Version 1
: Received: 6 November 2019 / Approved: 8 November 2019 / Online: 8 November 2019 (03:50:08 CET)
Version 2
: Received: 27 February 2020 / Approved: 29 February 2020 / Online: 29 February 2020 (12:33:12 CET)
Corcoran, A.W., Pezzulo, G. & Hohwy, J. From allostatic agents to counterfactual cognisers: active inference, biological regulation, and the origins of cognition. Biol Philos 35, 32 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09746-2
Corcoran, A.W., Pezzulo, G. & Hohwy, J. From allostatic agents to counterfactual cognisers: active inference, biological regulation, and the origins of cognition. Biol Philos 35, 32 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09746-2
Corcoran, A.W., Pezzulo, G. & Hohwy, J. From allostatic agents to counterfactual cognisers: active inference, biological regulation, and the origins of cognition. Biol Philos 35, 32 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09746-2
Corcoran, A.W., Pezzulo, G. & Hohwy, J. From allostatic agents to counterfactual cognisers: active inference, biological regulation, and the origins of cognition. Biol Philos 35, 32 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09746-2
Abstract
What is the function of cognition? On one influential account, cognition evolved to co-ordinate behaviour with environmental change or complexity (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Liberal interpretations of this view ascribe cognition to an extraordinarily broad set of biological systems – even bacteria, which modulate their activity in response to salient external cues, would seem to qualify as cognitive agents. However, equating cognition with adaptive flexibility per se glosses over important distinctions in the way biological organisms deal with environmental complexity. Drawing on contemporary advances in theoretical biology and computational neuroscience, we cash these distinctions out in terms of the representation and resolution of different varieties of uncertainty. This analysis leads us to propose a formal criterion for delineating cognition from other, more pervasive forms of adaptive plasticity. On this view, biological cognition is rooted in a particular kind of functional organisation; namely, one that enables the agent to detach from the present and engage in counterfactual (active) inference.
Keywords
complexity; uncertainty; cognition; allostasis; homeostasis; free energy principle; active inference; environmental complexity thesis
Subject
Arts and Humanities, Philosophy
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
