Cognition as Morphological/Morphogenetic Embodied Computation In Vivo
Entropy November 10, 2022 DOI: 10.3390/e24111576 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Embodied cognition Evolution Agency Autonomy Intelligence Morphological computing |
| Citations | 40 |
| Key points | Argues that cognition is a capacity of all living organisms, understood as a network of morphological computations from self-assembly and self-organization, challenging the human-centric view. |
Abstract
Cognition, historically considered uniquely human capacity, has been recently found to be the ability of all living organisms, from single cells and up. This study approaches cognition from an info-computational stance, in which structures in nature are seen as information, and processes (information dynamics) are seen as computation, from the perspective of a cognizing agent. Cognition is understood as a network of concurrent morphological/morphogenetic computations unfolding as a result of self-assembly, self-organization, and autopoiesis of physical, chemical, and biological agents. The present-day human-centric view of cognition still prevailing in major encyclopedias has a variety of open problems. This article considers recent research about morphological computation, morphogenesis, agency, basal cognition, extended evolutionary synthesis, free energy principle, cognition as Bayesian learning, active inference, and related topics, offering new theoretical and practical perspectives on problems inherent to the old computationalist cognitive models which were based on abstract symbol processing, and unaware of actual physical constraints and affordances of the embodiment of cognizing agents. A better understanding of cognition is centrally important for future artificial intelligence, robotics, medicine, and related fields.