2014 - The roots of motivation in science and knowledge

University of San Marino, Ancient Monastery of Santa Chiara
August 27-29, 2014

International Symposium organized in collaboration with Rimini Meeting for Friendship amongst Peoples, CEUR Foundation, Republic of San Marino – Segreteria di Stato per gli Affari Esteri e Politici, University of San Marino.
Sponsored by Riviera di Rimini Convention Bureau

Focal Issues
Part of the motivation in tackling a specific research subject rests in the anticipation of how “relevant” a result in that particular field could be. What are the “big questions” in different fields? Why are these questions “big”? What lies at the heart of interest for the specific topic of research? Can it be expressed?What is the cultural impact of the “big questions” addressed by science on our perception of life, of nature, of humanity? The popularization of science often portraits nature as a gigantic mechanism that leaves little room for real novelty, to the point that it is often perceived as suffocating. Is it true? Is this trend as an intrinsic and unavoidable consequence of the advance of research?
Has there been a change over time as to what is considered most relevant in your field of research? Is the trend toward increasing specialization -possibly an inevitable consequence of the fast growth of knowledge- leading to the loss of a comprehensive understanding of nature?

Sessions outline
Following the successful scheme adopted in the previous editions of the San Marino Symposium, the above topic will be addressed in three sessions, each involving three outstanding thinkers from both science and humanities.

The proceedings have been published on Euresis Journal.

1st session

Go to the biography

Astrophysics, Geology, Paleobiology are telling us that, in a sort of homogenous universe, where the laws are everywhere the same since fourteen billion years, everything else is changing all the time. And as far as matter is concerned, the “things” seem to change with time in a direction: more complexity and more organization; it is the reason why we meet successively inert matter, leaving one and thinking one and not the contrary. Paleontology is clearly showing the last part of this “evolution” and the emergence, for understandable natural reasons, of Man: the
necessity of adaptation to a climatic change, a drought.
But as his adaptation, instead of having “chosen” only the teeth or the locomotion, have “chosen” the brain; and more complexity and more organization of the brain brought suddenly to this organ an unexpected new capacity of knowing that it knows, a sort of reflection like in a mirror and it was of course the beginning of all our characteristics, technical, intellectual, spiritual, esthetic, ethic. Even if all these features are evolving, becoming more and more elaborate, I think, as the paleontologist, that Man is Man as soon as he is Man. And this thinking is obviously a result of field research, of discoveries of remains and of their interpretations.
More fossils will of course help us to describe these transformations but the fact that the human brain evolve first to become better in inventing strategies to survive in a more open environment (natural selection) is very clear. And the fact that this brain has then become able to do many things else, anticipate, talk, exchange, dream, think about his origin, his destiny, about death, about God, is a sort of exaptation, “un usage dérivé, sauvage, volé!”

Go to the biography

Signs of astronomical activity, as a dedicated and continued observation of celestial phenomena, are present in all world civilizations: when and why this human natural behaviour became “science”? Following the historical evolution of Astronomy may shed some light on the subtle difference between science and knowledge or, better said, scientific knowledge and human wisdom. The interplay between Astronomy and Philosophy/Theology is indeed deeply rooted and has never ceased to be a powerful motivation in the quest for Truth.
My contribution will explore some significant historical aspects of this interplay and project it to the current epoch, when the scientific knowledge on the global evolutionary characteristic of the cosmos, including the emergence of life and conscience, inevitably impacts on our philosophical and theological discourses.

2nd session

Go to the biography

Speculations about the existence and nature of extraterrestrial life have abounded for the past 500 years and more. But only in the past few years, with the explosion of discoveries by the Kepler mission, are we suddenly faced with the existence of thousands of known planets and planetary systems, with a huge diversity of properties, with many of them potentially similar to Earth and the solar system. Though very challenging, we will soon be able to make the first attempts to search remotely for signs of biological activity — biomarkers — in such planets.
I will review the various methods currently used to discover and characterize extrasolar planets, and what we have learned so far. I will then discuss some of the issues that the discovery (or absence) of extraterrestrial life would raise. Will the Universe turn out to be teeming with life, giving us yet another Copernican “wakeup call”? Or will we find that life, as we know it, is an exceedingly rare occurrence that took place only here?
A third possibility is that our expectations for what we seek may turn out to be too terracentric, raising the risk that we may miss manifestations of life that are vastly different from those we know on earth. Recent developments in the study of extreme life forms on Earth reinforce this risk. Despite all of these difficulties, determining the existence or non-existence of extraterrestrial life is of the greatest importance for underestanding the emergence and nature of life here on Earth.

Go to the biography

The practice of mathematics is completely determined a priori by the requirement for absolute rigour defining it, and by the limitedness of its basic language: the elementary rules of logic, the integers and their operations, the geometrical intuitions linked to our ability to seize space. On the contrary, at the level of human organization, the practice of mathematics may appear highly unconstrained, as it essentially does not require any material means: only some paper and ink, without any experimental apparatus.One might thus ask how the freedom inherent in human nature and actions could be fulfilled in mathematics, and to what extent. Is it possible to want to become mathematicians also for the love of freedom? Does mathematician’s freedom mainly unfolds in the choice of the objects of study? Or are the pursuit and discovery of results, which turn out to be independent from us, also acts of freedom?

Go to the biography

Living systems are characterized by the recurrent emergence of patterns: power-laws distributions, long-range correlations and structured self-organization in living matter are the norm, rather than the exception. All these features are also typical of thermo-dynamical systems poised near a critical point. The great lesson from physics is that criticality can emerge as a collective behavior in a system with simple interactions. The question we will try to answer is why living matter has evolved so that it behaves like a “critical” system.

3rd session

Go to the biography

Human cortex is the product of million years of evolution and is thought to be responsible of the implementation of the “higher brain functions” characterizing us humans. Cortical phylogenesis can not be investigated directly, but the study of the alterations linked to neurological disease can be helpful to sharpen our ideas on how the cortex evolved and its functional organization. The author will show examples taken from his clinical studies on awake patients under local anesthesia submitted to cortical mapping and direct cortical stimulation during neurosurgical operations. These data, obtained primarily to increase patient safety, can, with patient permission, be extremely useful for the exploration of the biological basis of language and writing.

Go to the biography

“We feel that even if all possible scientific questions receive a response, the problems of our life would not even be touched” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This is the scope of the human problem: who is seriously engaged with life and with his own humanity can not help but feel this dimension of the problem. It was Neurology and Neurophysiology from which it took its cue that made clear the organization of the brain, identified the neural systems that implement the various motoric and sensitive functions, clarified their connections with the muscles that implements our actions and with the sense organs that allow us to perceive the world outside and inside, discovered the cortical localization of many of the cognitive functions. Over the past 20 years Neurosciences have greatly developed thanks to the discovery of techniques that allow us to capture the brain activity during thoughts, emotions, tasks, stimuli, etc. Yet the nature of consciousness remains elusive: Physiology has shown the anatomical and physiological bases at least with regard to wakefulness. Neurosciences are tempted to think that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of neuronal activity physically determined, but this clashes with the evidence of our experience. No major breakthrough happened in the last 20 years of neuroscience madman.

Go to the biography

Humans have dreamed of other worlds for thousands of years. At the dawn of science, over two thousand years ago, some Greek philosophers thought that the Earth might not be unique, but a geocentric cosmology squashed this speculation until the time of Galileo. Gradually, telescopic observations revealed planets and moons to be worlds in space, and robotic space probes in the past fifty years sharpened this awareness. In 1995, the first exoplanet was discovered. In less than twenty years, the inventory has grown to over 3000, of which several hundred are Earth-like and dozens may be habitable. Astronomers project roughly 100 million habitable “Earths” in the Milky Way and the search for life on those worlds is one of the most compelling projects in science. Meanwhile, cosmologists paint a picture of an expanding universe where the space-time we can see holds 10²³ stars and their likely attendant planets. If inflation occurred, then other space-times are likely to exist, with properties that may or may not be hospitable to life. The Byzantine potential of a boundless, biological universe recasts what it means to be human.

Guest participants
The Symposium is open to a limited number of “guest participants” (PhD students, Postdocs, and Scholars) invited to attend the seminar sessions and to participate in the discussion sessions. Application informations can be found in sm2014-announcement.

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:
Marco Aluigi, Meeting for Friendship Amongst Peoples
Tommaso Bellini, Department of medical biotechnology and translational medicine, University of Milano
Marco Bersanelli, Physics Department, University of Milano
Giorgio Dieci, Department of Life Sciences, University of Parma
Andrea Moro, Department of General Linguistics, IUSS Pavia
Elio Sindoni, CEUR Foundation
Carlo Sozzi, Milano Plasma Physics Institute, National Research Council of Italy (CNR)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Benedetta Cappellini, Euresis Association
Tonino Ceccoli, Euresis Association
Matteo Turchi, Meeting for Friendship Amongst Peoples

A few photos of the symposium are available.
A short report of the discussed topics can be found on IlSussidiario.net online magazine.

SYMPOSIUM IMAGE 
Wolfang Pauli and Niels Bohr, demonstrating 'tippe top' toy at the inauguration 
of the new Institute of Physics at Lund, Sweden.
Photograph by Erik Gustafson, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Margrethe
Bohr Collection