Intelligence and Reference

Abstract

Abstract. 1 In a seminal work published in 1952, "The chemical basis of morphogenesis" -considered as the true start point of the modern theoretical biology -, A. M. Turing established the core of what today we call "natural computation" in biological systems, intended as self-organizing dynamic systems. In this contribution we show that the "intentionality", i.e., the "relation-to-object" characterizing biological morphogenesis and cognitive intelligence, as far as it is formalized in the appropriate ontological interpretation of the modal calculus (formal ontology), can suggest a solution of the reference problem that formal semantics is in principle unable to offer, because of Gödel and Tarski theorems. Such a solution, that is halfway between the "descriptive" (Frege) and the "causal" (Kripke) theory of reference, can be implemented only in a particular class of self-organizing dynamic systems, i.e., the dissipative chaotic systems characterizing the "semantic information processing" in biological and neural systems.