360 GRADI MAGAZINE // March-April 2021

this matter and argues that consciousness
is a controlled hallucination, a
dream modulated by the senses.
It is obvious that a
description of this
kind immediately poses
problems for us.
When someone asks
me: “but does this
thing exist?” I answer
him: “yes I have seen
it, I have seen it myself
with my own eyes”.
This happens because we are convinced
that everything that our senses
and our cognitive system processes
and collects is certainly safe, but it is
not. Here then appears the concept of
consciousness as a controlled hallucination.
To better explain this idea, I refer to
the comic by Milo Manara, where he
is inspired by the script of a Fellini film
that the director has not been able to
make, not having had the time since
he died before. The screenplay, named
G. Mastorna’s Journey, has this plot: a
gentleman arrives by plane in a strange
city in an unidentified Asian country;
he lands, checks out, calls a taxi, goes
to the hotel, takes a shower and then
turns on the television. On television
they show images of the plane, with
which he arrived, which explodes and
crashes to the ground; the reporter
says they are all dead. Here is a gap in
the reality examination that oscillates
between the pole of reality and the
pole of fantasy, dream or unreality but
is usually compensated and harmonized
by the function of consciousness.
However, there are limit states in which
this capacity for harmonization gets
stuck or states of creative and artistic
inspiration, where there is space for a
fascinating narrative and screenplay
like the one described by Fellini in this
film, which unfortunately we have not
been able to see.
The assumption that consciousness is a
controlled hallucination
suggests
to us that what
we see, in large
part, are things
that we believe
we see and are convinced that we have
seen; this is so true to the point that
man since antiquity and the thought of
the history of philosophy have posed
this problem as primary. Plato wondered
and was convinced of the fallacy of
the senses; he believed that our beliefs
were credibly true when based on abstract
ideas. The Latin etymology of the
abstract term tells us that a belief is true
insofar as it is independent of the senses
that are fallacious. In other words,
if I say: “the triangle has three sides”, this
sentence, which belongs to the world
of abstract ideas, is very likely true because
I do not need with the senses to
count the three sides. The three sides
are already in the concept of a triangle,
everything else is fallacious. Descartes
also moved with his methodical approach
to doubt and asked himself: “How
can I be sure that my senses tell me the
truth?” To this end, he introduced the
concept of the deception of an evil genius:
“I see things and this evil genius cheats
me and
makes me
believe these
things are
true”. It follows
that the
relationship
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