RoR applications of knowledge representation, computational reasoning, and simulation

Mauro Maldonato is currently organizing a conference in Potenza (Italy), focused on the investigation of the relationship between conciousness and scientific knowledge. Because conciousness has a number of definitions, I thought that the following excerpts from Johnson's article "We Are Live Creatures: Embodiment, American Pragmatism, and the Cognitive Organism" would be a nice introduction to the topic.

There is no rupture in experience between perceiving, feeling, and thinking ... Embodiment theory inherits several key tenets of how [...] Pragmatist philosophers viewed cognition:
(1) Embodied cognition is the result of the evolutionary processes of variation, change, and selection.
(2) Embodied cognition is situated within a dynamic ongoing organism-environment relationship.
(3) Embodied cognition is problem-centered, and it operates relative to the needs, interests, and values of organisms.
(4) Embodied cognition is not concerned with finding some allegedly perfect solution to a problem, but one that works well enough relative to the current situation.
(5) Embodied cognition is often social and carried out cooperatively by more than one individual organism.

These principles are in line with the idea that language and abstract reasoning are inherently social and cultural activities. In other words, human understanding and thinking is not the activity of a single individual, but it is in synchrony with the social environment surrounding it. This is probably more evident in our times than ever before, specially given the advent of on-line communities and social networks. Of importance, this social medium obviously permeates the way we do science, where communities of scientists are absolutely influential in the way scientists reason and think about their fields and findings. Johnson actually summarizes this idea very nicely with a word of caution toward our next steps in the field:

having challenged the “inner mind” versus “outer body” split, we must not then proceed to replace it with another equally problematic dichotomy—that between the “individual” and the “social.” We must recognize that cognition does not take place only within the brain and body of a single individual, but instead is partly constituted by social interactions and relations.