How to think about the mind? Prediction, Adaptation and Language

Predictive processing has become a popular tag to define mental processes in the recent past especially in mind and brain sciences. As much as it is computational, it is also behavioural in the sense that, the dominant theories ground their central claims to sensory engagement with the world. Language as an evolutionary cognitive tool for the mind has been of special significance to many since it connects thoughts, actions and consciousness to the environment. This externalisation of the mind has important consequences for how we have come to think about cognitive processes generally. I would like to present arguments and provide empirical support, taking bilingualism and cognition as a model to show that multiple languages in the environment tagged to different individuals show us the flexibility of adapting. The proposed lecture will also include the elaboration of a recent model that connects environmental diversity to cognitive processes, which extends beyond the domain of language. I would claim, moving away from traditional orthodoxy that, cognition of individuals constrained by cultures and core abilities is a dynamical adaptive system grounded to cues in the environment.

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