What Makes Us Human? | PhotoVogue Festival 2023: What Makes Us Human? Image in the Age of A.I.

The last panel of the day.

This is for me, really an honor

to have these two wonderful guests with us.

And let me introduce my two guests.

We have Paola Mieli here on stage with us.

She s a not only psychoanalyst,

but a beacon of knowledge and insight, I have to say.

Her work with the Apres-Coup

Psychoanalytic Association in New York

and her role as co-chair of the Section of Psychoanalysis

in Psychiatry of the World Association

have made significant impacts

on how we understand the human mind.

And then we have with us Paolo Benanti.

I would like to thank Paolo because he s traveling.

He was just now at the UN,

and so the connection might be a bit unstable.

So we might start with Paolo

who is a Presbyterian theologian

and an academic at the Pontificia Universita Gregoriana.

And he is also an expert in AI

which in itself I find extremely intriguing.

So this panel is gonna try to talk with people

who know much more than me

about this kind of subjects about what makes us human.

And I think it is a very relevant question now

with the AI, you know,

and how AI could change the idea of what makes us human.

I think I would like to start with you, Paolo,

just because as we said, you are traveling

and who knows what s gonna happen to your connection.

And first of all, thanks for being here with us.

And can you-

[indistinct] was my pleasure actually,

Is the volume...

Can you hear Paolo?

Can we have the volume up a bit?

Okay.

I can hear you very well.

Can you hear me?

I can hear you, but I don t think the people hear.

It s a bit low.

They are asking to put it louder.

Can you try talking now?

Yes, I m trying to talk.

[indistinct] Okay, perfect.

Perfect

So Paolo, please tell us,

what does it mean to be, you know, a priest?

Can I say priest?

Or a theologian, and also being an expert in AI?

How do these two things about technology and faith,

how can they be together?

Well, let s start from the right perspective.

More than a [indistinct] time,

a Franciscan monk.

That is a little bit different

but this is just to put myself in a history perspective.

Because actually if you look what happened

with the history of things,

one of my friers in the 13th century, Raymond Llull,

was the inventor of a strange method

to try to find all the possible combination among words.

The volume was named Ars Magna.

And that volume was used by Leibniz

a couple of centuries later to define a possible logic.

And the works of Leibniz actually was the works behind

what we use as artificial intelligence today.

So it s not so far from my family in that sense.

It s not so far from between being Franciscan

and being occupied with science

because Franciscan give a huge contribution

to the science philosophically

and also with a lot of experiment.

As a religious order, we are in the square

in the sense that we live with other people

and we breath the complexity

and the challenge of the status.

And if once,

the problem was understanding the universe with philosophy,

now is understanding what the machine is speaking to us.

As you said before, we are facing an everyday challenge

among a little frontier that is the language

between a machine that every day

is becoming much more human.

We talk with our artificial intelligence assistant every day

much more human way,

and between that and a human being,

that understanding itself as much as a machine every day.

And neuroscience are pinging on us simple enlightening

that a lot of things that we think could not be explained

as something that works in a way,

now we know that works in some way.

Thank you, Paolo.

But exactly, you re talking about machines

that we talk to every day,

which already is something weird to say.

I do too.

I mean, I use ChatGPT.

I talk to ChatGPT.

He kind of knows me by now,

so it s quite interesting relationship.

But now these machines, they think, they learn.

Do you believe there s a spiritual or soulful component

that will always remain uniquely human?

Well, let s start to say

that we project some human trait on the machine

more than the machine has a human trait.

Machine store information, and we call that process memory,

but the memory of a machine,

is certainly different by the memory of a human being.

If my computer or your computer start to change

what we memorize inside, for us it s broken.

We have to crush it.

Our memory actually is something that is alive with us.

We people process our memories

and our memories that are connected to our identity,

it s not a static perception of the beings,

but it s a dynamic entity that live with us.

And so it s much more a problem of,

you know, let me say in that way,

we are a little bit too much alone.

We are the only certain species in 60,000 years ago,

and probably this kind of machine looks like

if something that could be almost like us.

And there is someone that is task tendency

to project on the machines a lot of human traits.

Then your question about what we call spiritual.

Well, in a really broader non-religious way,

we can define spiritual every kind of happening

that is blessing and meaningful for the human beings.

If I walk all the night on a mountain

and I see the rising of the sun

from the top of the mountain,

well, that kind of experience in one sense is spiritual too.

Is this something that is unique for human beings?

In one way, yes, because, you know,

try to think a really much more elementary experience.

If you look at computer and computer has a LED light

that is flashing when you use the hard disk,

that kind of signal that connect the LED light

to the central process unit is not much so different

from the kind of signal that is connecting,

for example, one tooth to my brain.

If I have some problem to my tooth,

a signal, a low voltage signal is connecting my tooth

to the [indistinct] center in my brain.

Well, if after a long day I work with my computer a lot,

the lab is always on.

If I have one day of tooth pain, it was an horrible day.

Well, the difference between something that works

and someone that exists is exactly in the ability

to put this kind of objective

around the quality of experience

that for the machine is simple repetition

on the same experience day by day or time by time.

Thank you.

And Paula, from a psychoanalytic perspective,

how would you define the essence of being human?

I need the mic.

Well, before starting,

I want to say how much I appreciated to be here.

I really heard a very interesting intervention

and I want to thank Alexia and all your organizer

for bringing together many different people,

artists and technicians and thinkers

for an internship encounter on a topic that is so important

and I personally think

that we have to work together from different discipline

in order to address the present technological revolution,

let put it this way.

And actually appreciate it enormously also

the exhibition that you organized.

So thank you very much. Thank you, thank you.

So to say what is a human being,

its essence is practically impossible

to say it in three words.

But since you had raised this question to me,

I was thinking, how do I reply to this?

And I thought, well, I considered a human being,

a poet and an artist who walk on a standing position,

who is able to laugh and cry,

who is able to see the world through equation,

through numbers, symbolizing,

and who is inhabited by three fundamental passions.

Love, hate, and ignorance,

these are the three passions that characterize human being.

So I would say that this is a short answer.

The long answer is that there are certain,

I was thinking,

I consider that there are five factors

that really characterize our species in particular.

And I summarizing them here.

Then we will eventually discuss-

Go back to it and discuss it.

Number one is the standing position of the human being

that constitutes a border between the human species

and the other species.

Second point is the fact that the baby of humans

are born premature,

and therefore they take a much longer time

than the baby of all other primates

to become independent from adults.

And this generates all sorts of consequences.

Third point is the fundamental structural point

that is the difference existence in human being

between instinct and drives.

And therefore the fact that we are erotic beings

living in an erotic body,

but also that we have destructive passions

as we have seen all afternoon, right?

And fourth characteristic

is that we are divided by a knowledge

that we are not aware of,

but that produces effects in the every life constantly.

That is to say the presence of the unconscious in our life.

And then the fifth

is the particularity of the human language.

The fact that we are speaking being,

this is what characterizes us,

and that allows very high level of symbolization.

Symbolization that allows for very sophisticated form

of transmission among ourselves collectively,

but also among generations.

And I would conclude this brief, you know, list

saying that the particularity of the human being

is that the collective is the subject of the individual

as Jacques Lacan had said.

That the collective is the subject of the individual.

Can you elaborate on that?

Because maybe not everyone here understands its concepts.

Human being is a social being by definition.

It cannot survive because of the prematurity

of the offspring of the infant of the humans

that as I was saying before as this characteristic,

that it takes years in order to develop physiologically.

Think about the time it takes for an infant to acquire,

for instance, the gravitational autonomy

that allows for certain oriented gesture to be made.

For instance, you know,

how many months it s going to take for a child

to pick up a cup and bring it to one s own mouth, right?

This...

I mean, this is completely different from other primates

that take much lesser time to do this.

So, the dependency of the, you know, human offsprings

from the adults creates all sorts of implications.

Number one, the identifications

with those who care for the child to live and growth, right?

And by definition, the human being is a collective being

because it is not going to survive socially

or individually outside social environment,

be it a small environment or an enlarged environment, right?

So this is a characteristic of it.

And the formation of subject s identification,

identity, let s put it,

is always the consequence of an exchange with the other,

with the caretaker.

And not just the first caretaker

but the series of caretakers or people

that are exchanging with the child

and that allowed for certain process

of identification to take place.

There is a particularity on the process

of identification of the human being

that maybe we will return upon afterwards.

Listen, you are saying a lot of words

that interest me a lot,

and I wanna also ask you, Paolo, what do you think?

cause I heard instinct and drive, for instance,

or before you were talking about love, hate and ignorance

and all of these...

They do feel really human,

and it comes down to me also as,

I m thinking how this concept

of how what it means to be human

has evolved throughout the years.

And while maybe a long time ago,

we would talk about being human as people

who are able to use the rational mind better.

And so they re good at doing calculus and maths.

Now that machines are so much better than us,

it feels like we re going back to this idea,

being human, it s related to emotions.

How do you feel, Paolo, about this?

But actually I think that Paula put the nail in the cubic

I can express in that direction

because, you know, the problem is that

the confusion arise with machine

for the same definition of artificial intelligence.

Because according to actually to Alan Turing,

a machine could be defined intelligence

when if you put behind the wall a machine and human beings,

the interaction that we have with the machine

is not possible to be distinguished

by the kind of interaction that we have

with another human beings.

And philosophically speaking, this is a huge upside down,

a huge flip out of a really old paradigms of knowledge

that is the paradigms,

that simple plot of [indistinct] inside society

when inside the republic,

he tells us the might of the cave, you know.

If in the cave, something is projecting a light

on the back of the cave,

the real knowledge is not when the projection of the light

is as sufficient undistinguishable between object

but when you go beyond the wall

and see what is that is projecting the kind of light.

Well, if we are someone

that is not simple rationally driven,

but is also emotionally driven,

a set of engineer, simple understand an emotion

like a sort of algorithms.

If you open up an evolutionary psychological book,

you can say that a lot of of people

start to describing emotion like evolutionary algorithm

that allows species to survive.

Fear could be understood as an algorithm

that allowed a [indistinct] to not be killed by a lion.

Well, if they are understandable as an algorithm,

I can make an algorithm that is perfectly able

to imitate that kind of emotion.

And because we are social beings,

because we are burning

when we are not still enough ready to survive,

well, we are this innate temptation

for this kind of social limitation, social identification.

And so a soulmate machine is the perfect mirror

in which we can reflect our ourself

and we can imagine that there is a mind behind that

and not something that is working.

I understand, but how can we be a hundred percent sure?

I mean, you guys know better than me,

especially in this case you, Paolo, being an expert on AI.

You re talking about, at the end, it s all about algorithms,

but, I don t know, do we know so well

how this machine work

and how they will work giving how fast

and the speed at which everything is going

and how exponentially AI is getting,

you know, stronger and smarter and whatever,

that something is not gonna happen.

Like, I dunno, like...

Like, I dunno.

How can we be so sure that it s...

Let me put in a mathematical perspective.

The real thing that could be problematic

is the existence of torsions inside the material.

But because the machine that we are producing,

the Turing machine,

we could be a little bit safe.

And the idea is that caution

is not Turing comparable problem.

So it s something that a Turing machine cannot compute

and so cannot be present in the machine.

The aspect of that is that also in the front of the best

generative artificial intelligence,

if you prompt the generative artificial intelligence

for an images,

the machine will produce much more images that you need

because you, the human part of the relationship,

need to say which one is beauty,

which one has something to say.

So the creative side is still on the human side

because it s not the property that the machine can have.

Well, theoretically speaking,

the day in which we ll make computers

that are not Turing machine,

we can discuss again this topic.

But for now there is nothing else than Turing machine.

Yes, I understand.

I mean, my question...

I understand absolutely what you re saying.

I m just looking at the future which is so,

with all the changes that are happening now,

and they re so fast, exactly,

I mean, I m wondering when and if machines

are ever gonna be...

Are we ever gonna treat them as objects

who do have their own rights?

You know, it s like what...

When do we...

When we decide that something alive, a being,

now I don t know how to say it, should have its own rights?

what does it...

Is it related to pain maybe?

To the capacity to...

Well, this is one of the oldest question in philosophy,

what makes someone alive?

What is life?

And the problem,

to make short the long and complex question,

is that if you take a dark and an eye dryer,

the duck can the eye dryer as the same shape.

But if you turn off the eye dryer, then you can turn it on.

If you turn off the duck, it s dead.

This is the difference between something that works

and someone that exist

and this where some kind of rights will arise.

Thank you, Paolo, that was quite an image in itself.

And what do you think, Paula?

I think that before thinking about

the autonomy of machines, and they re right

because we have to have in mind

that machines are informed with as many data as we want,

but they are informed by human data.

So after all, there is a maker of the machine

and there is an informer of the machine.

So much so that, you know,

there was, for instance, an interesting article

on the Harvard s Business section just a few days ago

that was saying, are going to be AI

are going to be obsolete in the sense

that if you don t inform fresh information

constantly to the machines themself,

then at a certain point,

they re going to become somehow

entropic on their own, right?

So, it requires a constant feeding

on the part of the humans.

I find more interesting, frankly,

what is the relation of human with the machine

because that is what we see happening in this day

and we see that this has already a very strong impact

on human subjectivity in many respects.

For instance, if you go to,

I mean, I guess it s the same in Milan,

but if you go to any kind of subway place in New York,

everyone that you see is basically

looking at one s one extension as is happening here

in this hall, actually.

The is one s own telephone, right?

So the telephone itself, you know,

experience as an extension of the mind

of the subject, right?

There is a certain communication with the machine

that makes it a prosthetic app to the subject itself,

to the memory.

You want to know an information immediately,

you get into it, right?

So there is this kind of transferential relation

that occurs with the machine.

And with the new technologies,

it s becoming more and more obvious.

As a clinician, because I am a clinician,

I can tell you what are some of the effects of it.

For instance, and, you know, I can give you, for instance,

one of the most frequent thing I see in adolescent

is that, for instance, they start having

their first erotic experience online, right?

Through the media, through pornography,

because they are of, obviously, you know, universal access.

And the relation that they establish,

erotic relation that is established through,

for instance, the use of pornography

is allowing them to have all sorts of fantasy

realized on the spot.

But paradoxically, then they allow for the creation

of all sorts of inhibition at the time in which this person

meets another person.

Because meeting another person in order to flirt

with the person or to engage with another person

raises all sorts of inhibition

because the other person has a body,

maybe has a smell one doesn t like,

maybe has a look one doesn t like.

So all sorts of blockages that are paradoxically,

you know, raised.

On the one hand, you have the facility that is given

by the experience.

On the other, the difficulties then

of meeting the other person on that register.

And the curiosity also of encountering the other.

I don t know.

I mean, it seems to me that the reality here in Italy

is probably still very different.

[Host] No, no, it s the same, I think.

But in United States,

we see this constantly.

I can give you many other examples.

Paolo, what you were saying before

and what also you Paula were saying before

about being the fact that it s still us human

that have to feed the machine, right?

But do you think, are we...

Do you think, are we close to instead a place

when the machine will feed the machine

without the need for us to do this

and the machine is gonna just say...

I mean, how close are we,

how far away are we from that scenario?

Well, if you go to the industrial use of AI,

actually, are machines that are feeding the machine

because the data are the data produced by sensor

during the production process.

And so what we have is an optimization of the process,

but there is nothing that is pinging on us

in a so problematic way.

If you go back instead to generative AI,

that is AI that is speeded by human produce data,

well the human is so critical part of the process

and there is a lot of example

that when you start to feed

a sort of generative AI-based on text

with the machine-produced text,

there is a huge amount of entropy

and the quality of the production simply collapse

and is not anymore good.

And so this is could be a negative way

to prove that there is something in the human beings

that is not reproducing the machine

because in a machine-produced text,

there is something that is not good

to maintain that kind of of quality.

And so probably we are not able to define it,

but we can see the degradation or the quality

when the human is outside of the loop.

Right.,

The question of the degradation

is the one that is discussed in these days.

But do you think...

I don t know, now is just,

I wanna do a provocation, okay, to both of you.

It feels like that maybe we as human

have reached a stage where maybe we can t go any,

the evolution I m talking, right?

From the evolution of human beings.

Can it be that the next step of us being human is machines?

Like, I don t know, can it be something like that?

What do you both think?

Well, look, many years ago,

I organized a major colloquium in New York

that was called Being Human:

The Extensions of the Boundaries of the Body.

And I m invited...

It was 1997, 98.

In fact, a book,

a huge book was produced afterwards.

And I m invited among the scientists who came.

There was the head of human cryonics, Jim Young, okay?

So I m speaking about the group of people

that are freezing themself after death

with the idea of being resuscitated,

and therefore for them to keep living in another time.

Walt Disney was Frozen, right?

You know, it was cryonically frozen.

So the extraordinary thing about Jim Young

is that he gave a talk in which he explained to all of us

that we are immortal.

By immortal,

meaning that we could be transformed into machine,

into AI machine,

and therefore, you know,

for us, machine to take over, right?

It s a text that you can read in the Being Human.

It s very interesting.

Of course, what kind of a vision this is, right?

Yeah. It raises the question,

what kind of vision is this?

I don t think that this is going to be the case.

The case is that we are using the machine we create

as much as possible.

It depends on how we are going to use them,

which is the most important thing

because, obviously, there are very positive side

related to it,

but then there are also some destructive side to it,

which is important to discuss

as it happened in,

we did in the afternoon right?

Part of it.

And, Paolo, I see you re already smiling

because you must be thinking, what is she saying?

No, no, no, I m really agree.

What my pitch was maybe in Georgetown

was about the cyborgs,

so I m really near to the topic.

Well, the point is, we have a sort of malleability,

and we have to not deny it.

What I am with the glasses

is really different from what I am without the glasses,

but I can embody the glasses in some way.

And the last frontier of technology

is going in the direction

of production of synthetic neurons.

So, we can implant our synthetic neuron in our brain.

And at this point,

we ll be like in the Theseus paradox.

The paradox is about the Theseus ship that, for Greece,

it s so important because it is a remembering of a battle

and they have to maintain it,

changing time by time good pieces and nails.

When the machine that is,

the ship that is maintained with this kind of substitution

will not be anymore the original ship.

This is our philosophical paradox

that say, how much is too much?

And these are not an easy solution.

So we can imagine,

and someone is imaging that we can substitute our neurons

with synthetic one.

And the problem is, at which point

what we have will be a sort of mummification

of our ourself [indistinct],

a copy of ourselves and not anymore ourself.

Well, at that point, when we will be on the machine,

we will be in the same condition of the machine

that now is degrading with our lack of human information.

We will have a copy of our ourself,

but the copy of ourself is not like ourself.

So I m sorry,

but I think that we cannot evolve in a non-living beings.

Yeah. Okay.

Well I dunno.

I dunno if I agree.

But anyway-

[Paula] Well, what do you think?

What do you think?

I don t know.

I mean, I just see that...

For instance, maybe you, Paolo,

you did this thing on technology in the 90s.

Paolo, you re an expert,

so you know much more than what I do about AI and machine.

I have a feeling that things are going so fast that,

and maybe it s my ignorance,

that I m not sure we can really know what this looks like

10, 20, 30 years from now.

Now, for instance, what are hallucinations.

When we say that a machine hallucinates, right?

And maybe you can explain that, Paolo.

I m not sure exactly that we would know now

what s gonna happen

if things keep going as fast as they re going now, you know?

Well, the unpredictable

of the technological trajectories are possible

but the effort of the human being is another one.

And I think that the hallucination

could be a good point to explain the difference.

Because, you know, when I make a large language model

and I asked the large language model question,

what the large language model be is a calculation.

And he brought an answer

that is a numerical answer

that is changing to a symbolic language one.

Well, and this is the limitation of the machine.

Everything that I asked to the machine

as a solution numerical that become language.

But the language is not coherent with the reality,

and so I can have something that the machine is saying

that does not exist,

and this is a hallucination.

If I ask something to you like before

about the idea of revolution,

you can answer like, I do not know.

Well, this is something that the machine cannot do.

And is also the root of philosophical understanding

from some of the stuff ongoing

about the knowledge of not knowledge.

And coming back to what Paula said before,

it s also one of the main patient of the humans,

the ignorance.

And so that could be a really interesting point

that we can use to go deep inside the study.

That s so interesting.

So maybe the day the ChatGPT

is gonna tell me, I don t know,

I should be worried.

Yeah.

Okay, that s good to know.

Listen, you re both referring a lot to language

as something that is defining for a human being,

and it is, both from a psychoanalytic point of view,

from your point of view,

but also from the point of view of the machine, right?

Because the machine learns through language.

The machine...

I mean, without language, the machine wouldn t exist.

And also language is so important

in defining the self and who we are

and the possibility to interact to each other, right?

So, exactly.

Can we maybe speak a little bit about the unifying language,

the unifying virtue of language.

What language means for us as human beings

and for the machines?

Well, for the machine,

I think that the answer is pretty straightforward,

and I think the Paolo can give it

very specifically and precisely.

I can speak about the significant language

for the human being,

because the particularity of human language

is not just that of communicating, right?

It s also the fact that that is conveying within it

also some effects,

something that cannot be said.

The particularity of an act of speech,

like the one that I m doing now,

is that if I start,

and I don t go on, right?

If I start a sentence right and I don t complete it,

you don t understand the meaning of my sentence.

That is to say there is a difference

between the process of enunciation

and the statement that comes out of it.

The effect of meaning is always in the aftermath

of the act of speech,

which brings about something that

of the order of a division.

Because not necessarily the thing that you understand

are the one that I intend to say,

and not necessary I say what I mean to say.

Because in the art of speech itself,

something emerges that is of the order of a shift

between enunciation and statement.

And it s precisely in this shift

that things that are unintended can occur

like the slip of the tongues, like parapraxis,

like, for instance, missing words.

And it s precisely there where something is missing,

and this is a particularity of the human language

that we find something that is not of the level

of the subjective awareness,

something of the level of the subjective unconscious.

So, you know, the unconscious is not in the depth,

the unconscious is on the tip of your tongue,

is in the slip of the tongue.

You know, Freud said it very lovely

in his, you know, trilogy

on the structure of the psychic causality.

That is that precisely,

the main entrance into the domain of the unconscious

is the slip the tongue.

It s something that we didn t mean to say,

and yet came out that expresses in reality, you know,

a feeling, a knowledge, an intention

that is completely diff different

from the one that we are aware of or we intended to convey.

So this split is the particularity of human language.

And in the sense, the language itself is,

you know, is an effect of, you know,

the structure of the psyche,

which is, in itself, inhabited by an unconscious.

You know, there is...

Speaking about philosophy,

we know perfectly well that there is, you know,

no selfish reflection can exhaust, you know,

the sense of human subjectivity.

It s impossible.

Our rational thinking doesn t exhaust our being.

And in fact, you know, when we think about Descartes,

who has the delusion of the possibility

of saying [speaking in foreign language].

Because I think I am.

Well, you know, the psychoanalytic revolution,

which is considered specifically as a copernican revolution,

you know, makes, you know, I think, column quote,

therefore I am, right?

So introduce a punctuation

that shows that there where I think, I m not,

and there where I am, I don t think, right?

So it s exactly...

This is a revolution.

So when we speak about algorithm,

I mean, the characteristic of human language

is precisely the fact that it can symbolize,

and the symbolic order allows for symbolization,

for instance, you know, all sorts of symbolization.

Symbolization in our social environment,

as well as for instance, in the biological order

that we read through science and writings and symbols,

as well as in mathematics.

And, you know, computer science is born

by the certain usage of mathematics, right?

Of translating into mathematics

and the algorithm information.

But as Paulo was saying before,

this information are numbers

that then needs to be translated, right?

This is so interesting, Paola.

You could go on like for two hours

and we would love to listen.

Paolo, what do you think about language

and what Paula just said is so interesting?

Well, the first thing is that the machine

is based on information.

And according to Shannon,

information is the difference that make the difference.

So that is not space from all the ulteriority,

if I can tell you that way,

or the adding to [indistinct] blessing,

to the speech act that is typical of the human beings.

So a machine cannot have something that is unconscious,

something that is not set.

If I said one, it s one, if I said zero, it s zero,

and the difference is made by that difference.

According to human language,

and to make short a long discussion, I read a book on that.

Language is, you know, technological art in fact

because we speak different language.

We are expressing our self English,

but my native tongue is Italian.

And so it s not something that other language is inside me.

And why we developed such kind of tools

like Italian or English?

Well the answer could be,

because when I say to you I m happy or I m sad,

I allow you to imagine something

that is not visible inside myself.

And so with language, I can instruct your imagination

and give to your imagination the ability

to see something that is not visible.

With language, we have a history.

If I talk to you about Napoleon,

I can let you imagine someone that is not present here.

Not dogs can bark about their parents.

Just we can talk about our parents.

And we can talk about our parents, as Paula said,

in a way that is made by expression

and in a way that is the absence of the expression

that is much more communicative

than not the expression, and so on.

And so language is the same invention

of the ability to invent something.

And this is what we make as creative

and make the machine simple and execution of someone else.

[Host] I mean-

The discussion is so fascinating,

but my flight is-

Paolo.

Paolo, thanks for being- It was great having you.

Really. Thank you.

We wanna thank you, Paolo,

for being with us- Thank you.

It was a pleasure. And have a great flight.

Thank you. Okay, thank you.

Thank you very much.

It was my pleasure,

Bye-bye. Thank you, thank you.

So to follow up on what Paolo is saying,

I want to say why I insisted on the standing position,

because I don t know if you ever reflected upon this,

but the standing position is what constitutes the border

between the human species and the other species?

Because locomotion appears to be a determining factor

in the biological evolution.

The fact that we are the only species

that walk on their feet, right?

What it means?

It means that the spine developed and crane developed

in such a way as to liberate the upper limbs, right?

And these up upper limbs are devoted to what?

To do.

To do, to making, to creating,

to producing tool, right?

80% of the cortex of the brain is...

80% of the cortex of the brain

is devoted to relation existing

between the crane and the upper limbs.

And the left parietal controls both,

all the organs related to speech and to the hands, right?

So it is extraordinary because in a sense,

is that the hand and the making of the hand is a prosthesis,

is a secretion of the brain,

of the brain into function.

So there is a particularity of human being

that has to do with the development of language

and the possibility of using the hands,

which I m using, to make things, to make tool.

That s why I am saying that, you know,

the particularity of the human being

is precisely to be a creator,

a poet that has the possibility of standing

and walking around and walking towards your horizon

because the drive to walk is also very, very important

in terms of creating and exploring new horizons,

exploring, you know, what is not there, right?

So that s very important.

I want to say one more thing regarding language

because it s very, very important

because he pointed out before,

we are all born with neuron.

And in this sense, I m sorry that Professor [indistinct]

was not able to be with us tonight

because he is a great neuroscientist who had,

you know, discovered, you know,

the premotor neurons that exist in the brain,

which allow for, let s say,

discover that there are certain neurons

that contain the very possibility

of the function of certain motorial functions, right?

So we, you know, these neurons are there, are in our brain,

and they re going to be,

they re ready to be used

even though the motorial action of the child

is still [indistinct], doesn t exist yet

because it s going to develop progressively

with the articulation of the physiology, right?

But they re there,

importance in order to be used when the development occurs.

In terms of language,

it s extraordinary to reflect on the fact

that every human being,

every infant of human being

is born with the produced position

of having a universal usage of all possible phonemes

existing in all languages.

Roman Jakobson had discovered this.

That an infant has a possibility of, you know,

articulating in his babbling

all sorts of sound contained in every human language, right?

Neurologically.

Except that with growing and with developing,

the articulation of his mother tongue,

he progressively loses the possibility

of articulating certain sounds.

In other words, there is a progressive atrophy,

a loss of the very possibility

of activating certain neurons, right?

So the impact of the mother tongue,

which obviously comes from the exchange of the infant

with the environment, with the collective,

implies, you know, instructional forgetting of things

that were potentially there.

Isn t it extraordinary?

Incredible.

Which is the reason why, for instance,

I would never be able to make a sound, you know,

I don t know, the [speaking in foreign language].

[indistinct] I try, but will never be able- Spanish.

Eugenia, I can t say it.

No, right, right.

That s so interesting.

Listen, I just also wanna leave then space for questions.

But before we were outside talking about

how interesting it was today

and how interesting it was the group discussion

that we listened to,

and you were telling me how important it is

to talk about representation,

representation of the real

and, for instance, making the invisible visible.

So from your perspective, what is your perspective on this?

Look, I was very, very intrigued by today s discussion.

It was very interesting to me.

I was very interested by the project

of making the visible invisible

done by the Australian group.

At the same time, it brought to mind to me

how this issue is constantly an open issue, right?

Because it is extremely difficult

to represent the real.

It brings to mind what each [indistinct] did.

You know, I dunno if you remember the anecdote

that each [indistinct] was asked

after the liberation of the camp.

[indistinct] was asked to take the [indistinct]

that s were coming from the shooting of the camps

and editing it in order to present it

to the American public, you know, as a document.

And he refused.

He refused because he said

that no matter what he would ve done,

it would ve turned out to look like fiction, okay?

So he refused.

For ethical reason,

he said, I don t want to do it, okay?

Which, what does it mean,

to look like fiction?

It means that something of the order

of an atrocity of the real.

At the very moment in which is represented

could acquire the quality of an imaginary

or symbolic representation

rather than, you know, offering us an access

to the real itself.

And which brought to mind

to me when I was listening to them

also what Claude Lanzmann said and did and sustain

regarding his documentary Shoah,

which is a masterpiece.

It s the most important documentary ever made on Shoah.

And where, as you remember, he refused radically

to show any pictures of the atrocity.

On the other hand, he interviewed at length,

at length all the survivors

and also those that, you know, were still alive.

That, for instance, the Polish people that were around,

et cetera, et cetera,

all the witnesses of what had happened.

You know that Lanzmann took a very radical position, right?

Which echos a little bit what Sontag says,

you know, in her book.

That is that, you know,

in order to transmit the power of the trauma of the real,

you cannot, you know, represented it into images,

but you have to stay with the words

of the witnesses, of the survivors.

And I think that it s a very complex issue

because it s also true that unfortunately,

we see that many representation in many images,

you know, attract a form of warism and exists...

I cannot not say this to you

because I see it.

For instance, look,

think about the, you know,

the videos that ISIS put online

on decapitations of the...

[indistinct] . Yes.

Unfortunately, you know,

for instance, I personally refuse to watch them

as an ethical decision.

[Host] Yeah, me too.

Right?

It was an ethical decision.

At the same time, unfortunately, I know a lot of people,

I mean, I heard some of my patients

speaking about it, right?

Because, obviously, we cannot not take into account

the fact, speaking about the drive that nobody speaks about,

that we are inhabited by certain drive

and we have certain satisfaction of the drive,

also in obscenity, in warism, right?

So as well as there are drives that are sadistic

or drive that are masochistic, right?

And these are not instinct, these are drives,

which is why I think that it will be very helpful

in order for us, especially with artists, you know,

to understand each other and to collectively work together

to have a measure and a significance of this element

in order to think together of, you know,

of what s, you know,

how to present thing.

So now that you re telling me about your project last year,

you know, I really appreciate it.

I understand the concern.

Last year, I made an exhibition,

the festival was dedicated [indistinct].

One of the exhibitions I curated was a white wall

where I decided not to show the photograph,

but just write the description

of what the photograph have had in it.

Now, I m conflicted on this subject

because I understand how difficult it is

and how, especially nowadays with these eternal scrolls

and the attention span

and the time that we dedicate

to these images of violence and terror,

which is not dignifying for the victims,

is not dignified for what s happening.

At the same time, I do still recognize

how impactful and powerful an image can be, you know?

So...

And again, you know, what I was trying to,

my point last year continues to be,

is to try to put also the responsibility

of what we see on us.

So us the viewer is like,

in which relation do you position yourself

to what you re seeing?

Right,

which is why I really appreciated very much

what Michael said before.

Obviously, Michael understands the issue

because he s on the field,

and I really appreciate it very much, his sensitivity.

Because on the one hand,

documenting is a necessity, right?

And collecting documentation,

I think that is very important.

But the question of how then, you know,

using this documentation,

it s a complete different study.

That s why I think that is very important for all of us

who have certain ethical sensitivity

to work collectively, to think about this issue.

From the different facets,

also, you know, from the facets

of the soul of the human being, if I can say it this way,

I mean, collecting for documenting is very important.

The project that they did in Australia,

I think that is very interesting that, you know,

this usage of fiction.

Because the usage of, after all is AI,

but is usage of fiction, right?

In order to give an image to words

that are so traumatized, right?

[Host] Yeah.

And well, and that, I can appreciate.

But that, I can see it as a singular project with the goal.

You see what I m saying?

That is a political goal

because it s very relevant in this case

that they have a name, a political name.

So I think that if we can use representation for,

in a discreet fashion in order to obtain certain goal,

political goal, it s very important.

It is the opposite

of being completely biopolitical manipulated as we are

with the bombardment of, you know-

[Host] Images.

The imaging, right? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, we have a thing to take,

again, possession of the means.

I agree a hundred percent.

Thank you. And to work collectively.

Thank you, Paula.

I just wanna leave some time if there are any questions.

So...

They re all scared to do...

It is such a difficult conversation to have

that I understand it might be difficult to ask questions.

But...

No questions.

[Paula] Okay.

Okay then.

Well, then thank you so much.

Paula, thank you, thank you. [crowd applauding]