1. The Cognitive Agent Overcoming informational limits Orlin Vakarelov
Philosophy & Cognitive Science
University of Arizona

2. Synopsis Question: Answer:
What are the systems for which the capacity of cognition is useful and what “function” does it serve?
Answer:
The “function” of cognition is to allow informationally deprived autonomous agents to overcome the informational deficit so that they can have more successful behaviour.
In a sense, cognition is that which makes agents smarter.
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3. Assumptions Cognition vs. cognition
Cognition is essentially an embedded and embodied phenomenon, and is related to system control of the dynamical interactions with environment.
Cognition is a phenomenon of complexity, i.e. it exist only within complex, organized systems, and it is possible in virtue of the complexity.
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4. A minimal approach Maturana & Varela1 – autopoiesis
A system is autopoiesis iff it can actively maintain itself by implementing a process closure, and it can maintain separation from the environment.
M & V claim: Autopoiesis implies both life and cognition.
Natural teleology, self-reference, meaning, perspective (umwelt), etc.
Di Paolo2: Autopoiesis is a structural condition, while adaptiveness is not. Cognition requires adaptiveness. Therefore, autopoiesis does not cognition.
1 H. R. Maturana & F. J. Varela (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Dordecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co
2 Di Paolo, E. A., (2005). Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4(4):
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5. Methodology Bottom-up approach
The theoretical distinctions must correspond to natural dynamical/system theoretic distinctions arising from the increasing complexity of organization of the systems.
I.e. if you are wondering among various systems, you should be able to stumble on the collection of cognitive system.
I describe a sequence of nested design problems whose general strategies for solution warrant theoretical distinctions – cognition is viewed as one such general strategy for a problem.
Autonomy  Agency  Cognitive Agency
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6. Autonomy Problem I: System persistence
Rocks vs. Vortexes vs. Living systems
Autonomy: a system that can self-govern.
Autopoiesis – simplest dissipative systems that can dynamically self-maintain their organization – simplest autonomous systems.
Autonomy comes in degrees – ability of the system to remain within (or widen) its viability limits.
We need to look at the strategies for making a system more autonomous.
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7. Autonomy Characterize organization in terms of effective description:
Dynamical interactions with environment
Mechanistic interactions with environment
It becomes useful to isolate environment-to- system interactions, system-to-environment interactions, and control relations between them.
Proto-percepts and proto-actions
Problem II: How can proto-actions, by changing the environment, improve achievement of the goal of persistence?
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8. Agents
As complexity increases it becomes more efficient to describe the interactions in informational term. (Semiosis)
When an autonomous system is such that it is best described with informational term, I suggest to call it an autonomous agent.
In an agent proto-actions become actions and proto- percepts become percepts.
Prob. II can be improved on when information from the environment becomes relevant for the actions.
Problem III: How can an agent use “better” information to control its actions?
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9. Informational Limits
A real agent, as a locus of high level organization, is still too simple to “absorb” and “contain” all the relevant information in the environment.
An agent is severely informationally deprived – it is connected to the environment through a low capacity information channel.
Problem IV: How can the internal organization of the control mechanism of the agent be improved to begin to overcome the informational limitations?
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10. Sequence of problems and systems
Problem I: System persistence
Problem II: How can proto- actions improve persistence?
Problem III: How can an agent use “better” information to control its actions?
Problem IV: How can the internal organization of the control mechanism of the agent be improved to begin to overcome the informational limitations? I II
III IV
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11. Cognitive Agents
Conditional informational entropy (CIE) – information deficit
Form: Entropy of Source on Receiver
The lower the CIE between the agent and the environment, the less immediate information must be transmitted through the informational channel.
I claim that the structures and mechanisms within an agent that have the function of lowering the conditional informational entropy to solve IV are exactly the ones that cognitive science studies.
The Cognitive system is the set of the mechanisms/organizational constraints of an autonomous agent that:
allows lowering of the conditional information entropy of selected important informational sources in the environment on the control structure of the agent,
so that the agent can improve the selection of actions to produce successful behavior in light of its information gathering and carrying limitations.
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12. Back to the familiar Two general strategies for CIE lowering
Internalize efficiently information from the environment so that you don’t have to communicate it.
Focus on the most relevant source of information.
More specific strategies:
accumulation and integration of information over time;
targeting specific useful feature of the environment;
building internal structures that encode information about the environment and its dynamics, and using them to anticipate the future state of the environment based on limited information from perception;
going beyond the immediate information thought informational transformations (with reasoning capacities), etc.
The prototypical cognitive capacities accomplish exactly such tasks: learning, memory, feature detection, representation, reasoning, etc.
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