Riccardo Manzotti's Home Page 
IULM University, Milan, Italy

Email: riccardo.manzotti@iulm.it
My University Web Page

CV - Publications & Online Papers  - Events and Talks - Links 

Science may set limits to knowledge,
but should not set limits to imagination.
Bertrand Russell

More favourite quotations here

I am assistant professor of Psychology at the IULM University (Milan).

This year (2009/2010), I teach "Neuroscienze della cognizione e della percezione" at the University of Genova and "Psicologia della Percezione Artistica" at the IULM University..

Right now, I am also involved in the starting up of a new exciting international journal on philosophy of Mind, AI, robotics, cognitive science: The Journal of Machine Consciousness.

In 2009, I chaired an ESF Exploratory Workhop on Neuroesthetics.

On the scientific side, I published some new papers and chapters on the externalist view of consciousness I am developing since 2001.

During 2008, among the other things, I attended to a Workshop on Machine Consciousness at Nokia; I've been invited to give a talk at the Winter APA Meeting in Philadelphia. In Italy I had the pleasure to participate to the Infinita...mente Festival in Verona.

My new Italian book (2008), co-authored with Vincenzo Tagliasco, has just been published: "L'esperienza. Perché i neuroni non spiegano tutto" (The experience. Why neurons do not explain everything). As you can imagine, we look for an explanation of consciousness which goes beyond the sometime limited scope of neuroscience.

During 2007, I co-chaired a symposium on the relation between consciousness and artificial intelligence at the AAAI Fall Symposia, Washington DC. Together with Antonio Chella, I am one of the editors of the book Artificial Consciousness (Imprint Academic, 2007).

In 2006, I published two papers on Journal of Consciousness Studies and on Mind and Matter. They both presents a new view on consciousness from two slightly different perspectives.

In 2005 I coorganized the International Workshop on Artificial Consciousness held in Agrigento. In the same year, I've been co-editor of a special Networks issue on consciousness. I also took part to the TSC2005 Copenhagen where a special special plenary session was devoted to externalism (Ted Honderich, Francois Tonneau and myself were the key speaker). If you want to know more click here.

Here you can find an interview of mine on the website of the Hybrid organization.

In 2007/2008 I teached a course on Psychology of Art. If you are one of my students or you are interested to the topic, click here and you will find some material. For Psychology and Media, click here.

Finally, I wrote a short cartoon explaining my standpoint on consciousness. You can download it, here.

If you want to see a few pictures of mine, as well as a few personal details you can click here.

Forthcoming events (2010)

• 31 January -  "La coscienza oltre i neuroni, l’approccio esternista". Infinitamente, Festival della Scienza di Verona.

• 19 February - “La creazione della memoria”, Palazzo Ducale, Sala Munizioniere, Genova

• 13-18 April - "The spread mind: is phenomenal experience identical with physical processes larger than those taking place inside the nervous system? A defense of process phenomenal externalism". Conference "Towards a Science of Consciousness", University of Arizona, Tucson

• 14-15 May - "Externalism and panpsychism: towards the spread mind" at the Workshop "The Mental as Fundamental – Panpsychism and the Hard Problem of Consciousness", Department of Philosophy / University of Wien.

• 17-18 May,  "Does the feeling of being alive entail a special feeling or rather a special object? An externalist perspective on the problem" at the Workshop "Feelings of Being Alive", Akademie Der Wissenschaften, Berlin

My main interest is understanding the nature of consciousness. I believe that to understand consciousness we need to change our fundamental categories. The road we had taken is passing through the technological land of robotics as well as the misty shadows of theoretical philosophical analysis. We hope we will not get lost along the journey. I believe that there is no more important quest than this one, for mind is the point of the universe where knowledge and being are 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.

-    MP3 format (audio only, good for IPods)

-    M4P format (video and audio, relatively small, good for new IPods, 124 Mb)

-    MPG format (video, rather big file, PCs and everyone else, 335 Mb)

Per saperne di più clicca qui.

- To know more click here
- A review

Villamira M, Manzotti R, Comunicazione e sistemi. Milano, Franco Angeli, 2004.

Questo volume ha per oggetto i sistemi e le interazioni tra sistemi nell'ottica delle scienze della complessità e affronta alcuni dei principali argomenti che, in area psicologica, rappresentano le punte avanzate della ricerca in merito ai temi richiamati nel titolo. Oltre che agli studenti e agli studiosi di discipline psicologiche, il presente volume si rivolge a tutte le persone di buona cultura che desiderano un aggiornamento sui temi della comunicazione e della complessità.

Per saperne di più clicca qui.

Manzotti R., Tagliasco V. Coscienza e realtà. Bologna, Il Mulino, 2001.

Come può il nostro cervello, un oggetto fisico, rappresentare il mondo esterno? Per fornire una risposta adeguata è necessario riconsiderare le categorie fondamentali con le quali interpretiamo la realtà. La comprensione della coscienza non è semplicemente qualcosa da aggiungere a quanto già conosciamo, ma qualcosa che richiede la revisione dei fondamenti della nostra concezione del mondo. La coscienza è l'estrema frontiera, la chiave di volta inevitabile, in cui l'intreccio fra il nostro io e la realtà che ci circonda trova soluzione.

- Per saperne di più clicca qui.
- Per scaricare il primo capitolo clicca qui. (To download the first chapter, click here)

Manzotti R. Intentional Robots. Genova, Lira-lab, 2000

My PhD thesis. In this thesis I develop a theory of the mind, which is called the Theory of The Enlarged Mind (TEM for short). Such a theory suggests to consider intentionality as the foundation of reality and to derive from it all other aspects (existence, representation, and being in relation with). The elementary principle of such a theory is called onphene.

- For a short introduction on TEM, click here.
- To download the thesis, click here