Che cos’è la coscienza: dialogo con Giorgio Vallortigara

Breaking away from the most common models in neuroscience and philosophy of mind today, Giorgio Vallortigara, professor of Neuroscience and Animal Cognition at the University of Trento, advances the original thesis that basic forms of cognitive activity do not require large brains, and that the neurological surplus observed in some animals, including humans, serves memory stores and not thought processes or consciousness. The most plausible substrate for the emergence of the latter is instead to be found in an essential characteristic of cells: the ability to feel. This ability would have first manifested itself when, with the acquisition of voluntary movement, elementary organisms felt the need to distinguish between the stimulation produced by their own activity and that provided by the external world, the other. The existence of a lowest common denominator between us and the humblest life forms distances us once again from the Cartesian concept of the animal-machine – and raises ethical questions that we will no longer be able to avoid.