Grounding cognition: heterarchical control mechanisms in biology

Abstract

We advance an account that grounds cognition, specifically decision-making, in an activity all organisms as autonomous systems must perform to keep themselves viable—controlling their production mechanisms. Production mechanisms, as we characterize them, perform activities such as procuring resources from their environment, putting these resources to use to construct and repair the organism's body and moving through the environment. Given the variable nature of the environment and the continual degradation of the organism, these production mechanisms must be regulated by control mechanisms that select when a production is required and how it should be carried out. To operate on production mechanisms, control mechanisms need to procure information through measurement processes and evaluate possible actions. They are making decisions. In all organisms, these decisions are made by multiple different control mechanisms that are organized not hierarchically but heterarchically. In many cases, they employ internal models of features of the environment with which the organism must deal. Cognition, in the form of decision-making, is thus fundamental to living systems which must control their production mechanisms. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Basal cognition: conceptual tools and the view from the single cell’.

Reframing cognition: getting down to biological basics

“…The collection opens with a bold theoretical proposal by William Bechtel and Leonardo Bich about the biomolecular origins of cognition [55]. The argument focuses on two classes of physiological mechanism that function in a particular type of organization.…”

A continuum of intentionality: linking the biogenic and anthropogenic approaches to cognition

“…The idea common to all of these research programmes is that organisms embody internal models of their environments and their behavioural consequences upon the environment (Cf. Bechtel and Bich 2021). Evolutionarily, as organisms became able to incorporate increasingly temporally distal consequences of both their current behaviour and environmental causes into their behavioural regime, their internal models became more complex.…”

“…As such the biogenic approach (BA) starts with biological facts-as typically exemplified by the adaptive behaviour of basal organisms-and attempts to work its way up to human cognition. Crucially, by widening the scope of model organisms under consideration to include organisms such as bacteria and plants as cognizers, proponents of BA suggest that it is well placed to identify possible organizational principles and conserved mechanisms underlying a full range of cognitive capacities, from simple to complex (see Ben Jacob et al 2006;van Duijn et al 2006;Baluška and Mancuso 2009;Bechtel 2014;Baluška and Levin 2016;Levin 2019;Ginsburg and Jablonka 2019;Barrett 2019;Calvo et al 2020;Bechtel and Bich 2021).…”

The life-cycle of artificial contexts

“…Typical examples of sensory systems will include visual, auditory, olfactory, haptic, and gustatory input systems. But we can reduce our focus to draw out a generality about biological mechanisms as systems of constraints upon the flow of free (available) energy [4]. For such mechanisms to operate they rely upon an input that tips the energetic dynamics into a particular pathway, and the mechanism has been designed by selection to respond only to specific sources, or kinds of input.…”