The Question of Consciousness: What Are We Talking About?
19–21 September 2025, Salina, Italy
Gathering in Salina, one of the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily—at that stretch of the Mediterranean where Europe seems to pause before opening south and west—always carries a sense of suspension. Yet this time the atmosphere was not that of a holiday. It was an occasion to return to one of the most persistent questions in the philosophy of mind — what do we actually mean when we talk about consciousness? From the outset, the debate drew a clear line between those, like Michael Pauen, who insist on the need for conceptual rigor alongside empirical investigation — seeking the neural correlates of consciousness without forgetting that data always demand a theoretical frame. The question was not only where and when consciousness lights up in the brain, but what we think it is when we try to identify it. Michael Pauen challenges the idea that consciousness is in principle inexplicable, arguing that the classic defenses of the “explanatory gap” rely on philosophical intuitions that are unreliable and often incoherent: if subjective experience and physical processes were truly separable, we could not even justify certainty about our own consciousness. Drawing on the history of science, he notes that concepts change in response to empirical findings, and therefore it is not legitimate to set the limits of neuroscientific explanation a priori on the basis of current conceptual categories. He thus proposes a gradual, empirically guided approach, explaining specific aspects of experience — as in the case of affective pain, whose phenomenal component proves to be functional, neurobiologically localizable, and clinically testable. From this follows the conclusion that the problem of consciousness should not be treated as an impenetrable metaphysical mystery, but as a complex scientific task that requires progressive integration between theory and data and can advance step by step.
Productively challenging this perspective was Riccardo Manzotti’s Mind-Object Identity theory, according to which experience is not found inside the head but in the world, in the physical relation between organism and object. In this view, “correlates” are not internal traces to be mapped but external conditions to be lived. The debate highlighted the contrast between a neuro-centric model and an ontological-relational one: consciousness as an endogenous neural process versus consciousness as identity with what is perceived. Much of the discussion unfolded around this conceptual tension.
Pietro Perconti and Alessandro Acciai then shifted the focus to the relation between consciousness, language, and language models. Their aim was not to attribute conscious states to machines, but to characterize their behavior through a form of machine psychology. Phenomena such as sandbagging, overconfidence, and the production of self-narratives in language systems, they argued, can be seen as structural effects of linguistic coherence — mechanisms by which a model keeps a conversation within its functional boundaries, producing self-statements (“I cannot do X”, “I know Y”) not as signs of phenomenal self-awareness, but as normative strategies of discursive continuity. The apparent “self” in language models is not a window into artificial consciousness, but a necessary linguistic illusion, a structural by-product of systemic constraints and the segregation between competence and self-ascribed competence.
Completing the empirical perspective, Raffaella Rumiati illustrated how contemporary cognitive neuroscience can illuminate the mechanisms, dissociations, and limits of consciousness — distinguishing levels, contents, and metacognition — and showed how laboratory studies and clinical cases have brought consciousness from speculative debate into the realm of measurable phenomena, even if without resolving its essence.
Finally, Andrea Velardi offered a critical view on the relationship between neuroscience and emergentist ontology. While acknowledging the importance of neuroscience in tracing cognitive and affective processes, he cautioned against the assumption that it can fully explain subjectivity. Drawing on themes of strong emergence and causal complexity, he noted that consciousness may not be reducible to neurons and circuits alone if we admit emergent powers or ontological properties that elude straightforward physical reduction. His intervention emphasized that neuroscience can show how consciousness manifests in the brain, yet not necessarily why it has the form it does, nor what its ultimate ontological nature is.
Alongside the main presentations, the core of the discussion emerged through a lively exchange among the participants. Scholars such as Anna Re, Mehdi Osanlou, Domenica Bruni, Paolo Livieri, Mario Graziano, as well as journalist Beti Tomsič, helped put the proposals to the test by probing their philosophical assumptions, their implications for the cognitive sciences, and the role of social practices in shaping subjective experience. Questions and objections explored the relationship between empirical data and theory, the legitimacy of strong emergentism, the boundaries of artificial intelligence, and the very meaning of speaking about “consciousness” in an interdisciplinary context. In this setting, dialogue was not a mere accompaniment to theory but its proving ground: ideas took shape through exchange, divergences were not smoothed over but examined, and the plurality of expertise demonstrated that research on consciousness truly advances when one accepts the effort of debate, the slowness of shared reflection, and the mutual commitment to clarifying and refining one’s positions.
In the concluding discussion, a shared understanding emerged: philosophy and neuroscience cannot do without one another. The former keeps the full depth of the problem alive; the latter sharpens the questions and anchors them to empirical constraints. And perhaps the real value of these days was not resolving the problem of consciousness — but recognizing that inquiry becomes richer when it accepts complexity rather than rushing to simplify it. The island remained a quiet backdrop, yet the true space opened was between what we can currently explain and what, for now, we can only continue to think through.
