RICCARDO MANZOTTI is a Professor of Philosophy at IULM University in Milan, Italy. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at MIT. He holds a PhD in robotics, is the author of 50 papers on the basis of consciousness, artificial intelligence, machine consciousness and perception. He is the webmaster of consciousness.it and thespreadmind.com. His published work addresses the nature of the self and the meshing of technology and consciousness. Over a period of many months, The New York Review of Books Daily has posted an extended series of conversations between Manzotti and the novelist Tim Parks, in which the two attempt to dissect the nature of consciousness.

• 1.The Spread Mind1.1What, where and when is experience?1.2Experience is the object1.3I am world1.4A better object?1.5Nothing appears, everything takes place1.6Appearance is reality1.7Shangri-La2.The Spread Object2.1The fridge-light model of the object2.2Traditional and actual spread objects2.3Senses as multiple objects2.4Phenomenal is physical2.5The last Ptolemaic stand2.6Percipere est esse3.The causal geometry of experience3.1Stretching over space and time3.2Glass, mirrors and beyond3.3A storage-less model of memory3.4Dreams and hallucinations as spatiotemporal kaleidoscopes3.5The causal argument revisited3.6Return to Shangri-La4.Illusions4.1Proxy and alleged properties4.2Illusions as misbeliefs4.3A zoo of illusions4.4Benham's Top4.5A comparison with other accounts5.Hallucinations and dreams5.1Ordinary and extraordinary hallucinations5.2Gerrymandered objects and direct brain stimulation5.3Double preemption5.4A continuum – from objects to hallucinations5.5The common kind assumption6.A zoo of objects and experiences6.1The myth of endogenous mental experience6.2Phosphenes and blindness6.3Visual images and congenitally blinds6.4Geometric hallucinations6.5Impossible, forbidden and Martian colors6.6Additions and subtractions6.7Afterimages6.8The myth of supersaturated red6.9Filling in6.10Innate phantom limbs7.Joint causation and wholes7.1Actual existence7.2Objects and wholes7.3Joint causation7.4No time, no wholes7.5The cause of the cause is the effect8.The spread now8.1The present is not punctual8.2The spread now8.3Now is relative and multiple8.4Present is near past and past is far present8.5Pastness has no color8.6The time-gap argument8.7Time is an ocean, the present is its shore9.In nature, identity is the only relation9.1A is A9.2Thou shalt have no other relations before me9.3Kinds of representations9.4Brains as world makers10.Look at the universe and you'll see yourselfReferences

Praise for The Spread Mind"In The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One he strenuously denies that there is anything in the head but neurons and electrochemistry; the experience that constitutes our lives lies outside, one with the object, which is as it is thanks to the presence of our bodies and indeed our neurons. What is extraordinary is how systematically and engagingly Manzotti is able to reconcile this externalist and physicalist approach with the findings of neuroscience, the theory of relativity and even quantum mechanics." —The Guardian"The Spread Mind presents a game-changing idea, one that when recognized will take Riccardo Manzotti right to the top. . . . It is difficult, when considering work so conceptionally revolutionary as Riccardo Manzotti's, to know whether one is looking at the real thing or an abberration. After long reflection, I am convinced it is the real thing." —Tim Parks, author of In Extremis and Europa