A philosopher by choice. An engineer by training. An anti-philosopher by vocation.

I became a philosopher by trial and error. I studied engineering because I wanted to understand how things work. I did a PhD in robotics because I wanted to build machines that could see. When I realized that we did not really know what "seeing" meant — not in the technical sense, but in the real one — I turned to philosophy.

It was the late 1990s. The philosophy of mind seemed to me, back then, at a standstill: it had inherited from the twentieth century an obsession with the inside — consciousness in the brain, mental representation, internal states — that simply did not apply to the machines we were trying to build. A robot has no inside in the sense we imagine for a human being. And yet it was obvious that if we wanted to give it an experience, we first had to understand where experience lives.

The answer I built over the years — the Mind-Object Identity — is simple in form and radical in its consequences: consciousness is not inside the brain. It is identical with the object that exists relative to the body. There is no inner copy of the world. There is the world, existing in a specific way in relation to a specific body, and that is what we call consciousness.

For most of my life I have defended this thesis against neuroscientists, against analytic philosophers, and — lately — against the strangest machine ever built: generative artificial intelligence. Large language models confirm the MOI by way of negation: they are not conscious because they have no body that enters into relation with objects. They manipulate symbols; they do not encounter the world. They know and they read, but they are not.

I have taught at IULM since 2004 — from AI to the philosophy of the media, and also perception and the psychology of art. This is no accident. I use art to show the nature of our consciousness, our experience, our existence. The psychology of art and the philosophy of the media have each become a laboratory: a painting, a film, a screen, a generative-AI system are all ways in which an object enters into relation with a body. The MOI lets us think of them as kin, not as separate phenomena.

I write books because I believe a philosophy that speaks only to philosophers betrays its own task. I make comics for the same reason. I hold dialogues with novelists like Tim Parks to remind myself that thought is for looking at reality with new eyes, not for passing the time at conferences and symposia.