Cognition as Embodied Morphological Computation

Abstract

Cognitive science is considered to be the study of mind (consciousness and thought) and intelligence in humans. Under such definition variety of unsolved/unsolvable problems appear. This article argues for a broad understanding of cognition based on empirical results from i.a. natural sciences, selforganization, artificial intelligence and artificial life, network science and neuroscience, that apart from the high level mental activities in humans, includes subsymbolic and subconscious processes, such as emotions, recognizes cognition in other living beings as well as extended and distributed/social cognition. The new idea of cognition as complex multiscale phenomenon evolved in living organisms based on bodily structures that process information, linking cognitivists and EEEE (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) cognition approaches with the idea of morphological computation (info-computational self-organisation) in cognizing agents, emerging in evolution through interactions of a (living/ cognizing) agent with the environment. 1 Understanding Cognition Cognitive science is currently defined as a study of processes of knowledge generation through perception, thinking (reasoning), memory, learning, problem solving, and similar. Thagard (2013) makes an extension of the idea of "thinking" to include emotional experience. This move bridges some of the distance between cognition as thinking and its (sub-)processes, but the fundamental problem of generative mechanisms that can dynamically overarch the chasm between matter and mind remains. The definition of cognitive science does not mention biology, chemistry, (quantum-nano-, etc.) physics or chaos theory, self-organisation, and artificial life, artificial intelligence or data science, extended mind, or distributed cognition as studied with help of network science, sociology or ecology. On the current view, cognition is about high-level processes remote from physicalchemical-biological substrate. It is modeled either by classical sequential computation, understood as symbol manipulation, or by neural networks. On the other hand, historically, behaviorism offered an alternative view of cognition with the focus on the observable behavior of a subject. This divide is mirrored in the present day schism between cognitivism/computationalism on one side and EEEE (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) cognition on the other. There have been numerous attempts to bridge this gap AQ1 AQ2

Prolegomena to an Operator Theory of Computation

“…In this context, each type of information has the corresponding type of information spaces. Here we should add that, according to recent results from cognitive science and neuroscience, cognitive and emotional phenomena cannot be treated separately [26]. With modern understanding of embodied, embedded, and enacted (EEE) cognition, emotions are an integral part of a real-life process of cognition [26], which is based on information processing.…”

“…Molecules, for example, on which our brains perform computations, are not only symbols as words of an electro-chemical language, but they are concrete physical objects as argued by Alcami and El Hady [27] and Silver [28]. That is why emotions are part of cognitive process, since cognition is not only electro-chemical symbol manipulation, but also embodied electro-chemical material object manipulation [26]. There is a difference between the symbol/word and the object which it represents.…”

“…The idea of natural info-computation [59] as a dynamics of information systems successively connects and relates their information structures (states) and makes it possible for a cognizing agent to get an idea about the information content of the world that gets revealed in the agent after sequential processes of information transformation from the source to the receiver. In [26], Dodig-Crnkovic, presents a framework of computing nature [39], where nature is regarded as a network of networks of morphological info-computational processes unfolding through information processing for cognitive agents. "Morphological" stands for a computing model based on information about the form or structure of material system performing computation [6].…”

Modeling Computing Devices and Processes by Information Operators

“…Natural computation is physical computation performed through the dynamics of physical bodies [21], and involves information spaces of physical states (morphologies) of the systems undergoing spatiotemporal transformations [22][23][24][25]. In robotics, specific morphological computation that offloads computational tasks of control to the natural physical behavior and morphology of the robot body itself is presented, for example, by the authors of [26,27].…”

What Can Deep Neural Networks Teach Us About Embodied Bounded Rationality

“…Proponents of embodied cognition often use the term “computation” much more broadly than I am using it here to mean any sort of information processing (Dodig-Crnkovic and Giovagnoli, 2013 ; Müller and Hoffmann, 2017 ; Dodig-Crnkovic, 2018 ). Any dynamic process that reacts to sensed information about its environment is capable of such “morphological computing” (Pfeifer and Bongard, 2007 ) or “natural computing” (Müller and Hoffmann, 2017 ).…”