Lets resort to some experiments known as performed upon the human nervous system. Suppose a subject existing in a perfectly dark, isolated room. Suddenly a luminous spot appears. This will be the only new information coming from the outside world. The subject reports the light spot, seeing it, observing its movements. Were the subject reduced to beingness (an experiment we can imagine) then the only significant aspect would be the impression of the light spot in itself, whereas its movement or motionlessness would bear no significance. The thing that attracts the subject in beingness is the impression of the light spot in general, and this observation makes it possible for us to extend this philosophical experiment to the case of, say, a natural view. In the presence of the light spot, the state of beingness triggers the symbol of the respective state and, together, constitutes the state of existence. From the confrontation of the two, the state of knowing is automatically triggered off. But by this we have not clarified the nature of beingness, the respective "subjective" impression of the light spot. Various experiments performed on the human nervous system have so far brought no more clarifications. One knows that the light spot excites a spot on the retina, that from there signals are sent to the brain, in the cortex visual zone, by a point-to-point correspondence. The excitation of a given point on the retina leads to the excitation of a certain point on the cortex. This was determined experimentally with micro-electrodes implanted in the brain. But the arrival point on the cortex is only an intermediary point, in fact a starting point for the subjective impression. If one excites the brain with electric signals applied directly to the micro-electrodes, the subject reports seeing a light spot in a certain point in space. In fact this light spot does not exist. It is from this point on the cortex that other signals leave towards the brain and create the subjective impression. And this happens irrespective of the signal being due to an external stimulus (the light spot) or by an artificial (electric) stimulus applied to the brain.

More than this, the integration of all the points on the brain that are excited by a complex external image (as in our initial experiment) is a typical case of form recognition. Such phenomenon can be described by a machine, but the subjective sensation of each component element and of the whole picture implies a special activity of the central nervous system.
We could stop here and assume that we have reached a certain limit of knowledge as far as beingness is concerned. This is not yet explained scientifically. Some biologists view beingness, and in general, awareness, as some kind of instrument outside the biological machine and outside the biological science¹. We could stop here, consider beingness as a singular point, and concern ourselves with the rest. It is like listening to Kant and considering beingness as a phenomenon, and what is behind it as something in itself, impossible to understand. It is obvious that with the notion of beingness we reach a certain frontier of knowledge, both through introspection and through everything we know from contemporary scientific research. If we do not admit this thing in itself, we could see beyond this point the soul, or a new property of the matter, or a dual substance. We could imagine anything. But the history of science and philosophy has shown us that the thing that made us progress was a cognitive conception, responsible for removing the limits, for pushing further the science itself. Were we to stop here and say that beingness was an attribute of the soul, we would have to make that idealistic come back, as Hegel did, towards an absolute universal soul, delimiting the whole existence between two spiritual moments, reducing the existence to spirit and idea. However we shall say that beingness reflects a deeper existential reality.

The idea however exists that beyond the limits of beingness there is in fact nothing, that everything can be reduced to a very complex machine developing its own consciousness. In this view the man is only a machine, an automaton, nevertheless superior since it has consciousness. But in essence he is still an automaton, a biological machine. On such a line of thought one finds the science of neurocybernetics. It models not only the formal intellect, but also the creativity, as well as human affectivity and motivation. Through the rigorous concepts of system and automaton theory, one finds that the deterministic automata can perform all the operations of the classical formal logic, as well as arithmetic operations and all the mathematical operations that can be reduced to them. The stochastic automata have an heuristic behavior, and this is considered to be creative. Automata can learn, can adapt themselves, can recognize forms, can reproduce themselves. Hence, disregarding the question of consciousness, the whole rational, affective and motivational human activity appears as a machine, automaton activity. Certain human modelscan be derived from this point of view².
Suppose that we create a machine using such a model. Let's try and imagine what will such a machine, created with non-biological elements, be like. Will it imitate human behavior ? As far as mind processes, formal and even heuristic intellect, are concerned, the answer will in principle be yes. Will it have consciousness ? We have seen that the awareness experiment has shown that we can derive from beingness the symbol "be" and the symbol "know" as far as "self-consciousness" is concerned. Since these are informational states, they can be anyway introduced in the machine which in turn can in principle have a learned self-consciousness around which will gravitate its whole activity. Such a machine will then declare that it knows what it does, that it knows that it exists, etc. Gathering knowledge around its self-consciousness, it will generally have consciousness. Such a generation of machines could extend, for example, our social consciousness. But such a machine does not have beingness, or rather "it does not yet have it", and when it will have it then we will have to ask ourselves if it still is a machine.

The question now rises of the verbal consciousness that might function in a device with artificial intelligence. The man is not reduced to verbal consciousness, he has states more profound than the verbal ones, but nevertheless it is not less true that in many cases its consciousness is manifested mainly verbally. One knows the experiments of Sperry, who experimented with a human subject having, due to medical reasons, the brain hemispheres separated by cutting the link through "corpus callosum". The right hemisphere cannot talk, cannot do arithmetic, but can recognize a written word, and can act through the left hand (that it governs) upon the object described by the written word. But the man could not write what word he read, what object he manipulated, how he manipulated it, just as everything took place outside his verbal consciousness, since that is localized in the left hemisphere. In appearance, due to the verbal incapacity, the right hemisphere seems to have no consciousness. However it is capable of intelligent activity, not only for simple things as those described above, but also for the complete understanding of geometrical figures, forms, spatial configurations. The left hemisphere (via the right hand) cannot draw a cube, a thing that the right hemisphere (via the left hand) can do with remarkable skill. Of course, the normal functioning of the brain is based on the cumulated effect of the two hemispheres, but the experimental study of their separate functioning opens new ways towards the better understanding of human consciousness (see John C. Eccles, The understanding of the brain, McGraw Hill, NewYork, 1977, pp.209-218).

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