Of what is “minimal cognition” the half-baked version?

Adaptive Behavior, 2019

This special issue highlights the work of some recent participants of a series of Minimal Cognition workshops held at the University of Wollongong in 2018. The goal of these workshops has been to showcase the interdisciplinary work being done in what might be called 'minimal cognition research.' Our aim was, and continues to be, to bring biologists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists into dialogue on how we might understand the minimal criteria for cognition and cognitive behavior. This special issue, titled "Approaching Minimal Cognition," is intended to open up further exchange between the different fields converging on this richly interesting area of research, and to spur debate and discussion about the roots of cognition, the indicators of cognitive behavior, collective cognition, and the possibility of life-mind continuity.

Adaptive Behavior, 2006

Within the cognitive sciences, cognition tends to be interpreted from an anthropocentric perspective, involving a stringent set of human capabilities. Instead, we suggest that cognition is better explicated as a much more general biological phenomenon, allowing the lower bound of cognition to extend much further down the phylogenetic scale. We argue that elementary forms of cognition can already be witnessed in prokaryotes possessing a functional sensorimotor analogue of the nervous system. Building on a case-study of the Escherichia coli bacterium and its sensorimotor system, the TCSTsystem, we home in on the characteristics of minimal cognition, and distinguish it from more basic forms of ontogenetic adaptation. In our view, minimal cognition requires an embodiment consisting of a sensorimotor coupling mechanism that subsumes an autopoietic organization; this forms the basis of the growing consensus that the core of cognition revolves around sensorimotor coupling. We discuss the relevance of our interpretation of minimal cognition for the study of cognition in general.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

The premise of this two-part theme issue is simple: the cognitive sciences should join the rest of the life sciences in how they approach the quarry within their research domain. Specifically, understanding how organisms on the lower branches of the phylogenetic tree become familiar with, value and exploit elements of an ecological niche while avoiding harm can be expected to aid understanding of how organisms that evolved later (including Homo sapiens ) do the same or similar things. We call this approach basal cognition. In this introductory essay, we explain what the approach involves. Because no definition of cognition exists that reflects its biological basis, we advance a working definition that can be operationalized; introduce a behaviour-generating toolkit of capacities that comprise the function (e.g. sensing/perception, memory, valence, learning, decision making, communication), each element of which can be studied relatively independently; and identify a (necessarily inc...

2016

Published in BioSystems (2016), 148, 12-21. Co-authored with Alvaro Moreno In this paper we address the question of minimal cognition by investigating the origin of some crucial cognitive properties from the very basic organisation of biological systems. More specifically, we propose a theoretical model of how a system can distinguish between specific features of its interaction with the environment, which is a fundamental requirement for the emergence of minimal forms of cognition. We argue that the appearance of this capacity is grounded in the molecular domain, and originates from basic mechanisms of biological regulation. In doing so, our aim is to provide a theoretical account that can also work as a possible conceptual bridge between Synthetic Biology and Artificial Intelligence. In fact, we argue, Synthetic Biology can contribute to the study of minimal cognition (and therefore to a minimal AI), by providing a privileged approach to the study of these mechanisms by means of artificial systems.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2015

What is minimal intelligence? Generally speaking, our understanding of intelligence has to do with sets of biological functions of organisms that exhibit a degree of flexibility against contingencies in their environment-induced behavioral repertoire. In principle, sensory perception, sensory-motor coordination, basic forms of learning and memory, decision-making and problem solving, are all marks of minimal intelligence subject to scrutiny with the toolkit of the cognitive sciences. The bottom line is that an appraisal of the behavioral repertoire of eukaryotes, and of the organizational features that sustain it, resists an interpretation in reactive, non-cognitive, terms. Despite the manifest diversity in the behavior of animals, plants, fungi and protists, and the functional specialization of different eukaryote cells, cellular organization based on the division into a nucleus and a cytoplasm allows for the genomic collaboration in the overall guidance of the response patterns to be observed, for example, in growth and development. However, understanding the expression of overt behavior at the level of its eukaryote cellular basis, or unearthing connections between behavior and genes, are but one piece of the puzzle. The research program requires, not only that we assess the cellular changes to be associated with, say, behavioral flexibility, but also the direct comparison across organisms with an eye to highlighting similarities and differences in the behavior of eukaryotes. The objective is ultimately to obtain a general picture of the capacity of organisms to solve problems in novel, often stressful, situations that enable them to deal with variable and complex environmental circumstances. By anchoring and comparing minimal, and yet robust, forms of behavior both functionally and structurally, the ability of organisms to learn from previous experiences, to predict future stresses, and to shape as well as to select suitable environments will be better appraised. The fact that eukaryotes effectively exhibit minimal forms of intelligence might not be breaking news. In effect, the list of minimally intelligent organisms may well include E.coli and other prokaryotes (

Biology & Philosophy , 2021

A mark of the cognitive should allow us to specify theoretical principles for demar-cating cognitive from non-cognitive causes of behaviour in organisms. Specific criteria are required to settle the question of when in the evolution of life cognition first emerged. An answer to this question should however avoid two pitfalls. It should avoid overintellectualising the minds of other organisms, ascribing to them cognitive capacities for which they have no need given the lives they lead within the niches they inhabit. But equally it should do justice to the remarkable flexibility and adap-tiveness that can be observed in the behaviour of microorganisms that do not have a nervous system. We should resist seeking non-cognitive explanations of behaviour simply because an organism fails to exhibit human-like feats of thinking, reasoning and problem-solving. We will show how Karl Friston's Free-Energy Principle (FEP) can serve as the basis for a mark of the cognitive that avoids the twin pitfalls of overintellectualising or underestimating the cognitive achievements of evolution-arily primitive organisms. The FEP purports to describe principles of organisation that any organism must instantiate if it is to remain well-adapted to its environment. Living systems from plants and microorganisms all the way up to humans act in ways that tend in the long run to minimise free energy. If the FEP provides a mark of the cognitive, as we will argue it does, it mandates that cognition should indeed be ascribed to plants, microorganisms and other organisms that lack a nervous system.

Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, 2020

The most widely accepted view in the biopsychological sciences is that the cognitive functions that are diagnostic of mental operations, sentience or, more commonly, consciousness emerged fairly late in evolution, most likely in the Cambrian period. Our position dovetails with James's below À subjectivity, feeling, consciousness has a much longer evolutionary history, one that goes back to the first appearance of life. The Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) model is founded on the presumption that sentience and life are coterminous; that all organisms, based on inherent cellular activities via processes that take place in excitable membranes of their cells, are sentient, have subjective experiences and feelings. These, in turn, guide the context-relevant behaviors essential for their survival in often hostile environments in constant flux. The CBC framework is reductionistic, mechanistic, and calls for bottom-up research programs into the evolutionary origin of biological consciousness.

How and why cognition evolved depends on what one thinks cognition is. The classic definition by identified cognition as the processes by which sensory inputs are transformed, manipulated, augmented and used to give rise to motor outputs, with the implicit assuming that these processes took place solely in the brain. There is a distinctly anthropocentric tinge to this definition, grounded as it is in the cognitive revolution, which aimed to model (or even recreate) human intelligence via the use of computers. Consequently, the processes usually considered to be cognitive include concept formation, reasoning and problem-solving abilities, theory of mind, natural language, memory, prospective planning and the ability to represent objects in their absence. This view of cognition often results in what Lyons (2006) terms an "anthropogenic" approach to its evolution, in which we "assume, to a greater or lesser extent, that human psychological attributes are the hallmarks of cognition and ask what sort of biological or evolutionary story might account for them" (Lyons 2006, p.12).

Aim and Scope: "Evolution and Cognition" is an interdisciplinary forum devoted to all aspects of research on cognition in animals and humans. The major emphasis of the journal is on evolutionary approaches to cognition, reflecting the fact that the cognitive capacities of organisms result from biological evolution. Empirical and theoretical work from both fields, evolutionary and cognitive science, is accepted, but particular attention is paid to interdisciplinary perspectives on the mutual relationship between evolutionary and cognitive processes. Submissions dealing with the significance of cognitive research for the theories of biological and sociocultural evolution are also welcome. "Evolution and Cognition" publishes both original papers and review articles. Period of Publication: Semi-annual Price: Annuals subscription rate (2 issues): ATS 500; DEM 70, US$ 50; SFr 60; GBP 25. Annual subscriptions are assumed to be continued automatically unless subscription orders are cancelled by written information.

Introduction chapter to a book-length version of a paper of the same name presented at the 2011 TSC conference in Stockholm. The Origin of Cognition: The evolution of sentience mapped in incremental adaptations, from the boundary awareness of single-celled organisms, to the cognitive complexity of human brains.