What consciousness is is the big problem that neuroscience faces in recent years, and it will probably be the feat of the century. Two modes of investigation gave hope for a solution within reach. The first is the observation of brain activity live with tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography and new electroencephalography techniques applied to non-pathological subjects in everyday situations (work, reading, listening to music …). The other is the study of the brain at the molecular level, that is, seen through the exchange of electrochemical messages between the synaptic contacts of neurons, up to the extreme limit, where perhaps quantum mechanics comes into play.
The third way
Both attacks on the problem are interesting, but that they were successful was an illusion. We advance in great strides but the goal moves away to the same extent, always revealing new complexities. Vittorino Andreoli, illustrious psychiatrist, in the book “The origin of conscience” (280 pages, € 16.50), which inaugurates the new series of Solferino editions “The sciences of man”, deals with the theme of conscience from an observation point phenomenological and, so to speak, autobiographical (in the sense that Andreoli observes and describes himself as an experimental subject-object). The result of this “third way” (to quote an ancient essay by the same author) is a “theory of consciousness” based on its “correlates”, a word that, roughly stated, indicates the contents of consciousness (sensations, perception of environment and time, conscious and unconscious experiences, dreams, ability to imagine, spiritual suggestions and so on).
And Cambridge alla Nasa
After graduating in Medicine at the University of Padua and before moving to clinical psychiatry, Vittorino Andreoli devoted ten years to laboratory research. It was the time when brain chemistry began to be explored at the molecular level. Amphetamines and the neurotransmitter serotonin were the molecules that attracted Andreoli, and they reciprocated his attention by granting him discoveries of considerable scientific importance, pursued by taking his doctorate in pharmacology at the University of Milan and then moving to Cambridge in England, to Harvard in the United States and also, for a short time, in a NASA laboratory, when in Alamogordo, New Mexico, it was planned to test the journey to the moon on chimpanzees-astronauts.
Synthetic look
The molecular study of brain mechanisms is fundamental, but it is typical of the reductionist research method, which explores extremely sectorial aspects while neglecting a more panoramic view of the factors in action. Andreoli recovered his synthetic gaze on the whole man and not only on neurons and molecules by directing the Department of Psychiatry of the Public Health Services of Verona until 1999. Since then he has been a freelance with a wide range of interests and a successful writer.
Open ending
But this is a strange, singular book, a “hapax” of publishing. It has no opening words and no conclusion. It does not even have a real index: only the list of themes treated in short chapters that follow one another not in a systematic way but rather by mental associations or determined by extemporaneous experiences. The system emerges as a closed book, when the pieces go together, and then even the spaces of the mosaic that have remained empty acquire meaning, indeed they become the most significant because they suggest research itineraries yet to be explored. In short, “The origin of consciousness” is a “diary” of observations on the subject, and therefore draws a theory in progress. Where “theory” must not make us think of abstract schemes. As a viaticum, the book opens on a sentence by the philosopher Dario Antiseri, who in turn took it from the famous Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin: “Nothing is more concrete than a good theory”.
At the base is memory
Andreoli starts from the necessary but not sufficient data for a conscience to develop: memory. There are countless levels of memory, from the most basic experimentally documented in Aplysia californica, the sea snail studied by Eric Kandel (who obtained the Nobel Prize), to the complex and stratified human memory. Consciousness begins with the ignition of attention, which then evolves into vigilance, concentration, evaluation, acceptance, rejection, choice, dialectic between reason and emotion, drives and ethics, etc. Andreoli goes so far as to list at least 25 levels of self-consciousness and one’s own “shadow” in the analytic (Jungian) sense of the word. All this in a solidly Darwinian framework: consciousness in its various manifestations is seen as an adaptive advantage rewarded by evolution. Ethology and anthropology, two “Darwinian” sciences, support Andreoli in an exercise of comparison between disciplines.
Christof Koch’s “Feeling alive”
I hope that I managed to communicate that “The origin of consciousness” is a book that does not end but asks to be continued, by the author but also by the reader, each in search of their own “correlates”.
It is interesting to note how current the topic of research on consciousness is also in the light of the developments of Artificial Intelligence. “Feeling alive” by Christof Koch, neuroscientist and former collaborator of the Nobel Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the DNA double helix), for 27 years professor at Caltech and now scientific director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has just come out of Raffaello Cortina of Seattle. For Christof Koch “feeling alive” is the zero degree of consciousness. Starting from this “trade union minin” Koch develops the Integrated Information Theory, through which he identifies the properties of the “correlates” already encountered in Andreoli’s text. Koch and Andreoli have various points of convergence. One concerns the belief that consciousness can never become a prerogative of machines, not even the most “intelligent”. Because machines have no corporeality, and they do not exist in the time dimension as they memorize (much better than us) but do not remember.
Machines that decide
This does not prevent, Andreoli points out, that man delegates certain decisions to machines, and gives the “historic” example of responsibility in maneuvering an aircraft in extreme emergency: leaving the decisions to pilots or to autopilot? “All the airlines – recalls Andreoli – have chosen to activate the decision that is linked to the reading of big data and not to that of the captain, who is inevitably caught up in emotions, a sense of responsibility, fear not only of the death of passengers but of one’s own “.
Ethics according to Patricia Churchland
Here we are faced with the emergence of ethics from conscience, with the infinite nuances that distinguish moral casuistry. Patricia Churchland, a neuro-philosopher, emeritus of the University of California at San Diego, talks about it in a fascinating way in “Conscience. The origins of moral intuition ”(Ponte alle Grazie, 277 pages, 20 euros). Does the “inner voice” that dictates morality refer to second degree correlates, that is, to meta-correlates? Is there an ethical a-priori? On this issue Andreoli has a clear opinion, anchored to society: “I have never believed in a morality ‘within us’ in the manner of Kant, but always in learned rules that end up becoming fixed. And not in terms of taste or liking, but of prohibitions and punishments “.