Eccentric Computational Embodiments: Cognitive Domestication of External Entities

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.

Keywords

• morphological computation
• physical computation
• mimetic bodies
• computational substrates
• pancomputationalism
• simplexity