Memoria, coscienza e plasticità sinaptica. Esplorazioni epistemologiche

Abstract

Keeping as theoretical horizon reference the new paradigm of complexity, the present work analyses the results of inter-disciplinary  research about the emergence of mind in the field of neurobiology, in order to go beyond  the molecular biology of Kandel’s cognitive activities (which anyway is still anchored to a form of methodological reductionism) and computationalism. Thanks to such studies we can explain how, within science, complex phenomena as learning and memory cannot be explained by recurring to solely reductionist technologies or procedures. The main idea of this article is that conscience and memory are highly complex processes depending on particular arrangements of matter, even if they are not reducible to it. These considerations allow us to set the bases for the elaboration of a theory of self-organization able to go beyond the Cartesian hiatus between an immaterial mind which coordinates and a physical body which executes. Here we can recognize with certainty that particular intertwining of complexity, intentionality and emergence which characterizes the natural forms of the cognitive activity in every living system.