Thank you. I am particularly happy to introduce Federico Faggin today. I was wondering what title to give him; as great as he is, I just call him by his first and last name. He has four or five degrees, five doctorates — we even gave him one ourselves — so I just call him by name. I remember when, as we were saying earlier, in 2017 a congress, Mind Science, was organized by Bruno Neri, who is here, by Angelo Gemignani, who is over there, and by Pierluigi Barrotta. We were having dinner, we were seated next to each other, and he introduced me in a very fascinating way to a whole series of themes that I think will be taken up again in today's lecture. And we couldn't — Bruno Neri thanked me — we couldn't not give ourselves one of our best lecture halls, both because of the lofty nature of the themes and because he comes to develop and propose his solution to what began here in Pisa.
Because what began here in Pisa — because as we discussed that evening, the themes Faggin will address are, in my view, and not only in my view, the final outcome of that process that derives from the application of the scientific method, which did not begin only in Pisa, but in the world. If one wants to pick a figure to exemplify the scientific method, one picks Galileo. [chuckle] We have an excellent statue of Galileo in the historic main lecture hall, which for now is too small to host all of us. We don't have one here. What did Galileo do? You all know — apart from appealing to experience, which would be the least of it, because they taught us that in high school or even earlier — but no one among the ancient thinkers actually thought that experience should be thrown away or used very little. Galileo did two fundamental things.
Mathematics — his famous metaphor or analogy: the universe is written in the language of mathematics — and why mathematics works is another fine topic. When I teach, I show the title of what I believe is — I don't know if it's a book — I believe it's an article by Wigner, a Nobel laureate, 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.' But he didn't only do that. There is a very long passage from the Assayer, which was usually summarized as the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, actually taken up from the ancient thinkers starting with Democritus, in which Galileo says: I have no difficulty believing in the existence of physical matter, which is a series of qualities — position, volume, etc. — but things like sound, color, and we could add emotions, sensations, I don't see them out there. In my view they derive from the interaction with the subject.
[chuckle] This was another postulate that methodologically was enormously successful, because by focusing on what Galileo called primary qualities and applying mathematics, from Newton onward modern science emerged, which has always rejected — where [clears throat] — the problem is precisely that: the so-called secondary qualities, subjectivity, the interaction with the subject, which in Galileo's time was not an object of science. What is the problem today with modern neuroscience? Have we gone inside the subject, or do we think we have? And the qualities, the colors, red, but also the beautiful, feelings, and the last concept, the greatest of all, which I think will be the object of this analysis, which encompasses them all — consciousness. Looking in there with a CT scan, with the experimental methods we have, we have never found it.
And yet it seems that they are there, and yet subjectively we are certain that they are. And this is what, when I was younger, was called the mind-body problem, which some still call mind-body, which some call the problem of qualia, which some call the problem of consciousness. And in my view — and again, not only in my view — it is the modern restatement of the problem of knowledge, which remains unsolved. Also on the other side of the reductive process: only atoms exist, empty space. Democritus — we no longer have atoms and empty space. What do we have? It's not entirely clear. Well, fundamental physics today, which is a development of quantum mechanics — theories, at least the ones that have experimental support — quantum field theories and what else — leave us with a fabric of reality that we don't really know what it is.
We were mentioning earlier with Federico Faggin the famous phrase of Bohr: if quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet, because everything we call real is made of things that none of us would qualify as real. How does it come about? Well, what I think Federico Faggin will give us is his attempt to find a solution to how it comes about, which has immense value, because in my view this is the crucial point of the cultural debate — not only scientific, philosophical, but of modern thought — which closes the circle of Galileo. Yes, primary qualities, but how do the secondary ones come about? Are they really secondary, or are they primary too? Or is there some other solution? Well, that is what we are about to hear in Federico Faggin's vision. Welcome again, and thanks to everyone. [applause]
