Monday, 27 February 2012

Exploring the Darkness of your Substantial Consciousness: the Pinocchio Chronicles

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, 14 February 2012

The intellect of Funes


density is intensity

Funes is a character in a Borges novel: his memory so amazing, he can't simply live. He remembers every single detail of every single configuration of the world. Tononi, an important collegue of neurologist Edelman, claims brain thinks because it's complicated. The brain reached a critical level of complexity in self organization of the information control that this fact alone produces thinking.
Zen Buddhism says that the super-presence of self is in reality an absence.

Three way to say the same. Precedence to fiction. Why Funes is our paradigm of intellect? Because our closest mates, brother apes, are endowed with more or less the same cognitive architecture. They feel, they love, they interact, but they don't “think”. They have a sense of self but they don't have a consciousness. They don't construct a narrative conglomerate of themselves. They don't evoke the fictional bunch who will start to pretend to be aware of being there. We present in front of ourselves the representation of being there. In other words our consciousness is a fictional representation: but don't be fooled. The representation is not in the content but in the container. Nothing in the seting but the horizon itself. Reality is fictional not for the twistable aspects of perception, the self conscious perceiver is the fictionality. So when we say that Funes is unable to think for excess of representation, this is a paradox.

But it's a story, so we can believe that we are able to think because we forget something in the perfection of representation. First, details. Second that if it is represented, it doesn't mean that the representative faculty is someone. Density of representation leads to the conclusion of intensity of consciousness. Fictional! (Which is not false or wrong!) So reality is produced by the illusionary conglomerate of cognitive density. Tononi says that if you put enough self organization of information exchange, simply the recursive operation of self monitoring such information cascade will lead to self consciousness. Funes is super self conscious.

But Funes is sick. He's not able to live, though nothing escapes his merciless attention for information control. Can we live in absolute information control? Borges says no, Tononi is less precise in making this kind of distinctions. It's not unrealistic to claim that a cognitive machine exercising information control over its own complexity must apply a limit: otherwise the recursivity will produce the loop we hear in sound amplification. When the microphone starts to amplify its own augmentation of the sound, the outcome is a noisy and painful whistle. Limits of technology and divine recall to stay in the limit of your existence. Human beings are mortal: don't try to over amplify your limits. Why? Funes.
Funes is the noisy and painful amplification of self augmentation. Don't.

But if we are awareness of being there and this is control over the complexity of self organization, then we should realize we are the fictionality of our own self augmentation. We are taking out a consciousness from the brain and this is the hallucination of the brain self, in search of self organization. Funes is density, let's fade then from sickness of presence. So who is really the one, who is presenting to himself his own representation? The cognitive conglomerate of self organization. The fictional mind. Less details, don't funes me. A brain fools himself with a story and listening to his own story project a narrator. Who's the narrator? Take out details, like masks from the stream of narrations. Beyond the last mask there's someone who's not a who. My saying is either not asserting nor denying. The unkept secret is not a secret. Me is not the I. You are me and I'm not the Walrus. Tell me the story and I'll teach you the differences. Learning to be aware of being there is masking the absence with the presence. Fluctuations of void makes being matter. I'm not a void, though I'm emptiness. Honestly, it's simple.