Riccardo Manzotti

My main interest is the understanding the nature of consciousness. To do so, I believe that we need to change our fundamental categories. The road I envisage passes through the technological land of robotics as well as the misty shadows of theoretical philosophical analysis. We hope I won't get lost along the journey. There is no more important quest than consciousness. For the conscious mind is the point of the universe where knowledge and being are one and the same.

In order to to understand consciousness, we need to understand reality. To understand reality we need two steps: hypotheses and empirical verifications. The scientific tradition narrowed the field of empirical evidence at only the objective facts. In order to understand what consciousness is, a new ontological standpoint is needed and, in order to verify such ontological premises a new kind of experiments must be envisaged.

To verify a theory of consciousness, empirical experiments are needed. Two possibilities are feasible. The first one is interfering with the conscious subjective experience of human beings. To design an experiment in which it is possible to predict and describe in advance a change in content in a subject's experience. The second option is to build an artificial being with a structure that can be related with the development of a true subject. This second approach is followed by implementing an architecture coherent with the new ontology.

Works involving Riccardo Manzotti

Situated Aesthetics

Art Beyond the Skin
(Edited by)

This book focuses on externalist approaches to art. It is the first fruit of a workshop held in Milan in September 2009, where leading scholars in the emerging field of psychology of art compared their different approaches using a neutral language and discussing freely their goals.

Artificial Consciousness

(Edited by)

The book is interdisciplinary and focuses on the topic of artificial consciousness: from neuroscience to artificial intelligence, from bioengineering to robotics.

Works involving Riccardo Manzotti

Situated Aesthetics

Artificial Consciousness

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