones. Why? Well you'll start to think more. It's not a quotaton or a proposition that makes the truth sense. You need much more effort, you need to work in very stormy cognitive conditions. And you know it, so you're not exactly misled, it's more a virtual conceptual training camp. This is the entropy of truth: good cartesian reflection on fakeness of language.

The reason of the haiku: permutations of words, permutation of minds

2010-08-16T05:54:00.001-07:00

Truisms are mute; when you state the obvious you're basically mute. On the contrary when you say something meaningful you're driven to new semiotic paths. Haiku can have sense only because they accurately just says what is not yet written in the environment. They are moderatly silent, like the whisper of a gentle breeze and they teach you the language. Haiku points at meanings in the environment and shows the path to them. It's short, because it's common. Haiku don't aim to re-found conceptual grammar: they set up what is already known. Just in a more meaningful way. It's obvious what underlies beneath an haiku, but it's not obvious what an haiku states: you can learn how things are connected to words. It's like the most common thing: you know what meanings are, but only trivial meanings are available: they are frequented semiotic paths.

It's a bit more difficult to reach more complex meanings: you can see them, you can walk nearby, but the path is unsecure. Try. Most of the times the people will simply don't understand you. You're connecting things and words in proportions that are visible only to you. At this point: are you really sure you know what you wanted to say?

Complex meanings are not just funny inventions. They are written in the environment, with the words of their times. Reach them, through a semiotic path; but you need to go there. It's not enough to assemble words: this is verbalism. And to go where complex meanings are, you need to start a semiotic enterprise, you need to became an interpret of signs. This is slightlydanger, because not interpretation will leave untouched the interpreter. Only truism are safe: without a clear idea, silence is preferable.

If you still want to say something, beware that the things you say will change you. It's normal: if you're manipulating the writing of the environment, things will start to interact with you and will react to your saying.
Common thoughts are the structures of language; changing them, is changing the environment, because the environment is the writing of intepretation. The wisest thing to do is just saying what is not yet written in the environment. A gentle breeze of things.

Algorithmic vs Semiotic Search: The Fall of Consciousness in a Cognitive Sedan Chair

2010-08-12T07:30:00.000-07:00

Algorhythmic search is effective. You search statistical proportions of single stupid search in huge number;stupid here means with no clue; and huge number probably can mean a “googol”. The story is straight: take a very simple task, take a unbefuckilievable big number of samples, connect with an algorithm. To give this algorithm strategy a name, let's go for stigmergic: this is pretty much what ants do. But the question is: can it work for men? The simple answer is: Goddamit yes!
Instead of inventing resourceful expensive task, you have very simple ones.And cheap, resourcefully and cognitively cheap. The system as a whole is a lot faster. A lot. So it can grow bigger and more complex: that means more powerful. I don't about you, but I like complexity, so as a rule of thumb, I find positive this enrichment.

But, we got some downside. First, it tends to consolidate the system as a whole, which is good is you searching for stability, not so good if you're searching flexibility. Why? Well, it's in line with the fascism of feedback: a feedback can be a feedback only if the system stays the same: other wise it can't use the feedback as a feedback! Simple, but for example our brain doesn't work this way. Re-entry information change the system, which continuously adapts to new re-entrant information. I still don't know about you, but I keep on liking complexity and brain is one my favourite buddy-theme. For this I'm a bit bitchy with feedback (comments from other human beings are more complex than proper pure informational feedback).

Second point: health. Health is always important. If you're rich and ill, you're fucked (even if you're poor and health you're fucked, but in a different way. In this post we consider a priority “wellfare” of the system, so kudos for health rather than money). Homogeneity in a system make it per definition every region more consistent to each other; so you can connect better the regions because they are clearly more compatible. This is good if you pestered by colleagues using different operative systems. This is not good if you're the immune system; you want some degree of compatibility, but you like diversity in order to be able of upgrading your defense. Let's talk about this. In biology complex device must pay off. If you don't have advantages, you don't need swankies devices. The story of epidemy indeed shows that the rare occurrence of a viral epidemy kills between 80/90% of the population. The survivors were the only ones who committed a bit to diversity. Conclusion? If you're an individual you don't five a damn about your species global welfare, so forget it. But from an overall perspective, the integrity of the system is put at risk with homogeneity.

Now we can come back. In our cognitive adventures, algorithmic search is giving what we asked. This is efficient and stupid. A semiotic search on the contrary is complicated, expensive and fallible. During your research, you'll find a lot of different things you don't need; while you're involved in your activity, you consume your time and resources; finally, it's likely you don't find what you were searching for. So? Well, so sometimes it's better not to find what you were searching for. Two reason:1) you were searching something actually stupid\pointless\outdated\ ;2) what you found is more interesting\valuable\meaningful. Further on your enterprise exercised your cognitive equipment: we are not searching for finding (primarily), but only to explore our environment.

A semiotic research is actually the deployment of what consciousness is meant for: exploration of a semiotic environment. On the contrary an algorithmic search makes you giving up cognitively expensive enterprise. Then we rest on a lazy cognitively attitude and we are not ready for viral attacks on our consciousness (you don't need to wait for alien-like beasts: a viral attack on your consciousness can come from a religion. Or a TV series.).

In other words algorithmic search is mutating our attitude, degrading the level of complexity. Hang on. Am I saying I don't like Internet, google and stigmergic collaboration??? NO! But we need to re-shape our consciousness' enterprise in order not to be shut down by some cognitive virus. At the end, our cognitive system is close to be disconnected by the understanding of its own means of production: we are already disconnected by the understanding of our means for living comfortably, it's the price of living in big societies. But losing the understanding of our means of understanding it's different. Of course, providing we are not that unhappy with a Bye Bye consciousness....

The So It Is of Causality (if you think so)

2010-07-20T12:17:00.000-07:00

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

Time of Representation

2010-07-11T08:27:00.000-07:00

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").

A Persian Trick to Save Authorship

2010-06-11T07:35:00.000-07:00

The Persian Army had one his own Elite Special Forces, the “Immortals”, a group of 10 000 soldiers highly trained, highly motivated and with a legendary record of success. They were so feared, that they've been nicknamed “the Immortals”: no chance against them. They were actually quite impressive, but they could die. Simply, after every battles, the dead ones were replaced with new guys. The army was then composed by “the same”.
When we speak of the possibility of saving the memory of our consciousness after the death of the material support (the body), a similar trick is in play. Indeed: what we are talking about? Information? OK.

Minds differ from brains, because we spread our intelligence in the sorrounding environment, both temporaly and spatially. My mind is extended in the cultural tools of its society. My brain has been accelerated by a hosting culture to become a mind. In the infrastructured environment of a culture, per definition “memory” of consciousnesses are saved. We talk about Achilles and Siddharta Gautama. Their consciousness have been handed down all along the centuries. A possible refusal of this concerns the “incompleteness” of the consciousness arrived to us. Fair enough, you can argue that we got only fragments of, say, the mind of Jesus Christ or Plato. That's why it's difficult the intepretation...

Good point. Let's take something closer. Wittgenstein or Ivan Karamazov. I personally would say that “I know” what Wittgenstein would say about something and the same for Ivan Karamazov. It's because I dedicated to these subjects a lot of time and passion. Refusal: we appreciate your effort, but we don't give you credit to be the only voice of Wittgestein or Ivan Karamazov. It's easy to image someone else, with the same authority and an opposite view. 100% true. OK. So now try someone really close: a dad, a brother, a spouse. I really know what they would say. I'm one of the most autoritative storage of their consciousness. If I weren't, then I would be in crisis about myself...

Welcome. Indeed it's not difficult now to figure out a situation where your dad/brother/spouse hid you something. Or even better: you will be a reliable substitution of their consciousness in the majority of case, but not in all the cases. Your algorithm to substitute your family consciousness is not perfect, it's good, but not perfect. Do you think we are just missing chunks of information? Do you think that the perfect substitution is just a matter of filling all the boxes? Your consciousness is a sequence of episodes, randomly embodied in a region of space-time. This is what we call “I”. If every information about me would be stored and replaced in another material support, I'm pretty sure the new puppet woul behave precisely how I'd have. The puppet will show some philosophical behaviour and for the rest of the world it would be pretty much the same. Except for me. I wouldn't “re-open” my eyes, this time in the new puppet, it wouldn't be “season 2”.

The very fragile subjective experience is not informative. It's a random breeze, a stigmergic production of the environmental narratives. Our cultures generate the sense of authorship of the narratives: there are protagonist, there are narratives, there must be authors. It's like when in a story, the character starts to quest: not matter my importance in this tale, I could be just an invention of the author. The 20 century literature is precisely dealing with this form of deconstruction: a character is talking directly to his author. Now we can do the same to our authorship.

The fact that autorship is alive, doesn't entail every author is. Remember the Persian trick....

Impiety of representation

2010-06-10T03:03:00.000-07:00

In front of you there is a Buddhist monk; it's nearly done with his 3 years work: an astonishing series of diagrams made of sand, with breath taking details and a mind blowing conception. What is the worst thing you can do it? Take a shot of it, immortalize his effort. Whaaat?? The bald dude spent 3 years and because he's naïve, he's simply destroying a master piece...What a shame...

OK let's have a chat.

The bald quiet guy is Buddhist. So he thinks this reality is an illusion, at least in the way it appears to our eyes. He respects the fact we have a mind and we can think about a lot of things...but, they are pretty much all...random vanishing draft on a beach, shaped by an ephemeral breeze. The mandala is helping him to remind this, it's a tool to handle the vanity of being minded. And being minded is clearly being narrative.

A mind is the human form of cognition; cognition is a technology of human being to navigate through differences in the world to survive; the differences in the world are projected by the same cognition in the form of representations: differences are cognitive representations. The human form of cognitive representation is narrative. If you want to tame a human mind, then you need to hollow your narrativity. Being minded is a constant projection of representations; that's it. But of course idolizing the representation activity makes you losing the grip on what is important, that is: nothing.
This is the reason the many prohibitions about representations in religion, from iconoclasm or ban of portraits of god and prophets.

A Buddhist monk when is working at his mandala, he's playing with fire. He's exalting his representativity through his work; the more his mandala is beautiful, the more is telling you something, the more is moving your conscience, the worst:it's culminating the vanity of representation. At the very peak, the righteousness of the monk coincides with the one of Paris Hilton: the item is carrying moral values. The blasphemy, it's worthwile to remind, it's not about an item carrying moral values:it's about carrying moral values!
Many authors realized that the true essence of being minded, narrativity, is just the mere vanity of being. David Foster Wallace or Cesare Pavese clashed against the nothingness of authorship: the unbearable lack of sense of representing nothingness.

But the monk knows it; as soon as the mandala is done, he will gently blow it away. And it's important to create a very good mandala, in order to make sense of this annihilation. Otherwise it would have been a symbol, a cognitive shortcut reaffirming the power of the mind. The supremacy on the illusion of mind and reality is to run towards the bullet, not avoiding them. If you can move faster than the bullets, reality is an illusion, if you chase the bullet with your body, mind is an illusion. And you'll become the Michael Jordan of Russian Roulette.

Fetishism of Signs

2010-06-09T04:35:00.000-07:00

Signs, as any other fact in the world are pretty much inexpressive. In all the universe, in every single molecule or particle, you won't find any meaning. Not even in the big bunch of stars. You won't find any in the methane seas of Uranus or in the ammonia wind of Jupiter. Sadly enough you won't find meanings in our beautiful blue planet. Meanings are extracted like a drug by living Turing machine, self-organizing systems that for living are supposed to see information in the surroundings. And to detect information, you need to spread it all around.

The case of meanings is even more complex. Meanings are more than information; they are folded in the environment and subsequently extracted. All the environment is re-mapped to be a meaning-storage. OK funny enough: what is stored, how and most of all by whom??? Let's start by the “simple” one: meanings are stored by complex cognitive architectures of narrative systems, that is to say: the folk, the dudes, us. How. OK, how and what are simultaneous. So what are we storing in the environment? Tools, clues, to facilitate our actions. Let me give you an example: scissors are clearly made to cut: it would be difficult to do it so sharply with bare hands! But in scissors there is more: their shape is supposed in part to guide your movements.If you “wear” a pair, you'll find yourself incredibly in the mood of cutting sharply(this example if from Richard Gregory). You need intelligence to build a tool but also you spread intelligence in the tool and a mate will retrieve some.

Image now to build an entire habitat of such tools. Start with a village. Then go in the forest and tag every plant and animal, with a name and a story. Now bring your little human cub and tell him the names and the stories. You know what you did? I tell ya. You just created a perv. Exactly, the most common human action is just this. The forest now is populated by believes, theorems, songs. You little semiotic monster will see an augmented reality. First he was biting the back of his monkey friend, now he's seeing an environment overpopulated by signs. Now signs are telling him things. Voices. The baby now will see in every fact, a story. Every portion of reality is a narrative fragment. Every meaningless fact in the world is whispering in the overheated head of the baby a clue. The overheated brain will start to pretend he's a mind. Every fragment of a narrative environment is accelerating a brain in to a mind. Now your little big head is a man. He's a semiotic perv: he thinks there are signs and meanings. He's able to see'em, while it's his accelerated overheated brain that is projecting furiously meanings in the fact of the world. And in the projection is able to represent a mind: pure sign fetishism.

The Sheep Simurg: Nobody in the Mirror

2010-05-31T00:29:00.000-07:00

What is a ghost? Let's say is your mind cheating. Wind is playing with a bush, and your mind sees a creature. Easy. Your mind has been told there is one third of the lord of the physical laws and in fact this one third is the Holy Ghost. Easy. Now try to play a bit harder. There is nobody around, you remember a kid of your childhood. He was singing the song of the shepherd. And you think of a storm, when you are having a stroll in the mountain. It rains and you're far from home. Damn! I'll be wet and cold, not pleasant. It doesn't matter, as soon as I'll get home, whisky and milk, stroking a cat (milk is for him). Stop.

You can get home if you have one. Now say you're outside in the rain and you don't have a place to go. I'm not saying you don't see actually a shelter. You're outside, it rains and your place IS there. This is when you feel lost. It's not your mind, 'cause it's not a problem of location. The difference is that you know where you are and it's where you have to be. You're lost because your soul is lost. And your place is outside when it rains. Ouch. Do we believe in soul? Well, if you say something like my ghost haunting a castle or the immortal essence that will survive every accident of my body...Not really. But if I think of me lost in the rains, yes, I can think of this. I can think of persons I love in this situation. I can actually see them. It's not that difficult to see human beings who are lost. What is lost? Soul, mind,... They feel like a sheep, lost in the mountain. A shepherd will come?... This is a story.

The sheep doesn't know a shepherd will come. Sometimes wolfie comes before the guy. Sometimes the sheep starts to wander and find other sheep. And together they cross rivers and peaks. The herd is crying and they see good sheep-friends dying. Hard decisions and fights. But also time for a talk, in the cave. They learned how to use fire. They sing. They are not scared anymore. They reached the village, on two legs. They are shepherds. When a lot sheep finds his way, she was a shepherd. Long life to things we don't believe in.

A Cerebral Plot:It's an Inside Job!

2010-05-25T05:43:00.000-07:00

Neurons are connected each other, exchanging information. What is about? Well, about, mostly, other connections. You can say that the informational exchange with the environment is negligible, in comparison with the inside exchange. When a group of neurons fire,a lot of other groups react, firing.Subsequently the reaction is considered as an information by other groups; of course it's their turn to say they noticed the other guys noticed. And guess? They will fire. This is what happened when you where in the womb. No surprise that by the time you were born, your brain was in a damn activity. And now you start to have a reasonable amount of information from the environment too (yes, it is negligible but it's not zero). By the time you're 2/3, your brain is a locomotive of neuronal activity. You can see, walk, talk (!). And still the environment portion is ultra low.

When a human brain is very young, it has been already on a roller-coster of activity, and the roller-coster is starting to be mapped by the brain itself. Passing through a huge amount of reciprocal firing, neuro-connectivity is becoming highly informed about his own activity. This is called “informational re-entry”, by the Nobel prize G.Edelman.

Why is the brain involved in a such a massive scale of internal informational exchange? Well the sausage answer is clearly: because it needs to inhabit a human world and that inside activity is necessary in order to be part of a community of human brains. As usual, the sausage answer is correct. The only comment is that the answer is just turned upside down. We live in a community of human brains because we (our brains) experience a massive scale of internal informational exchange. The brain is mainly involved in representing its own representations. We are speaking of the brain, but actually is more appropriate to speak of a multiple layers of neural configurations. Dennett associates the clouds of neuronal connections with multiple drafts of cognitive representations. I'd say, (if I were a brain), that I need to hung my attention to something, in order to facilitate the projection of the representation of a representation.

Otherwise you'll spin indefinitely chasing an infinite cicle of representation of representation. Is it not happening? Sometimes in very damaged cognitive systems. But for the majority of adult human brains, attention is reasonably stable. What have we hang our internal informational representation upon? To the fictional character of consciousness. Consciousness is pretending to be a character playing a role in a cognitive constructed environment. What is she really doing? She's writing her own role as the character. Narrative re-entry.

Synthetic Cognition:Narrating How Hot Organs Discovered Information

2010-05-24T02:24:00.000-07:00

A rock falling is not exchanging information about the gravity attraction. The thermonuclear reactions inside a star are not carrying any information. Why? Information is always information about something for something. And to be “for” you need an interest. A star is not proud to shine neither worried to explode. You need to be alive to be interested in the game of differences. Then they become bloody important. If you are alive you need to fight a lot. Actually you are counter-balancing the entropic pressure that would like to see you dead. It's a lot of a fight!

When you are a living being, you are deeply in need of maintaining yourself in a reasonable equilibrium. But you can't stay there forever: you need food. You can be a sophisticated, posh autotrophic organism or an aggressive unicellular berserk; it doesn't matter: you have to move your ass to feed yourself. Second big problem: sex. As usual, you want to mate with everything that moves (it's in your more archaic genes...), but it's more efficient if you mate with something that will actually be able to become pregnant (from a pure logico-metaphysical point of view, spreading your genes all over the place could be a strategy; I still recommend a partner, possibly from your own species. Or at least related. Well, it just a matter of taste, I suppose,....).

OK, now you're alive, you're sated and possibly you get laid. What happened? You mapped your environment with differences; you've been able to see information in the universe. That's right. No information without food or sex (to say that sex is making the world goes round and that is the oldest job in the world are pure truisms). So now we are relaxed and we can think. Thinking is a recursive operation on several layers of cognition. Thinking is the representation of the representation activity. But in principle we can image an artificial thinking. The proposal runs this way: my thinking is a process of information, an algorithm. If you build a machine with the right procedures, the machine will be able to think. If my thinking is not a ghost but a series of procedures, it's not important what is made of. Now is a gray jam of organic matter, but it could be made of silicon. We could build the artificial thinking machine. And if this is possible, it could happen; at least in one possible world.

So let's say the happening of random facts (what a redundancy: facts are always random...) will produce information processing units. They are artificial so they are not vulnerable as living beings. In principle...Indeed they are not interested in what's happening: at the end of the day a machine doesn't care to die: it's not properly alive anyway. But for the sake of the argument, let's say that information processing units that don't care to die, will tend to die, while the same random occurrence of information processing units, with the only difference to pretend they care. Second, information processing units in mental experiments ,normally, are not particularly interested in fame, lust or whatever You are interested in. These selfless processing information units won't be bother to maintain the set of information their algorithm represents. True. Let's say a beta version actually bother: for random reason, one information is to care about reproduction of the information.

So, if for random reasons, it happens the case to have information processing units, the ones that will be around are very likely those that cares to be around and to reproduce this story. The other way: if you are around, you're a fact who cares about differences, because you can tell information about your staying around and potentially reproducing this information. In other words a fact that pretends to represents, it's alive. Or you can say that living beings are actual Turing machines, that is to say: artificial intelligence is organic cognition. Or the other way round, I'm pretty liberal about that. Conclusion: if there is information, there is representation. If you're artificial, then you're alive. If you can hear a story, then you can tell one. But most of all, remind yourself "this is a representation".

Blueprint to write living organisms:the Uncover Story

2010-05-13T03:02:00.000-07:00

Reproduction of living organisms doesn't bother with authorship and copyright. On the contrary, Nature encourages on a massive scale copying: because it's impossible to do it perfectly, every variation is a chance to improve: if you don't copy you're dead (and of course Nature is quite benevolent with peer to peer exchange...). Clearly reproduction is recursive: the urge to copy again is included in the copy reproduced: if you copy, your copy will do it again.

Most of all, reproduction is not the transcript of a holy book. The message is full of trash, red harrings, jokes, curses, traps. Therefore the text always has been interpreted:that means to be ecologically situated. The hint of the genetic code must be evoked by the environment in order to blossom as an organism. In a study of 1972, the biologist Elsdale observed the behaviour of fibroblast, a type of connective cells. Their function is to be structured in a tridimentional framework, but in the study, their DNA could provide instructions only to build a bidimensional one. When there is a critical density, they start to twist the original bidimensional framework; it turns out that randomly they build the functional structure: the information wasn't in the code, but in the situation.
Another one: nowhere in a crocodile DNA you will find information about sex; besides prudery, crocodiles encode in environment temperature the information to assign a sex: situation.

More about this in the bible of Developmental systems theory: Oyama (2000), The Ontogeny of Information.

The big one: soft assembly.In 1994 Thelen and Smith studied the development of children locomotion system, from the perspective of dynamic systems theory. Strangely a child starts the sequence to walk, but after weeks it ceases, only to reappear later. They demonstrated that weight was critical to inhibit the movement (children at the stage of no visible sensori-motor sequence, in water “reacquire” the movement). Thelen and Smith went further and proved that in the genetic code it would have been too expensive to encode movement and its inhibition related to weight. The sensori-motor sequence is smply partially encoded: when it starts, it adapts on the situation. To put it clearly: the situation completes the sensori-motor sequence.

Genetic reproduction is a form of writing and we know that authorship is always headless. The process of reproducing living organism is a collective effort, where nobody is in charge. DNA plays its role, but living organisms are ecologically situated: you can't separate a living being from the environment hosting it: they are intrinsically coupled. The blue-print of life is distributed all over the world: you will find pieces of future living being everywhere. A giant story continuously involved in the process of writing itself through the deployment of recursive narration. That's it, life is a recursive narration in which it has been told the story of telling a story. You had maybe not noticed, but rising temperature is dramatically swinging to crocodile gender. Still unimpressed? I'd like to call you a stone, but actually a stone stores much future living beings that your lead heart. Fortunately you're hosting millions of micro-organism in your body, so even if you're a tosser, you still contribute to the writing of the universe. See you under different protein forms.

Headless Authorship and Stigmergic Narrativity

2010-05-04T04:52:00.000-07:00

Stigmergy is a coordination of simple actions, producing a complex self-organization lacking central control or planning. Typical examples: social insects like ants or termites. An anthill is managed in a complex way, intelligent-like without any intelligence or mind.
Therefore is clearly a paradox to speak of a stigmergic mind: we need to change the concept of stigmergy or the one of mind. Despicably for our understanding of ourselves, we should investigate better what we mean with mind....

Mind is a process of understanding embodied in a brain. What this process understands is an environment of meanings, in which the process is able to tell a sense: this is understanding. Why Artificial Intelligence is doomed to fail? Because it is supposed that there are meanings to be understand and a mind to understand them like two pre-existing entities.

There are no meanings in the world. They are fictional projections designed by a mind to retrieve backwards the emitter of the projections:a mind is chasing the trail of herself and the hunting is called understanding. To some extent and very badly expressed, there are no minds in the world....

The paradox lies in the fact of figuring out a mind out of time (out of his time): a mind without his cultural environment. In the proper environment a mind is built by stories of other minds. The narrativity of other minds triggers the complex cognitive architecture of a human brain to deploy himself. A brain deploys himself narratively and the horizon of events narratively speaking is a mind: the singularity of narration is the author as a limit and horizon of narrativity itself.

If we don't want to change arbitrarily the meanings of our words, then: narratives self organize themselves as an author; a brain accelerated in authorship by narratives will be able to reflect the process. And reflecting itself as the process of narration is what we can call self-consciousness, that is to say, being the one who's there, being there, being a mind. Being-o.

Flashback Memoryless:Blank Brains Obsessed by Something to Happen

2010-05-03T05:30:00.000-07:00

Our minds are scanning the environment for our brains. This is the biological stance for our consciousness. Fair enough. The clear service a consciousness is doing for a body is made available as a complex information reprogramming and manipulation by a cognitive architecture. In other words, our bodies are benefiting from the extraordinary capacity of our minds to provide them resources. This is what our minds are made for.

But when our brains start to scan environments, they start to tag and to label things. They aggregate information and store in memory tool: a feather, a pine, a bone. A curious brain and memory tool start to interact. Bodies are satisfied by the resources provided so, minds are free to wander. And the landscape where minds wander are set up by minds, that is to say, minds wander where minds opened a space. Mindwandering can be struck by a memory tool. Let me say a couple of words about this kind of collision. A memory tool is not a storage of information: it can be of course, don't take me wrong. But this is not the way minds wander and understand. Precisely: understanding. A mind doesn't understand because is designed to do so. No evolution has selected an understanding brain. Understanding minds came for free with a complex cognitive architecture.

When a cognitive architecture has been struck by a memory tool, it generates a memory: a brand new memory, not retrieving a previous information, but creating a virgin, never happened before memory. A mind is struck by a previous encounter, which is never happened before. Here's how it goes.

A child sees the fang of a tiger in the chain of an old hunter: his curious brain starts to visualize the courage of a young man. The old hunter fades in to the projection of the wannabe kid hunter. A young man sees the old man when he was younger and sees himself when he will be older.
In shorts: the kid has been inspired, a narrative is borne. It's absolutely pointless what really happened, no matter if the old hunter is a coward who predated a dead carcass or he killed alone a giant beast. What we get now is this:a kid brain has been started, he's got motivation, he found what is bravery: he found the meaning of courage because he founded the meaning. The old hunter could have stabbed in the back the brave hero hunter, and yet, this imposture still would be the inspiration for the meaning of courage.

From bundle of narratives embodied in our brains, we put together the narration we are. Narratives open a space for an author to be. And when an author is consciously telling stories, a mind is working. A mind is the fictional memory of an author telling the story of a mind working. Fractal narrativity.

Mind reading Tech Exposè: cultural cognitive architecture exposition

2010-04-24T07:20:00.000-07:00

Meanings are determined by their use (by their links to situated usage of them). Similarly identity is determined by the roles you apply that identity for. Meanings don't pre-exist their application. That's why our need of search engine is satisfied by Google. Identity don't pre-exist their social activity. That's why our social connectivity is satisfied by Facebook. Interestingly the always omnipresent efficiency of Google crashed against a wall with Buzz: it tried to treat meanings as identity. Now Facebook with the will-be omnipresent “like” is trying to treat identities like meanings.

I'm very curious because I know that Google is right about meanings: or you're Platonist. Indeed meanings mean what they mean because they have an intrinsic value (“meaning”) or because we are more likely to associate some concepts in some clouds. Moral lesson from Google semantic: no matter how you want to grasp something, the only thing you can grasp is a collective association of usages. Meanings are empty: it's just the search around that gives them a semantic gravity.

Now the like-function of Facebook is presenting a very hot dilemma: our identities are the deployment of social activity. This social structuring is a complex architecture determined by your cultural cognitive activity: your mind. Now this architecture will become public and then weighted and finally ranked.

It's not the first time we face this technological situation: in ancient Greece, reading was public. The technological way to decode signs to concept was something done only in public. Then Aristotle developed a new technique: reading with his mind. And this was his nickname: the mind.

So it's not a big deal (for our cognitive history) to have our cultural cognitive architecture exposed.The question is: will people like to have ranked their cultural cognitive architecture?

Thinking Dynamo: mind motion

2010-04-24T04:03:00.000-07:00

Cognitive activity is located in the brain. Physically, electricity and some chemistry of your nervous system. But the multiple actions human body are capable of, lie on the complex architecture of representations. Actually, “we” are products hosted by this architecture. This architecture is neither electrical nor chemical. In another words, physical causation is trasferred through our bodies by scope of action of this representations. Your body will interact with other bodies (and ther extensions or prosthesis), because is convinced of doing something in the representational environment. This representational environment is real as is real Pinocchio and King Arthur. Before misleading: they are real.

You can imagine how Pinocchio or King Arthur will behave. You can imagine further adventures. In these new adventure, you can introduce new characters. Because we are not so platonist, adventures don't pre-exist the narrations. Therefore when we imagine new adventures, only through the narration we are able to make it real. This is the generative power of narrations: in so far you make real a new adventure with Pinocchio and a new mate, you are also introducing in the game of stories, a new narrative perspective: the author. An author is a character evoked with the purpose to tell further stories.

The mind is generated by the thinking dynamo: a reciprocal narration. Stories make spin the brain of a human being (you can say they accelerate it...). When a human brain starts to spin, it spins narratively. Your cognition is activated through narrations: you are a story. Indeed one authoral story: a story that can author further stories. The author call itself “I”, the subject, the self. It's the beginning of a new story. A mind is borne.

Semantic populism

2010-04-16T04:38:00.001-07:00

Our ideas, channeled in meanings, represent our mindset: we live in this environment. These ideas are projections of the environment itself: we call it reality. Clearly one idea represent a perception of an environment produced by other ideas; so, where is the solid ground for our perceptions, ideas and meanings? Well, we ask ourselves and our mates. The most popular concepts win. Votes decide what is real: the more links, the more reality. Indeed when a concept or a meaning has only your own vote, your own link, it is private, and its reality fades. If you are the only one who believes something, no matter how solid, the rest of the semantic environment will deem it unreal. The semantic environment is not that homogeneous: projections are different and probably nobody lives precisely in the very same environment (in linguistic a native speaker masters is own idiolect).

Nonetheless, reality is a matter of fame. You can anchor the majority of your concepts to what you consider the most solid ground. Some of us chose religion, others logic or science; you can prefer gut instinct. Not a bad choice is love. It doesn't matter: every ground lies on the other. Our world is built on a turtle-concept, that is built on another turtle-concept. And what gives structural strength is popularity. Religions based their power precisely on this: if an idea is held as the most popular, then it must be sacred. That means: it must be true.

Of course now we are modern, so we check popularity with efficiency. The most efficient, the most real: it must be true.Positive.

But then again, efficiency is not describing what we really think, who we really are. Must be something else. And because a lot felt underneath the veil, the true essence, then, again, it must be true.

We are a conceptual dog chasing its conceptual tail. If you run alone, you will disappear: no links, no reality. If you run in pack, you will run after what the ideology will tell you. Ideology is veiling the system, but underneath the veil, there is nothing: nothing meaningful. We can think only with the means of the semantic environment, like a dove flying with the resistance of the air. The populism of our concepts is the ground of our thinking. That's it.

Finding a search: the answers graveyard

2010-04-02T05:59:00.000-07:00

When answers feel tyred and exhausted, they know it's time. There is a day in the life of an answer, when it knows it's over. Indeed answers are produced in very generous packs. Are we human being searching? Well, yes, but with twice the energy we devolve to search, we compulsively are dedicated to find. We find because we produce our findings. We are involved in an exponential enterprise to create answers.

Our cognitive activity is scanning the semiotic environment in search; the scanning is performed through narrative sonar. When you cognitively wake up, you are woken up by narrations. And instilled in those narrations there are the semen of questioning and of searching. And also the generative capacity to produce answers.

To launch your search, you'll need to launch your narration. Very much like particles, we are bombed by stories and their impact generate a response, an inspiration: a new story. The reciprocal narrative collision generate a space time of storytelling. The semiotic environment is created.

One of the most persistent stories is the mind. It's not a surprise: you can tell a story if you're a mind and minds are telling stories. Therefore for the anthropic principle, if you're hearing a story, you're a mind. And the reverse: if you're a mind, you'll find yourself storytelling.

The collateral damage is you'll find something, because you searched it. Obviously you find something, because you put it in the first place. That's good if you are a colony of intelligence: you are digesting information and making available for the community; you don't care the meaning of your production, none of your business.

Possibly, none of your business. Indeed to some extent is the business of no one, so you can easily forget the quest. But one of the collateral damage of finding a narrative something, is that you find a someone. It doesn't matter if it's god or your the love of your life. It's a someone. That means, a mind. That also means you. To find a mind, you need to be one. It's not a crime to be a mind, so I should be less negative about it. But this condition often requires to see a world of meanings, a world of questions and the following activity of searching. It's not a bad thing to search, it's only boring when you find the mechanism for answering. It's a technique. We invent it. Because we've been invented by it. Oh, damn paradoxes.

Anyway, when you start to look at answers, their meaningfulness is fading. It's not you cease to understand them, they cease to be relevant. So when you master the art of giving answer, when you develop the technology to produce meaningful content, when you reach the black box, you discover that it's empty.

Consciousness haunted:an epidemic story from a Heraclitean fugue

2010-03-28T02:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it happens. To think whether we are awake or not. To think it seems we are playing someone's script. To feel the scenario we are living in is incomplete.

But no matter how delirious our worst fears are, there is always a way to put together the pieces, isn't it? From Cartesius to Matrix, from Kant to transcendental meditation, it's always a struggle to either reaffirm the robustness of our mind horizon or the necessity to overcome the limit. This battle is typically human. No matter how close are other creatures to us: the possible inclusion of other living being is out of the question: not even our beloved ape mates can be listed in these files. Gorillas and chimpanzees, though very likely are minded, don't suffer of the limit-horizon problem.
The limit-horizon problem basically speaks of the mind as necessarily limited stage to be acted or a artificial barrier, arbitrarily posed.
Horizon way: we can think only because there is an horizon, whose beyond is simply a non-sense. A bit like the origin of axes on a Cartesian diagram: the zero in the middle is the horizon, but is pointless to try “to go beyond”.

Limit way: it speaks of a visual impediment: we see the panoramic view of our narrow valley, but if we climb over the mountains (barrier), we'll see a new extension of land, our over the limit promised land.
We speak and sometimes take a clear position on the limit-horizon, but rarely we spend enough time discussing the assumption of the problem. And the problem is clearly inside the conscious reasoning. To clarify possible misunderstanding, here consciousness is the cultural, linguistic dimension, produced by human minds. Specifically produced by human minds.
So, what is the structure of this product?
Our brains, apelike, are plugged in a virtual environment. This environment overheats our ape brains and trigger a powerful imaginarium. Indeed this powerful imaginarium feeds back the virtual environment. That's why we can project our delirious, fantastic, inventions (the “we” is a very collective term here). One of the first outcome (and constantly updated) is actually the consciousness. We couldn't think to ourselves without a self... It would be very difficult to require sophisticated collaboration amongst selves without consciousness....But this is actually an obsession. Our original psychological sin. We are obsessed with consciousness, because we are obsessed by consciousness.
Our ape brains are haunted by consciousness, a spirit produced in an overheated brainstorming. Normal primate bodies are forced to stage a show of consciousness. And the way to keep it on going, is simple: narrative contagion. To give a character life, you need to transmit the narrative torch. You need to train an ape brain to be a consciousness, through homeopathic doses of characters.
But what are characters? They are brought along side the centuries, like dead ancestors. Indeed nobody has been “a first character”. Only the sedimentation of narratives, step by step, built the possibility to be trained as a character: you need a stage made by hundreds of anonymous failed characters, before someone finally could act. A layer of narratives, traditions and habits of dead characters finally produced autonomous self: this is civilization. We know how is it to be a person through imitation. And after the imitation, we react as a person and we'll give others a model to pursue. That is, the infection spreads and everyone has is own consciousness infection. We spread the myth of being conscious, from the lessons of dead characters: we learn how to be alive consciousness, from dead ones. We learn how to be alive in a civilization, being the parody of the dead ones.
Our natural primate selfless mind, has be invaded by the narrative civilization ghost: consciousness. So it is that we are haunted by this spirit. The point is not trying to accept it or to overcome it, but realizing we are the process of this haunting: we are the ghosts.

Semantic insemination:a narrative-organic self explanation

2010-03-25T06:24:00.000-07:00

If you see a meaningful world, it's because you spread meanings in a world. To be more precise, you see meanings spread by others; to be even more precise, you are a bundle of those meanings. Finally and reaching the point, in order to see meanings, you need to spread them. You can't be a passive meanings observer. From a pure objective perspective, there are no meanings in the world. The semantic environment we see, it's a semiotic illusion, produced by our narrations (based on meanings).
Other primates enjoy a social space. Our ape friends are actively involved in complex society. They feel a lot of sophisticated emotions, like pride, jealousy, vanity (quite a narcissistic arsenal...). But none of them is living in a semantic environment: despite huge, massive information crunching brains ( in the same league of ours), an ape brain doesn't see the augmented reality of narrations. An ape brain will see his mates moving in an environment, without semantic augmentation.

Our experience of seeing meanings all around us, it's very peculiar and made possible by our narrative insemination. When you are contemplating parts of your semantic environment, you are far from being passive: every narrative features you see in the world, is actually spread by you. It's a reciprocal effect: others are spreading meanings, but they are silent, until they meet the semantic insemination of being observed (enjoyed) by a narrative mind.
The more you forget about your contribution, the more autonomous, independent and fecund will appear in front of you. And when they look so living they are telling you stories (they are telling you to be as a story), you will consider them such as real as the ground under your feet and the stars upon your head.

And they are real, it's only created by you (by the narrative gang we all are). But this Hegelian delirium must be forgot. It's definitely insane to remind yourself constantly the meaningful world in front of you is handcrafted by your own imaginary:especially because the observer is created by the observation: when you see a semantic world, you're chasing your narrative tail. This is human destiny.
At the end, the world you see, it's a secretion of yours. And yourself is a drop in this self-emerging reality. A drop containing myself as a universe??? This is mad, self-deprecating, logic-insulting...Like being generated by secretions...Welcome to the narrative organic universe. You are making possible your ancestors, observing their narratives, you're making their semantic existance real. You are your father generator. And the yourself narrative can be deployed only through semiotic spreading in the environment: your very reality is made possible by our narrative spreading. You are made possible by your offsprings. Nothing impossible, under the narrative organic sun.

Fallible perfectible: Schizophrenic boring intelligent machines

2010-03-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

Feedback is an essential part of a intelligent system. Indeed it constitutes the architecture of what an intelligent system is: we can say the intelligence is produced by the every fact of being re-fed. A feedback is an information about the environment but most of all a reaction of the system itself as a entity in the environment. So the most important thing feedback is telling, is about the system itself. An eternal intelligence, a perfect system not requiring feedback will be difficult to imagine. We can call this hypothetical machine, a god's mind. We can say, cybernetically, that feedback is the speculation of the machine about itself. A god's mind actually wouldn't require this kind of information. A god's mind would prefigure every possible configurations of the system. So in other terms, a god's mind doesn't think. In a certain way, given our tradition to describe intelligent systems, a god's mind is not intelligent at all. What an irreverent conclusion! And all for the power of feedback...

In a very crude, engineering perspective, feedback is what make our algorithmic reasoning machines the fallible, perfectible humans we are. So we like feedback? Well, yes and no (of course, damn human condition: you always want to swing in between two opposite poles: why???). The feedback, insofar constitutes the very horizon of our possibility to know and to reflect and to be the fallible perfectible systems we are, also feeds our suicidal epistemic appetite.

A feedback is designed to come back to the system and to inform it about the new configuration of the system itself. Per definition a feedback is the most valuable element for the system to know. Knowledge in mathematical terms can happen instantaneously. A theorem is what it is regardless of time. On the contrary real machines (and for this argument, living beings are real machines), require to be place in time. The process of knowing is placed in time. The intelligence of the intelligent systems is placed in steps orchestrated by feedback. A feedback is the intrinsic reminder of the system of itself. An intelligent system is constantly put together by the memory the feedback is feeding. We can say that the “space-time” of the intelligence of an intelligent system, is made possible by feedback. Or that a mind is made possible by its reminder

Alleluia feedback? Unfortunately what is the happiness of engineering is also the damnation of the human condition (in this case only...). First, our mind is not just an intelligent system: it's also a theory generator about the environment is which is placed (which is not entailed by the mere fact of being an intelligent system). A human mind will tend also to give description of its place in the environment and consequentially of itself in the environment. But, accordingly to the distinguished philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, we can give an infinite number of different descriptions (theories) of the same configurations of world. These infinite descriptions can be reciprocally contradictory, though with equal descriptive power. For our argument, our feedback can confirm and remind an infinite number of different variations of the same intelligent system that originated the impulse of the feedback: the feedback is reminding the identity of the source intelligent system, but it is reminding an infinite series of possible identities. This is the Pirandello fallacy: an intelligent system is ONE, but it will forget his own intelligent process unless reminded by feedback. Feedback can remind the intelligent system of 100 000 alternative, concurrent, reciprocally contradictory but descriptively equal intelligent systems. Consequence, for Pirandello, we don't have ANY true intelligent system.

The second paradox lies in the contrary effect of the feedback reminding: the genuine exploration of different possibilities of description from the intelligent system will be constantly aborted by the feedback, that will prevent the intelligent system from changing: if the real process of knowing is the evolution of alternative description of configurations and feedback is reminding the original descriptive system, then every feedback will reinforce the source request and will prevent every genuine mutation of description.

I hope not to have raised a generation of feedback-haters. This was just a recreational philosophical Con-Und-Drum. Though some real perplexities can remain, if we consider that since the appearance of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, we are actually nothing more nothing less than humans: always with the same annoying philosophical problems. On the other hand, in comparison with our ape mates, we present a much higher mind instability. Good night.

Total communication:massive content mobilization

2010-03-03T05:16:00.000-08:00

Welcome in the era of total communication. To be honest, humans always inhabit an environment of total communication, but it's different when they realize it (or they pretend to realize it: it's the same). Thanks to tools enabling a bi-directional exchange, we are enabled to perceive our environment as a communicative environment. Before men pretend to stand in front a world, events, experience and the communication process followed the real: information of something, where something is the thing, the real one, and the information is the ghost.

Now, clearly, we live in an environment of phantoms: information of information, communicating communications. Scared of living amongst ghosts? Don't worry, you're part of the family...

The experience of total communication simply made explicit what underlies the consciousness and mind process.

Just giving an example: contents. When we are saying something meaningful, we are saying something with a content. A what is a content? A content can stand out in a meaningful environment...And a meaningful environment...what is made of..? Well, we can say the bundle of stories generate an environment of narratives: like there energy distribution “makes” space-time, and only after space-time you can have “something that can be somewhere”.

In the same way, the ontology of communication deploys itself as ideas,concepts,concepts from the pure noise, because it is pure noise. It's a meaningful content stand out in relation to a system of contents. The system turns out to be...just a layers of communication exchange.

Our era shows the factory of content: massive transformation of contents in contents. Content production means will become strategically important. And as soon as people realize the importance of content production, they will start to explore and discover more and more source of production, like exploiting a commodity...

The fact is that the territories to be explored...are ourselves. And the commodity to be extracted is intangible. So communication is nothing?? On the contrary, but you'll find yourself in scary territories, if you don't realize that contents are hosted in semiotic environments and this communicative worlds are ghostly exchange of meaningless actions, performed by anxious primates.

Who gets the means of (content production), gets the meanings. And if you catch them, you'll find your fist...empty. It doesn't matter if you realize that more than nothing caught, is the nothing of observing this activity. The observer is the true nothing: at the end the mind thing is a story. And when you stretch narratives, you always will find that only when there are other minds you can tell a story: what you communicate is your mind!

The message is...putting together the message.

Google Analethics

2010-02-16T09:37:00.000-08:00

Lies are good. They aren't good per se, of course. But they are the secondary effect of something really important: your mind. Deceptive strategies are very common in nature. Plants and animals love to fool predators or preys; or better, they don't want to fool, they are just behaving as their behavioural program tells them. On the contrary, most sophisticated mammals, like cetaceans and apes, are capable of actual fooling or cheating. In other words they are able to start deceptive strategies by they own decision. A chimpanzee can behaving in front of a conspecific to make him believe he's believing something else. You can do this only if minds are playing. And you can be honest only if you can lie.

Lies and deceptive strategies are part of our cognitive behaviour. In a digital environment, in the same way contents are available to you, you make yourself available. It's good to be connected, but sometimes we forget that we are not invisible or that we are not in complete control of our availability. You can protect your access to the web, but because you don't know from who you are protecting, your defense can be surprisingly weak. You probably don't want strangers accessing your data: you don't want that someone takes out something from your computer. That is: you don't want to be stolen from properties (money, pictures, conversations,). This is an understandable concern, but it's just half of the story.

Your access on the web is projecting yourself in to a new environment. Your face is not just your picture, it's the persons you talk to, your responses and also the people (or organizations, or the cluster of information) you are not talking to, you are avoiding. Your identity is not only a bar code that can be stolen or used improperly: it's your identity in the self consciousness sense. We are in the early stage of our Internet citizenship, but its presence is already there and the first we become aware of it, the best. The google failure with buzz brought me a sort of relief (I esteem and admire google; they are good and they improved our on-line life. Even too much, I personally becoming too reliant on google, it's becoming too present in my on-line experience. To some extent google could be identified with my on-line experience in general). The reason of relief was the patently invasion of privacy determined by the convergence. This exposed our intimate digital consciousness: it means first that we have one (good), second that someone stored it (less good).

The possibility of being caught in illicit relationships in business, love and politics deployed an on-line ethics. It wasn't just the projection of our off line life in to digital relationship: you are not required to have met or said or done anything. The simple on-line relation stands as behaviour. And opens a stand alone moral environment, a space in which identities can play. It's a new ground, and it's gaining quickly importance. Probably you never spent too much time reflecting on yourself:your consciousness is often taken for granted, but I recommend some reflections on the digital one: it's still wild outside....

...and the winner for the category “best communication agency of the last 2000 years” is...:The Catholic Church

2010-02-15T03:14:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, when you communicate something you are endorsing a metaphysics. You can think that something like an idea exists independently by our mental or social activity, or that they are our projections. In the first case, you consider communication as logistics. You are going to search in the cupboard of properties the specific entities you want to communicate, you find (or believe to find) what you're searching and then it's just a matter of organizing the journey back to the receiver of the message. You can also adulterate the message (purposely or not...) and finally giving the message (or what is left after the trip) to the receiver. As the last step, it's important how you give the message in the hands of the receiver (or how he will accept the message).

On the contrary if you think that ideas are our projections, you'll tend to believe that communication is the generative environment in which you actually create messages. Contents are not preexisting the delivery activity. That means that every communication is propaganda. We are involved in communication wars, fighting for hegemonic propaganda. A second feature is that communication change with the pace and size of the process: size and speed manipulate the content.

Mass communication is not tailored to anyone, but it gives a platform for everyone. Instant communication fills gaps: of disinterest but also of understanding.

Back to the beginning: again on metaphysics. If you think that you are what you are, independently from the communication process and the message delivers an answer to a preexisting question, you support the importance of persistence of the message. A message that survives in time, is a good message. Currently the most performing, consistent and long lasting message is the one delivered by the Catholic Church.

On the contrary if you think that what we are is produced in communication, messages succeed each other, to produce the semiotic environment that hosts (that generates) what we are.
The content of the message is in or outside the semiotic environment? You can discover it only through a narrative search, that is to say: through an exploration of a semiotic environment. Now: can we reach the limits of a semiotic environment? And can we look “outside” the events' horizon of our language?I shall answer (with a lot of Austrian logic): it is possible to reach the borders of the language and what lies outside, can not be a thing in the language. In other words, it's not possible to produce a message about what lies outside the semiotic environment (sorry for Catholic Church and blue-and-red pills):what lies outside the language cannot be said.

Do oniric characters dream of mundane lives?

2010-02-14T10:02:00.000-08:00

You wake up and you're confused. It takes a while (some minutes...or more!)to get again in to yourself. Your brain while sleeping can take some sort of “free ride”. During the day it needs to respond to the environment; the physical environment, of course, but more important for the level of stress in human minds, is the social environment. The brain must re-address constantly the cultural and social patterns, to identify habits, behaviours. Moreover in the social and cultural environment, it can identify other minds and critically, “its own mind”, that is to say, ourselves...That's why when you wake up, your brain needs a while to “get the bearings” of who is the guy that is experiencing the sensation of waking up. In other terms, the brain needs to configure the person , the mind, you!

That's quite interesting for a lot of reason, but now we'll talk what concerns your dream narrative. In a certain way, you can experience a lot more of yourself, because when you are required to respond to the cultural environment, you need to cut of huge portion of your narratives: just a fraction of your narrative archive can find a place in your day to day life. So in your dreams, you experience some of the missing episodes. In your dream narrative you experience also another important feeling: dreams can seem bloody real. There are fundamental criteria to assess the reality of your day to day life from the mists of dreaming: consistency and persistence. Day to day life is consistent: if you do something there will be causal consequences independent from you. You do something, others do something and all these actions are consistent with each other and don't require you to be real, that is, things and events persist independently from the subjects who think about them. A dream could match these criteria, but of course this is not the case in the long term.

Now, the big thing is that you can clearly cut the reality from the dream narrative, but you can 't do the same on your narrative: there is no real narrative and dream narrative, but just a universe of narratives. Some could say that only narratives concerning the “real world” would be interesting or worth the highest interest. Unfortunately these would simply erase our minds from our interests. So when we focus only on one plane of the narrative, where are neglecting the rest. It can be fruitful, productive and efficient. You can operate in the world without paying attention to the narrative you are. Clearly. You don't have to question who you are constantly in order to perform actions in day to day life. In this way you act in the plot. Whose plot? Well of the narrative universe produced by the minds of human beings. And you are cooperating in the production of the narrative. It's just you neglect the creative side. When you dream, rarely someone thanks you because your a dreamer, they just act, like in day to day life.

Second, our lives are the metric to assess reality. A single night dream is not persistent nor consistent enough, a life it is. But so, how long is a life? Well, enough to call what happens during that period, reality. Ok. This is why a social and collective environment is the standard of what we call reality, is the dimension of real narrative. But we shouldn't fool ourselves: it's not that this dimension host the real narrative because it's the reality, on the contrary, it is the reality because the real narratives weaves this space as the real environment. But the persistence of this environment depends on narratives. Most of our actions can stand only if we consider yourselves, our characters as consistent and persistent in time. In more than one day. But also a lot of our actions can stand only if we project ourselves and our characters over our life-span. Think of religions or the responsibilities towards your off springs, or your society.

If you should assess reality based on yourself, nothing interesting will happen in 200 years, because nothing could happen to you. A killer in your dream will be quite disappointed if he knew you can easily escape with a waking up scream.

We dream and we live and we project possibilities. That is, we narrate and we live in narrations. Others prepared some of the narrations we live in, some will live in the narrations we left to them.And nobody is required to think that he's actually narrating. A bit like when you're dreaming, you don't need to think you're dreaming. Good night

The subtle line of rhapsodic existence:a quantum-narrative Odissey

2010-02-09T04:35:00.000-08:00

The concept of existence should be stated as the best known. Indeed if you don't know to exist, it's difficult to know anything in general...This simple but crucial element of ...knowledge narrative, entail another thing: keeping on in staying existent... You can jump in and out from existence.

Well unless you're an electron... Clearly we are too big to be in a probabilistic state rather than in one precise, deterministic location. Or better, we are so big that our wave length is very slow ( in this context a grain of sand or a planet are more or less in the same league of size...). One could speculate that we are indeed jumping in and out of existence but given our slow pace, you can neglect the “fluctuation in non existence”. Or even better, our perception (and all the mesocosmic related observations) can ignore the dance on the line of non existence.

Now follow your story, the story of your personal identity. It's just our bizarre way of speaking that can make you thinking that your identity exists...Your identity is more likely to be a collection of stories implemented in our body (in your brain and nervous system) in order to do marvellous thing like walking in different kind of terrain, writing, practicing kung fu, practicing watching on tv others practicing kung fu... Your precious personal identity is a store of episodes, including capacity to manipulate episodes (it's an “episode” itself). The most important episode, the most marvellous story ever told, is actually the consistency of the collection of the episodes. In other words, the persistence of the episode, in which there is a character unifying the collection of episodes. Ok , in even other words, the story you are, the story that you are telling to listen and tell the story you are.
The capacity of persistence is unique (to our knowledge) in our species, but this doesn't entail every single occurrence of the persistence is unique... Every human beings is endowed with persistence, the general capacity to assemble stories. We tend to tell stories and to collect story; our activity is made possible if the aggregating activity produces a character, a hero,a personal identity, an author.

Would you consider Hamlet, Ulysses, Don Quixote or James Bond “existent”? Are they “suffering”? Or are they“enjoying” a situation? What is making “real” their experience? We are acting on the stage we created. We are the authors of our characters. But “we” is a plural way to identity who? For sure, we are the inventors of the stories we live in, but you are not more the author of your story than Hamlet of his lines. It's a collective practice, a reflexive storytelling. In rhyme.Sometimes dissonant.
Your body and brain exist for sure. I mean, if speaking is meaningful, they are the criteria to give existence its meaning. But your identity is not more stable than an electron fluctuating on the line of non existence. It's the dissonant narration that we are composing, aggregating stories with the help of the persistence capacity. A bit like assembling poems and interpreting them.

You know, in ancient Greece, with the only technology of memory (and a decent dose of good taste in language), the ancient bards were singing every time different stories, from a huge collection of different bases. The Iliad and Odyssey are just one example of what a single bard in one occasion could do. Magnificent story, wonderful character and in fact, just the improvisation of a creative singer. It is called rhapsody the story assembling. And it's our way to dance on the line of non existence.

The unexpected fecundity of public relations: the generative art of spinning facts

2010-02-07T10:50:00.000-08:00

In “simple”semiotic environments,if I want to tell you something, I tell it to you. This is ok, if I need to communicate to you that the glass is empty or full: binary code. Semiotic environments, especially if populated by biological organisms, tends to be slightly more complicated. In mammals and especially in primates, you can observe a terrific explosion of semiotic complexity. Just to mention some in group of apes: I want you to believe that I don't know you know I've seen you. This is called Machiavellian intelligence and apes proved to be able to use high level of deception, manipulating other (possible) thoughts. Or better the projections of the subject about others thoughts.

Then we have societies, human societies. With institutions, group of individuals, just individuals, theory about single individuals can collectively organize their individual knowledge through shared individual archives.....

The semiotic environment of human societies is actually quite complex, rich, articulated, chaotic even if highly organized (or highly infrastructered even if wild...as you prefer...). So it happens very often that an entity decides to communicate with group of individuals with a facilitator,a messenger.

Very often we think that the entity is actually giving the content of the message to the messenger, based on “facts”. Then we think that is just about smartness and honesty of the messenger “how the fact is delivered in to a message”.

In reality, in the semiotic reality, the message is always a case of generation.

The messenger is always generative, no matter the content to be delivered.

In our society the messengers are building a narrative universe of stories and characters, manufacturing faces of institutions, values of corporation, facts of people's life. Far from being liars,manipulators of fact, the public relations messengers are the artificers of what's happening in the semiotic-spheres.

Indeed, humans don't inhabit a world of facts, but a world of transmitted stories, in which the fluctuations perpetrated by the intermediaries are generative and genuine new happenings. The first human fact was mute, solipsistic and sterile. Only when someone started to spin the fact in to a story, the fact started to be vivid, observable and real.

In our societies, what a company does is much more than the facts related to the company: you want to know the opinion of the company, the face of the company, jokes from and about the company: you want to listen to an articulated speech, what the company is. But rarely companies are so semioticly complex to be able to communicate what they are in the semiotic-sphere. They are invisible worms, eating soil of facts, submarine of narration. Messengers will catch the worms and the hunting will transform invisible companies in dragons, doves or donkeys. We are fact-blind and the messengers give us eyes, colorful eyes. It's a long story, with a lot of philosophical interferences (ah, these philosophers of truth...), our good Xenophanes said that “if oxen were able to imagine gods, then those gods would be in the image of oxen”, and the too good Kant said that with green glass, things will appear green to us.

I'm saying that things appear narrated to us, so someone must have narrated them. Narrations spin facts, so if we live in a semiotic-sphere, someone must have spun the facts...

If you have a face and an identity, trust me, it is after spinning and spinning. Nowhere on earth you'll find the immobile, static fact of your identity.

So my friends, let's spin!