Life is precious because it is precarious: Individuality, mortality, and the problem of meaning.
Keywords:
Teoría computacional de la mente, ciencia cognitiva, filosofía de la mente, fenomenología, individualidadAbstract
Computationalism aspires to provide a comprehensive theory of life and mind. It fails in this task because it lacks the conceptual tools to address the problem of meaning. I argue that a meaningful perspective is enacted by an individual with a potential that is intrinsic to biological existence: death. Life matters to such an individual because it must constantly create the conditions of its own existence. For that individual to actively adapt, rather than to passively disintegrate. I introduce two ancient foreign worldviews that assign a constitutive role to death. Then I trace the emergence of a similar conception of mortality from the cybernetics era to the ongoing development of enactive cognitive science. Finally, I analyze why orthodox computationalism has failed to grasp the role of mortality in this constitutive way.
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