Is free-energy minimisation the mark of the cognitive?

A mark of the cognitive should allow us to specify theoretical principles for demarcating 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 adaptiveness 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 evolutionarily 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.

Blake and the Mark of the Cognitive: Notes Towards the Appearance of the Sceptical Subject

This essay seeks to understand the implications of the distribution of cognition across the arbitrary boundary of skull and skin into the environment so that cognition can be partly offloaded onto the environment, and in so doing, open up new areas of inquiry for distributed cognition such as subject/object relations and scepticism. It reframes William Blake’s ‘London’ so that we can look afresh at his speaker. Blake’s blurring of where inputs and outputs begin and end make him an ideal candidate for such an inquiry, and he highlights the stiff price to be paid for all this cognitive efficiency: the inability to distinguish between affordances and ideology.

Breaking the Waves

Andy Clark is the foremost architect of the extended cognition hypothesis (ExC), according to which the machinery of mind extends beyond the skull and skin. Advocates of ExC divide into several camps, the most prominent being the first-wave (parity-based) theorists and the second-wave (complementarity-based) theorists. These two groups are routinely at loggerheads. Given this, it is an intriguing fact that Clark’s work has been appealed to by both sides. By exploring Clark’s own treatment of the relationship between parity and complementarity, this chapter argues that neither of these phenomena can ground a compelling case for extended cognition, and neither can their simple conjunction. Against Clark, it argues that a better argument for extended cognition relies on the concept of a mark of the cognitive. This argument does not fit comfortably into either first-wave or second-wave ExC, although it is perhaps most naturally seen as a development of the former.

Extended Knowledge

The author has maintained that among the things that cognition requires are: non-derived content, scientifically tractable and non-motley processes (Adams and Aizawa 2001; 2008a; 2008b), and the capacity to figure in agent-centered reasons that explain purposive behavior (Adams and Garrison 2003). So what will be discussed here is what someone who accepted these considerations about the mark of the cognitive would require for extended knowledge. Of course, cognition could extend without knowledge. Just as contemporary skeptics might be right (not that the present author thinks they are) and we might lack non-extended knowledge, even if cognition extends into the environment that alone wouldn’t mean that knowledge extends. Yet, if cognition were to extend, what else would be required for extended cognition to yield extended knowledge? Attention will also be given to Gricean thought and processes, procedural thought, mirroring, and we-intentions.