Wild Architecture

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors focus on cognitive architectures that are developed with the intent to explain human cognition. The authors first describe the mission of cybernetics and early cognitive architectures and recount the popular criticism that these perspectives fail to provide genuine explanations of cognition. Moving forward, the authors propose that there are three pervasive problems that modern cognitive architectures must address: the problem of consciousness, the problem of embodiment, and the problem of representation. Wild Systems Theory (Jordan, 2013) conceptualizes biological cognition as a feature of self-sustaining embodied context that manifests itself at multiple, nested, time-scales. In this manner, Wild Systems Theory is presented as a particularly useful framework for coherently addressing the problems of consciousness, embodiment, and representation.