piero scaruffi

E-Mail Address:

scaruffi@hpp.stanford.edu

KSL Affiliation/Position:

Visiting Scholar at the Knowledge Systems Lab

Research/Professional Interests:

Cognitive Science, Neurobiology, Philosphy of the Mind, Connectionism, Alternative Logics, Self-Organizing Systems

Personal Research Statement:

* The very fundamental idea of my research is that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical and that somehow the property that, under special circumstances, enables a particular configuration of matter (e.g., the brain) to exhibit "consciousness" must be present in all matter, starting from the most fundamental constituents.

* I think that cognition is a property of all living organisms that comes in (continous) degrees. Memory and learning can be said to be ubiquitous in nature, as long as we assume that they come in degrees.

* There are striking similarities between the behavior of cognitive (living) matter and the behavior of non-cognitive (dead) matter (a piece of paper that is repeatedly bent will tend to "remember" of having been bent by "staying" bent).

* The "degrees of cognition" that we find ubiquitous in nature can be expressed in the formalism of Fuzzy Logic, but modern physics is built on Quantum Mechanics, which is built on the Theory of Probabilities. A possible starting point for reconciling biological and physical sciences, i.e. for unifying Cognitive Science and Physics, would thus be to replace probabilities with Fuzzy Logic in Quantum Mechanics.

Check out his complete abstract

If you are interested in knowing more about this subject, check his reasoned bibliography (still under construction, only partially completed)

More information is available at Piero's new web site

Education/Other Relevant Experience:

Piero received a degree in Mathematics (summa cum laude) in 1982 from University of Turin, where he did work in General Theory of Relativity (mainly applied to black holes) and Theoretical Physics (a unification model for quantum chromodynamics). For a number of years he was the head of the Artificial Intelligence Center at Olivetti, based in Cupertino, CA. He has written a number of books (all of them in his native Italy) and has published hundreds of articles on publications both in Italy and the U.S. Check out his biography and his list of publications

Personal Interests:

Music

Adventure Travel

Literature

Poetry