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Enrico Bignetti

Parma University, Italy

Presentation Title:

We live like in a virtual game

Abstract

 The human cognitive model “The Bignetti Model” (TBM), focus the attention on two critical aspects of our life:

1)    Sensory organs are imaginative, unprecise and limited thus giving us an unreal representation of the world (see for instance the evidence of “Qualia”).
2)    In addition, most of the people interviewed believe in Free Will (FW) existence and are certain their mind may guide cognition and behaviour at will; conversely, many evidences deny FW existence. According to TBM, FW is an illusion of the mind that is produced by a genetic program instantiated in it. This program foresees also the presence of a physiological dual state of the mind: the Unconscious mind (UM) (with a biochemical/biophysical language) and the Conscious Mind (CM) (with a spoken language) (please note that the way they reciprocally translate their information is inexplicable to us, i.e. “The Hard Question of Consciousness”). By means of this program, we live as in a virtual game in which UM and CM respectively play the roles of the Avatar and of the Player; they together react against the external stimuli thus lowering the Gibbs free energy level of the perturbed mind.

In summary, the representation we make of our life, is unreal, i.e. a subjective, 1st-person perspective. Though, our intelligence that behaves like a Virtual Intelligence (VI) in that context, is ensuring us the necessary survival and resilience against the perturbing stimuli. In the absence of FW, cognitive VI’s activity cannot exhibit a predictive mind; though, it carries out proactive activities compatible with “Autopoiesis” (in accordance with the theory of Maturana and Varela,1980). To this aim, VI is sustained by a thermodynamically-driven computational mechanism, based on the “Reinforcement Learning”, typical of the virtual games.

Among those activities, VI is committed to improve scientific and technological tools, the most promising of which is Artificial Intelligence (AI); however, on the one hand, we know that UM and CM cooperate in problem solving and data collecting; while, on the other hand, we don’t know how they reciprocally translate their languages in this cooperation (“The Hard Question of Consciousness”). So, VI cannot artificially reproduce UM and CM in AI; AI is a product elaborated by VI and not a clone of it. Then, we should not expect that AI-possessing robot, might exhibit Autopoiesis as it would occur in living systems. 

Biography

Enrico Bignetti 1949) born in Brescia, Italy. 1974) graduated Doctor in Veterinary Medicine at the University of Parma, Italy. 1977) Professor of Physiology at the University of Parma. 1985) Professor of Clinical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Parma. 1987-1998) Director of Veterinary Biochemistry Institute. 2017) retired. Main research topics: 1) vision, olfaction and taste (Guanosine-triphosphate is directly involved in light-excitation of photoreceptors; bell-pepper Odorant-binding protein from nasal mucosa was purified and characterized; the psycho-active effect of Glutamate (Umami taste) was investigated); 2)) biosensor productions and the study of the psycho-active effects of food; 3) Cognition (a new human cognitive model “The Bignetti Model”, based on the role of free-will illusion in cognition was proposed). Work done abroad: Polytechnic of Zurich. University of Oregon, Yale University, Florida State University. Speaker at intl. congresses: Palermo, Italy; Jerusalem, Israel; Agra, India. (Rome, Italy, and New York, USA, will be postponed for Covid19). The last Publication: Bignetti E. (2021) The Limits of Mind and “The Bignetti Model”. New Horizons in Education and Social Studies. Chapter 8, Vol. 9, DOI: 10.9734/bpi/nhess/v9/7239D). Extra-academic activity: Conceptual Artist, Hatha Yoga Teacher and expert of oriental philosophies.