Naturalizing Relevance Realization

(Yogi)

The paper "Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational," which Yogi co-authored with Anna Riedl, Alex Djedovic, John Vervaeke, and Denis Walsh, has just been published after peer-review in Frontiers in Psychology (Section Cognition). It is the biggest and most important output of our project so far, challenging a number of fundamental assumptions in cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind. The main thesis is that cognition rests on the realization of relevance in the environment of a living, autopoietic system: picking out what is important to oneself, and what is not. All living beings, from bacteria to humans, can do this, but machines cannot, because this process is fundamentally not algorithmic. Instead, it is an adaptive (meliorative) evolutionary dynamic, that occurs through the continuous co-emergent construction of new constraints. This kind of dialectic process occurs across levels or organization, integrating autopoiesis, anticipation, and adaptation in organismic behavior and its evolution. Here's the abstract:

Or go an read the full version here.