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Beyond Mind: How Brains Make up Artificial Cognitive Systems

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Abstract

What I call semiotic brains are brains that make up a series of signs and that are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds” and so in thinking intelligently. An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of disembodiment of mind that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underling the semiotic emergence of meaning processes. Indeed at the roots of sophisticated thinking abilities there is a process of disembodiment of mind that presents a new cognitive perspective on the role of external models, representations, and various semiotic materials. Taking advantage of Turing’s comparison between “unorganized” brains and “logical” and “practical” machines” this paper illustrates the centrality to cognition of the disembodiment of mind from the point of view of the interplay between internal and external representations, both mimetic and creative. The last part of the paper describes the concept of mimetic mind I have introduced to shed new cognitive and philosophical light on the role of computational modeling and on the decline of the so-called Cartesian computationalism.

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Notes

  1. A configuration is a state of a discrete machinery.

  2. I studied the role of diagrams in mathematical reasoning endowed both of mirroring and creative roles (Magnani and Dossena 2003). I also think this discussion about external and internal representations can be used to enhance the Representational Redescription model introduced by Karmiloff-Smith (1992), that accounts for how these levels of representation are generated in the infant mind.

  3. “One’s thoughts are what he is ‘saying to himself’, that is saying to that other self that is just coming to life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it that critical self that one is trying to persuade: and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly in the nature of language” (Peirce CP, 5.421).

  4. Consciousness arises as “a sort of public spirit among the nerve cells” (Peirce, 1.354).

  5. Cf. for example the contributions contained in recent special issue of the journal Semiotica 153 (1/4) devoted to abduction and edited by Queiroz and Merrell.

  6. On the recent achievements in the area of the machine discovery simulations of model-based creative tasks cf. Magnani, Nersessian, and Pizzi (2002).

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Magnani, L. Beyond Mind: How Brains Make up Artificial Cognitive Systems. Minds & Machines 19, 477–493 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-009-9171-5

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