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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.