Active materials: minimal models of cognition?

Abstract

Work on minimal cognition raises a variety of questions concerning the boundaries of cognition. Many discussions of minimal cognition assume that the domain of minimal cognition is a subset of the domain of the living. In this article, I consider whether non-living ‘active materials’ ought to be included as instances of minimal cognition. I argue that seeing such cases as ‘minimal models’ of (minimal) cognition requires recognising them as members of a class of systems sharing the same basic features and exhibiting the same general patterns of behaviour. Minimal cognition in this sense is a very inclusive concept: rather than specifying some threshold level of cognition or a type of cognition found only in very simple systems, it is a concept of cognition associated with very minimal criteria that pick out only the most essential requirements for a system to exhibit cognitive behaviour.

Field-Induced Assembly and Propulsion of Colloids

“…Colloids are uniquely suited for identifying and quantifying such concepts, by filling the gap in available experimental models. Straddling the void between living and nonliving, order and disorder, and randomness and determinism is also a way to inquire and hopefully find answers to basic questions on the definition of life and consciousness. , …”

Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior

“…All biological and artificial materials and machines strike careful but different balances between many competing performance requirements. By drawing on advances in chemistry, materials science, and synthetic biology, a wider range of material, chemical and biotic building blocks are emerging, such as metamaterials and active matter (Silva et al, 2014;Bernheim-Groswasser et al, 2018;McGivern, 2019;De Nicola et al, 2020;Pishvar and Harne, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020), novel chemical compounds (Gromski et al, 2020), and computerdesigned organisms (Kriegman et al, 2020). These new building blocks may in turn allow artificial or natural evolutionary pressures to design hybrid systems that set new performance records for speed, dexterity, metabolic efficiency, or intelligence, while easing unsatisfying metabolic, biomechanical and adaptive tradeoffs.…”

Mind the matter: Active matter, soft robotics, and the making of bio-inspired artificial intelligence

“…Of course, what is central to the discussion of fine-grained functionalism is the connection between these active material processes and prototypical instances of cognition, such as goal-directedness, memory, learning, agency, systematic directionality, and so on. As it happens, recent work on active materials has begun to show the variety of ways in which some individual—and sometimes multiple—capacities are present in non-living systems, a discovery that has led some to speculate that AMP is revealing not only the physics of life (Popkin, 2016 ), but the physics of cognition as well (McGivern, 2020 ). To wrap up the discussion of AMP, then, we make a more direct connection to work on basal cognition and the concept of existential needs introduced above.…”

“…Here, we hope to cast doubt on the (un)happy divorce between material and cognitive processes by suggesting that looking toward recent developments in soft robotics (Man and Damasio, 2019 ; Blackiston et al, 2021 ; Bongard and Levin, 2021 ; Kaspar et al, 2021 ; Kriegman et al, 2021 ), active matter physics (Hanczyc and Ikegami, 2010 ; Needleman and Dogic, 2017 ; McGivern, 2020 ; Egbert, 2021 ), and basal cognition research (Lyon, 2006 , 2015 ; Van Duijn et al, 2006 ; Newman, 2016 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 ; Levin, 2019 , 2020 ; Bechtel and Bich, 2021 ; Lyon et al, 2021 ) complicates any cleaving of cognition from its living, material context. In light of recent empirical advancements, we argue now is a good time to revisit our philosophical assumptions regarding the MR of the cognitive and suggest that a more promising path in the development of AR and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is to take the materiality of cognition more , not less, seriously—a position explicitly disallowed in standard philosophical positions on MR. Our argument thus consists of two interlocked moves: first, we identify a set of assumptions that structure the debate on MR and that generate strong intuitions regarding the mental-physical interaction that have historically discouraged taking the materiality of cognition seriously.…”