[-empyre-] Raquel Paricio opening statement

[raquel@clonclon.com]

Hello everybody! It's a pleasure for me to be an invited empyre guest,
especially when it comes to discuss about cognition and more specifically
about consciousness, which is my main research interest. So here is my
opening statement and a few words about my work.

I?m working in collaboration with Juan Manuel Moreno Arostegui, an
engineer specialist in the implementation of electronic systems including
bio-inspired principles. We are currently working in the Poetic-cubes
project, based on the platform developed by the POEtic tissue project
(www.poetictissue.org).

The main goal of our research is to create environments that help to the
perceptive learning and in so doing to approach the processes involved in
the acquisition of new qualia .One of the major challenges still remaining
in Neuroscience is related to the understanding of qualia, i.e., those
ineffable consciousness experiences different from any physical or
computational process. In fact this research goal is what A. Schopenhauer
brilliantly termed the ?world knot?, since it constitutes the basic step
towards a clear understanding of consciousness.

The first point of our research is to facilitate the development of
attention, i.e., to be conscious of our attention or of our perceptions
(that is what Leibniz termed ?apperception?). In my opinion this is the
previous step to acquire new levels of consciousness.
The second point is related to the adaptation principle of an individual
to the environment. I relate this adaptation principle, a fundamental step
in the evolutionary growth of the species, to the evolutionary process of
human consciousness, and we concentrate in its apperception mechanism that
is used to generate new qualia.

We are living in a historical moment in constant change and acceleration.
Social structures more and more require from us more complex and faster
adaptation abilities. How can the field of art and science evolve on this
context? How can we help to evolve human consciousness?