Retrospection and future perspectives

As the concluding chapter, the story of the book’s content is revisited and summarized. Essentially, our embodied minds come into being due to an evolutionary predisposed cognitive developmental process, which builds progressively more abstract, conceptual, compositional predictive encodings based on actively gathered sensorimotor experiences. The chapter also acknowledges several under-represented, but important topics in cognitive science. Finally, the matter of consciousness is addressed, emphasizing that the mind emerges from a recurrent, self-maintaining, and self-regulating system, that is, our brain–body system. Combined with developing self-referential, social, event-oriented, conceptualizing predictive encodings, self-reflective cognition becomes possible. We conclude that despite pursuing a computational approach to embodied cognitive science, cognitive models in this direction are just at their beginning. Future cognitive modeling efforts promise to shed much further light on the exact details about how our minds come into being and how we may create useful, artificial, cognitive systems in the future.