Info-computational Constructivism

Context: At present we lack both a common understanding of the process of cognition in living organisms (with or without a nervous system and brain) and the details of the construction of knowledge in embodied, embedded cognizing agents in general, including future artifactual intelligent agents under development, such as cognitive robots and softbots. The info-computational approach is focused on the mechanisms behind the observed phenomena understood as computational processes on informational structures and it is used to study cognition in both living organisms and cognitive artifacts. It supports the views of radical constructivism that knowledge is actively constructed by an agent and shows how this process can be modeled. In the context of computationalism, among constructivists, von Foerster was prominent for his pioneering contributions to bio-computing and his view that the human brain computes. In that sense, von Foerster was a predecessor of natural computing and in particular bio-computing.