Causality, Meaningful Complexity and Embodied Cognition: (46 Theory and Decision Library A:)

Arturo Carsetti According to molecular Biology, true invariance (life) can exist only within the framework of ongoing autonomous morphogenesis and vice versa. With respect to this secret dialectics, life and cognition appear as indissolubly interlinked. In this sense, for instance, the inner articulation of conceptual spaces appears to be linked to an inner functional development based on a continuous activity of selection and “anchorage” realised on semantic grounds. It is the work of “invention” and g- eration (in invariance), linked with the “rooting” of meaning, which determines the evolution, the leaps and punctuated equilibria, the conditions related to the unfo- ing of new modalities of invariance, an invariance which is never simple repetition and which springs on each occasion through deep-level processes of renewal and recovery. The selection perpetrated by meaning reveals its autonomy aboveall in its underpinning, in an objective way, the ongoing choice of these new modalities. As such it is not, then, concerned only with the game of “possibles”, offering itself as a simple channel for pure chance, but with providing a channel for the articulation of the “ le” in the humus of a semantic (and embodied) net in order to prepare the necessary conditionsfor a continuousrenewal and recoveryof original creativity. In effect, it is this autonomy in inventing new possible modules of incompressibility whichdeterminestheactualemergenceofnew(andtrue)creativity,whichalsotakes place through the “narration” of the effected construction.

Table of Contents:
Consciousness, Intentionality and Self-Organization.- The Link Between Brain Learning, Attention, and Consciousness.- Emergence of Intentional Procedures in Self-Organizing Neural Networks.- Action Goal Representation and Action Understanding in the Cerebral Cortex.- Truth, Randomness and Impredicativity.- The Genesis of Mathematical Objects, Following Weyl and Brouwer.- Randomness, Determinism and Programs in Turing’s Test.- ?-Incompleteness, Truth, Intentionality.- Complexity, Incomputability and Emergence.- Leibniz, Complexity and Incompleteness.- Incomputability, Emergence and the Turing Universe.- Computational Models of Measurement and Hempel’s Axiomatization.- Impredicativity of Continuum in Phenomenology and in Non-Cantorian Theories.- Epistemic Complexity and Causality.- Reasons Against Naturalizing Epistemic Reasons: Normativity, Objectivity, Non-computability.- Some Remarks on Causality and Invariance.- Epistemic Complexity from an Objective Bayesian Perspective.- Embodied Cognition and Knowledge Construction.- The Role of Creativity and Randomizers in Human Cognition and Problem Solving.- The Emergence of Mind: A Dualistic Understanding.- Doing Metaphysics with Robots.- Knowledge Construction, Non-Standard Semantics and the Genesis of the Mind’s Eyes.