Computationalism in a dynamic and distributed eco-cognitive perspective

The concepts of information, computation, and cognition are variously interpreted and explained, and still lead to ambiguous results. I will contend that seeing the evolutionary emergence in humans of information, meaning, and of the first kinds of cognition as the outcome of dynamic coevolutionary interactions between brain/mind internal processes, body itself, and external environment can be extremely useful (1) to clarify the most common misunderstandings and the basic vagueness of the concepts above, and (2) to appropriately describe “computation” as an evolving concept subjected to continuous transformations of meaning. To this aim, I will also take advantage of the dynamic concepts of salience and pregnance derived from Thom’s catastrophe theory. When physical computation is seen in the perspective of the ecology of cognition, it is easy to understand Turing’s original ideas concerning the emergence of information, cognition, and computation in organic, inorganic, and artefactual agents, I will also briefly illustrate in this chapter. I will show that seeing computation as dynamically active in distributed physical entities of various kinds suitably transformed so that data can be encoded and decoded to obtain appropriate results further sheds light on what I call eco-cognitive computationalism. I hope it will become clear that eco-cognitive computationalism does not aim at furnishing an ultimate and static definition of the concepts of information, cognition, and computation, such as a textbook could provide, instead it intends, by respecting their historical and dynamical character, to propose an intellectual framework that depicts how we can understand their forms of “emergence” and the modification of their meanings.