Cognitive Offloading Is a Cognitive Universal

Humans routinely offload cognitive tasks to their environments. Here we show, employing just basic physics and the Free Energy Principle, that all time-persistent information-processing systems offload information-processing tasks to their environments. Hence all cognitive systems engage in cognitive offloading. We show how ecological niche construction, kinematic replication, bioelectric signaling, the development of communication systems based on shared semantics, and the ability of LLMs to demonstrate fluent language use in the absence of extra-linguistic input all exemplify this offloading process. We conclude that both theoretical understanding of problem-solving abilities and the engineering of such abilities into artifacts will be improved by considering active computation by the environment as a ubiquitous adjunct to cognition in both living and artificial systems.