Demarcating cognition: the cognitive life sciences

Abstract

This paper criticizes the role of intuition-based ascriptions of cognition that are closely related to the ascription of mind. This practice hinders the explication of a clear and stable target domain for the cognitive sciences. To move forward, the proposal is to cut the notion of cognition free from such ascriptions and the intuition-based judgments that drive them. Instead, cognition is reinterpreted and developed as a scientific concept that is tied to a material domain of research. In this reading, cognition becomes a changeable theoretical concept that can and must be adapted to the findings within this target domain. Taking humans as the best-established existing example of the relevant material target domain, this central case is extended to include all living systems. To clarify what it is about living systems that warrants their role as cognitive target domain, the new concept of cobolism is introduced as a complement to metabolism. Cobolism refers to the systematic ways in which each living system encompasses structures, processes and external events that maintain the fundamental metabolic processes that constitute the core of each living system. Cobolism is perfectly general, applies to bacterial and human cases alike, and provides a general format to describe wildly different cognitive organizations. It provides a clear target for the cognitive sciences to work on, turning them into what we can call the cognitive life sciences.

Reframing cognition: getting down to biological basics

“…Today the data are oceanic and meaning seems impossible without machine learning to detect relevant patterns. Defining cognition can even seem unnecessary, leaving its articulation a matter of scientific progress [39,40]. However, we do not have that luxury in this case.…”

Uncovering cognitive similarities and differences, conservation and innovation

“…The constitutive cells must both create and maintain this environment and, in general, act in ways that benefit this whole. Both the global orchestration of the activity of these inner multitudes-involving what we can call the organizing bureaucracy-as well as the activities of the 'inbodied' individual cells provide major targets for basal cognition [20]. The papers in this section focus on the global level and the signalling that transform these multicellulars into such new individuals.…”

The brain as a dynamically active organ

“…Not everyone agrees on what is to be understood by the term "cognition" [38][39][40]. As cognition, in its neuroscientific sense, refers to a process, the latin verb cognoscere, meaning to think, learn, know, realize or become aware of something, can provide us with a starting point for a scientifically useful definition.…”

“…1D) distinction between perception, integration and action dissolves [4]. Perhaps the recent broadening of the use of 'cognition' is indicative of this demarcation problem [39].…”