ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the conceptual foundations of automatism and its role in the mind across possible worlds. Automatism describes a property of real systems and the automated production of specific relations of input–output from machine computation. Automatism as the set of things in the world that govern automatic real systems demonstrates the properties of control and action. Automatism encompasses things in the world that can move or act in by themselves in a mechanical sense. Automatons are important for the coordination of movement or action at the level of the cultural system in the physical world. The automation of control and action as a mental and physical property in the world contributes to understanding of the culture as a physical system. The concept of automatism is explored in various ways to illustrate how the automation of mental and machine computation is necessary for the production of culture.
