Floridi's informational structural realist basis for info-computational modelling of cognizing agents

Journal article, 2014

Informational structural realism, ISR (Floridi, 2008a), describes the reality as a complex informational structure for an epistemic agent interacting with the universe by the exchange of data as constraining affordances. In conjunction with naturalist computationalism – the view that the dynamics of the nature can be understood as computation – Floridi's ISR presents a basis for the construction of the unified framework of info-computationalism. In this framework, the fundamental mechanism of all natural computation is morphological computation, expressed as a process of information self-organisation, with information structure understood in the sense of Floridi's ISR. Recently, in robotics, morphological computing has been used for decentralised embodied control of robots. In this article, we describe how appropriate body morphology saves information-processing (computation) resources as well as enables learning through self-structuring of information in an epistemic, cognizing agent.