Computational Modelling: a Language Game of Situated Cultural Practices

This paper defends that from macroscale human computation, it does not follow that microscale processes involve ontological properties of macroscale computation. Section 1 critically assesses and rejects computational realism, i.e. that computational models have an independent reality. Section 2 expounds that even on a deflated computational realism of mind-machine metaphor shaping scientific progress, other metaphors, that preserve the complexity properties of an open system, are preferable. Section 3, drawing from radical enactivism, builds theory characterising computation, including computational modelling, as a sophisticated human activity that requires enculturated full agency and skilled training. Computational modelling depends upon enactive cultural practices allowing for developing and employing diverse kinds of computational language games to understand neurobiological systems. Section 4, then, employs one kind: complex systems theory is a suited modelling formalism for systems neurobiology and its emerging enactive cultural human practices such as computation, and specifically, scientific computational modelling as means of understanding micro-scale neurobiological systems.