Mind Terraforming

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

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.