Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research suggests that post-cognitivist and computationalist paradigms are not necessarily incompatible. Here, we provide further support in favour of this proposition. Specifically, we demonstrate that it is possible to provide an implementation of two relevant verbal theories, Autopoietic Theory and Mechanistic Computation, that can analyse the AND-gate in Game of Life from the point of view of an autopoietic observer, identifying unities that show the property of either autopoiesis, mechanistic computation, or both. The explicit implementation also highlights the kind of considerations that a formalisation of a computational post-cognitivist theory has to address, which are not necessarily apparent from verbal theories alone.