8.5 Gianfranco Basti – L’io, la persona e la personalità

In this contribution I sketch the principles of a dual anthropology, typical of an intentional approach to cognitive sciences, which is common both to the scholastic tradition and to the phenomenological one. Of this dual anthropology I will offer, besides a metaphysical foundation, also a physic-mathematical one, based on the distinction between energy and information, which defines living beings, and humans in particular, as open systems entertaining a continuous mutual exchange of energy and of information generation with the physical and human environment. This is why the mind and its superior functions (namely, intellect and will) are not located “in” the brain, but rather in the interface between the brain and its environment, so much so that the notion of “person”, defined as an individual open to intersubjective relationships, receives a foundation capable of embracing in an harmonious synthesis – in spite of the modern schizophrenia typical of every dualism between “matter” and “spirit”, “physics” and “metaphysics”, “science” and “humanism” – the outcomes of modern science and the core of the great metaphysical traditions, no matter the further contingent religious and cultural differences. Even faith, for a Christian believer, is going to cease, but charity is not.