Title: Eco-Cognitive Computationalism—From “Mimetic Minds” to Morphology-Based Enhancement of “Mimetic Bodies”
Abstract:Eco-cognitive computationalism sees computation as active in physical entities suitably transformed so that data can be encoded and decoded to obtain fruitful results. Turing's original intellectual p...Eco-cognitive computationalism sees computation as active in physical entities suitably transformed so that data can be encoded and decoded to obtain fruitful results. Turing's original intellectual perspective first of all clearly depicted the evolutionary emergence in humans of information, meaning, and of the first rudimentary forms of cognition, as the result of a complex interplay and simultaneous coevolution, in time, of the states of brain/mind, body, and external environment. At the same time it furnished the conceptual framework able to show how thanks to an imitation of the above process the subsequent invention of the Universal Practical Computing Machine is achieved, that computer that in the perspective offered by Turing I call "mimetic mind". It is by extending this framework that I think we can limpidly see that the recent emphasis on the simplification of cognitive and motor tasks generated in organic agents by morphological aspects implies—in robotics—the need not only of further "computational mimesis" of the related performances—when possible—but also the construction of appropriate "mimetic bodies" able to render the accompanied computation simpler, according to a general appeal to the "simplexity" of animal embodied cognition.Read More