For 6pm on Friday 28 June the Meeting Space of the Polo del ‘900 (Piazzetta Antonicelli, Turin) has on the agenda an evening of in-depth study on conscience, with protagonists Angelo Tartabini (Professor of General Psychology at the University of Parma) and Maurilio Orbecchi ( Specialist in clinical psychology and psychotherapy, with an introduction by Boris Bellone (National Association of Italian anti-fascist political persecuted people – Anppia).
Already an esteemed researcher and full professor of general psychology at the Department of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Parma, Tartabini – who today also greenreport is proud to host on its pages – has received important national awards for his popular volume Animal Consciousness , at the center of the Turin event.
It will be an opportunity to explore topics of great scientific depth but also of current relevance, as documented by the controversies https://twitter.com/carlo_canepa/status/1783961604867993662 recently released by the Minister of Agriculture – Francesco Lollobrigida -, according to whom “man is the only sentient being” on Earth, that is, capable of hearing and experiencing something, a characteristic of consciousness.
A statement which however (despite the scientific community still having much to discover regarding the true nature of consciousness) is very distant from what we know so far about sentience.
As documented by the recent New York Declaration on animal consciousness, the evidence collected so far by scientists actually goes in the opposite direction to what the minister claimed: there is strong scientific support for the attribution of conscious experience to other mammals and birds; empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians and fish) and in many invertebrates; when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal.
