On What Makes Certain Dynamical Systems Cognitive: A Minimally Cognitive Organization Program

Abstract

Dynamicism has provided cognitive science with important tools to understand some aspects of "how cognitive agents work" but the issue of "what makes something cognitive" has not been sufficiently addressed yet, and, we argue, the former will never be complete without the later. Behavioristic characterizations of cognitive properties are criticized in favor of an organizational approach focused on the internal dynamic relationships that constitute cognitive systems. A definition of cognition as adaptive-autonomy in the embodied and situated neurodynamic domain is provided: the compensatory regulation of a web of stability dependencies between sensorimotor structures, is created and preserved during a historical/developmental process. We highlight the functional role of emotional embodiment: internal bioregulatory processes coupled to the formation and adaptive regulation of neurodynamic autonomy. Finally, we discuss a "minimally cognitive behavior program" in evolutionary simulation modelling suggesting that much is to be learned from a complementary "minimally cognitive organization program".

Autonomy and Enactivism: Towards a Theory of Sensorimotor Autonomous Agency

“…Etc. Miguel Aguilera (2015) has done an excellent job, expanding upon previous work by Di Paolo (2003Paolo ( , 2008, Barandiaran and Moreno (2006b) and Barandiaran (2008). studied large-scale neuronal coordination without targeting the role of sensorimotor dynamics .…”

“…One way to identify this path is by highlighting that mental life is unlike other forms of life (particularly biological life) and that the analogy between life and mind need not imply a reductive (or identity) continuity thesis between the biological and the cognitive. In fact I have long advocated for a ''biology = cognition'' thesis-see (Barandiaran and Moreno 2006b) but particularly (Barandiaran 2008, Chapters 7-8). In turn, this approach distinguishes itself from the more traditional notion of operational closure of the nervous system by assuming that cognitive autonomy is constitutively sensorimotor; i.e.…”

“…For monists such higher order ensembles appear always subordinated to the one and only form of autonomy that ultimately anchors the normative and regulatory principles of the higher orders (see Christensen and Hooker 2000 for a prototypical example). A pluralist approach opens the way to conceive of different types of autonomy: the autonomy of the cell (Bechtel 2007a;Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno 2004), the autonomy of multicellular organisms (Arnellos et al 2014;Rosslenbroich 2009), the autonomy of behaviour (Barandiaran 2004;Barandiaran and Moreno 2006b;Smithers 1997), the autonomy of inter-subjective interaction (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007;De Jaegher et al (2010) the autonomy of the social (Luhmann 1986(Luhmann , 1995, or the political (Adams 2007;Castoriadis 1997), etc. At each level a new phenomenological domain is opened, new forms of identity and novel types of norms emerge.…”

“…Ten years ago I started to develop this line of research 11 in order to rescue a notion of autonomy that is valid and complementary to the sensorimotor nature of our mental lives (Barandiaran 2004(Barandiaran , 2007Barandiaran and Moreno 2006b). One way to identify this path is by highlighting that mental life is unlike other forms of life (particularly biological life) and that the analogy between life and mind need not imply a reductive (or identity) continuity thesis between the biological and the cognitive.…”

Autonomy: A Review and a Reappraisal

“…Bickhard (2000), for example, holds that an autonomous system is one which actively contributes to its own persistence and that "autonomy in this sense is a graded concept: there are differing kinds and degrees of such 'active contributions'". Barandiaran and Moreno (2006) outline another promising approach when they write that "while self-organization appears when the (microscopic) activity of a system generates at least a single (macroscopic) constraint, autonomy implies an open process of self-determination where an increasing number of constraints are selfgenerated".…”