Dalla logica della scoperta alla scoperta della coscienza

With his imitation game Turing suggests an intuitive way to consider the artificial artifacts from the point of view of their performances. Such a criterion concerns also the conditions under which human beings can regard an artificial entity as intelligent. Is the imitation game, or the notion of imitation proposed by Turing, already valid for contemporary research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science? Starting from the Hoftstadter’s article on creating something in «the style of», I try to discuss the case of artificial scientific discovery. Moreover, even though there is not a problem of consciousness in Turing, I suggest that what could make the project of building a very intelligent system, able to create or discovery something in a deep sense, hard, could be the difficulty to solve the problem of consciousness from an artificial point of view and from the perspective of neuroscience.