Abstract

In this paper, a line is drawn from sensation to understanding, insofar as the need to recalibrate the construct of representation can find a proper allocation if we understand it as the raw material of understanding. Representation, sensorially defined and fully limited in its possibilities by the constraints of body structure, emerges from a particular kind of sensorimotor dynamic, namely the sensorimotor practice shared between multiple agents. This practice tends towards the optimisation of signals, which coagulate in interaction into communicative invariances (the gestures) and which determine the emergence of meaning. The latter, before being a manifest image experienced and understood by the agents, is a normative practice, which implements a continuous regulation of the members of a group, precisely in the reiteration of effective sensorimotor interactions and sanctioning those that are ineffective or harmful. In a reinterpretation of the Social Brain Hypothesis, the importance of socially effective sensorimotor invariances has required more and more computational matter over time, in order to prolong the cognitive permanence of shared effective sensorimotor patterns in the community of agents, and the simulative capacities, antecedent to the representational capacities, have expanded the predictive possibilities to the point of bringing out manifest images useful for effectively modulating one’s own image in a persuasive function.