Eccentric Computational Embodiments: Cognitive Domestication of External Entities

Lorenzo Magnani

doi:10.3390/proceedings2020047036

Abstract

Eco-cognitive computationalism sees computation in context, adopting the intellectual visions advanced by the cognitive science perspectives on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. It is in this framework that we can fruitfully study the relevance in recent computer science devoted to the simplification of cognitive and motor tasks generated in organic entities by the morphological aspects. Ignorant bodies can be cognitively “domesticated” to become useful “mimetic bodies'', which originate eccentric new computational embodiments capable of rendering an involved computation simpler and more efficient. On the basis of these considerations, we will also see how the concept of computation changes, being related to historical and contextual factors, so that the “emergence'' of new kinds of computations can be epistemologically clarified, such as the one regarding morphological computation. Finally, my presentation will introduce and discuss the concept of overcomputationalism, as intertwined with the traditional concepts of pancognitivism, paniformationalism, and pancomputationalism, seeing them in a more naturalized intellectual disposition, more appropriate to the aim of bypass ontological or metaphysical overstatements.

Highlights

The recent emphasis on the simplification of cognitive and motor tasks generated in organic agents by morphological aspects implies—once exploited in robotics—the construction of appropriate mimetic bodies able to render an accompanied and integrated computation simpler, according to a general appeal to the simplexity of animal embodied cognition, which stresses possible complementary relationships between complexity and simplicity
Recent rich and informed studies fruitfully aim at disambiguating the concept of digital computation in contemporary cognitive science, by illustrating how digital computation is implemented in physical systems: these studies do not end up in pancomputationalism, that is, the view that every physical system is a digital computing one and can be described in computational terms
A computer is a physical system with actual constituent parts and its own internal interactions that take it from one physical state to another

Summary

Building Computational Mimetic Bodies through Morphology-Based Enhancing

The recent emphasis on the simplification of cognitive and motor tasks generated in organic agents by morphological aspects implies—once exploited in robotics—the construction of appropriate mimetic bodies able to render an accompanied and integrated computation simpler, according to a general appeal to the simplexity of animal embodied cognition, which stresses possible complementary relationships between complexity and simplicity. It is first of all necessary to illustrate various aspects of the so-called physical computation

A Computer Is a Physical System

Morphological Computation