Conference "The Brain-Mind Pair Does Not Take Pictures"

Paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer, who starts by recognizing the Kantian root, we could begin this journey by stating that if “the world is a representation of the subject” then the work of art only depicts the essential traits of the external world so that at the level of the brain-mind duo it is the physiological mechanisms of the internal world of the observer that carry out the rest of the process of “generation and dynamic reconstruction of the image.”

Conversely, on the plate, or on the card of that machine which is the digital camera, the “imprint” of the external world is “printed” through a reprocessing “without an attribution of meaning.”

The construction of a digital image in a modern camera or smartphone is a sophisticated process of “transduction and computational processing.”

However, it is not a simple "recording" of light, but a more articulated and complex process of algorithmic reconstruction that takes place in a fraction of a second.

In summary, the mechanism is governed by a signal pipeline composed of many stages that will be explained in detail in the second lecture to be given by Dr. Prof. Roberto Favero.

Dr. Prof. Renzo Barbazza in the first lecture will focus on the mechanism of reprocessing of the brain component of the duo: the system that, unlike the artificial one of the digital camera, is plastic.

The "tiles," the micro-inter-neuronal networks, are not static; they are subject to Long-Term Potentiation (LTP). Every time an image is recalled, the inter-synaptic network is re-traversed again, and through this same act, it is slightly modified: “reconsolidation of memory.”

The mechanism of regeneration of the mind component of the duo: is the emerging property of the "mind" function.

The mind does not possess the image; it “becomes the image.”

Since the mind includes variables such as selective attention, autobiographical memory, and expectations, the result of the "reconstruction" is influenced by the context in which it occurs.

It is never the same act, as the "observing subject" has changed between one observation and another.

The brain-mind duo — once it has passed the initial stage of common sensory transduction of the machine — makes an “ontological leap.” The mind does not map; it “resonates.” It does not seek the identity of point with point, but searches for “the resonance between the present activation and the previous mnemonic configurations.”

Perception is not a mere process of calculating or comparing neural networks with each other, but a process of “hermeneutic reconstruction” based on the resonance of neuronal activation waves.

The final thesis is that while that machine which is the camera is doomed to physically repeat the same image on its memory card, the human mind is free to “regenerate the idea” of the image every time it observes it.

“The hardware-software duo of the camera generates data; the brain-mind duo constructs meaning.”

For this reason, the act of seeing — and particularly the aesthetic enjoyment of a painting — “is never a recording, but a resonance: a dialogue in which the past and memory and the present, that is vision, interfere to generate a form that exists only in our consciousness, and not on the chip of a processor.”

Essentially, we would like to provocatively launch a powerful message on the scientific-philosophical plane which is as follows: the camera is "doomed to generate by repeating within a rigorously defined research space framed by mathematical frameworks, programming languages, hardware and compilers designed by humans"; the mind of the duo "is free to “create” and regenerate new unprecedented ontological paradigms based on the resonance of wave functions."

The conference is free entry.