Making cognition: a mechanism account of the way humans develop the ability to build and alter their environments

Human building activity – the making of new tools, materials, artifacts, external representations, scientific models, instruments etc., and the systematic recombination of these to reshape the environment – has significantly damaged the planet’s biosphere and climate. New engineering design approaches – such as green energy and circular economies – have been proposed to contain the environmental effects of humans’ runaway making activity. Parallel to these efforts to change the external nature of making, we also need to characterize – and eventually reshape – the internal mechanisms underlying human making behavior itself, particularly now that generative-AI is set to radically change and accelerate making. As a starting point to develop such an internal characterization of making, we present an account of the cognitive mechanisms that lead up to human making, and show how changes to these mechanisms enable further making, thus creating a recursive loop that promotes runaway making. We discuss some theoretical implications of this account.