Elena Monai

Consciousness neuroscience is an expanding contemporary field driven by cutting-edge research embracing translational neuroscience and clinical neurology. Yet its central questions have roots that extend back to ancient philosophy, from the Socratic imperative to “know thyself”, Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”, James “stream of consciousness”, to the contemporary debates about the “hard problem” of consciousness. New challenges are now arising from AI and robotics, whose artificial systems for perception, sensorimotor interaction, cognitive function, and self-modeling reopen the foundational question of what distinguishes intelligence and function from subjective experience. I propose a historical and educational framework for understanding consciousness neuroscience as an evolving dialogue between philosophy, medicine, neuroscience and now, technology. Within this evolving paradigm, neurology continues to play a fundamental role in inspiring, testing, and applying new discoveries. Philosophy provides the foundational questions: What is subjective experience? What is the self? Clinical neurology transformed these questions from abstract problems into human, observable, and testable phenomena by revealing conditions in which consciousness is lost or fragmented. These include coma, sleep, anesthesia, seizures with impaired awareness, post-stroke anosognosia, neglect, dementia, delirium, and dissociative states. In this sense, neurological patients provide some of the most powerful human experiments for studying the dimensions of consciousness. Modern tools, including intracranial electrodes, functional neuroimaging, perturbational approaches, and computational modeling, allow clinical alterations of consciousness to be mapped onto neural correlates and mechanisms. More recently, AI and robotics are introducing a new wave of conceptual and scientific challenges, by generating artificial systems capable of human brain-like functions, providing technological experiments to test what distinguishes intelligence from experience, report from awareness, simulation from subjectivity, and functional agency from lived embodiment. Brain-computer interface technologies are then creating new possibilities for decoding, modulating and, potentially, restoring brain functions. In this evolving transformative paradigm, neurology remains both a catalyst and an application field for groundbreaking discoveries for a neuroscience of consciousness aiming ultimately to improve the lives of human patients. This historical perspective emphasizes that consciousness neuroscience blossomed through the continued interaction of philosophical questions, clinical observations, neural data, and now artificial models, placing it in a unique position within neuroscience. Teaching this history may help neurology trainees understand consciousness as one of the most compelling contemporary neuroscientific and clinical problems: what makes the human brain a system capable not merely of processing information, but of having subjective experience? Why are pieces of consciousness lost in certain neurological diseases and not in others? Will computer-brain interfaces be able to enhance/recover them?