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The Cognitive Agent

The Cognitive Agent. Overcoming informational limits Orlin Vakarelov Philosophy & Cognitive Science University of Arizona. Synopsis. Question: What are the systems for which the capacity of cognition is useful and what “function” does it serve? Answer:

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The Cognitive Agent

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

  2. Synopsis • Question: • 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. Cognitio 09

  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. Cognitio 09

  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): 429 - 452. Cognitio 09

  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 Cognitio 09

  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. Cognitio 09

  7. Autonomy • Characterize organization in terms of effective description: • Dynamical interactions with environment • Mechanistic interactions with environment • It becomes useful to isolate environment-to-systeminteractions, 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? Cognitio 09

  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? Cognitio 09

  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? Cognitio 09

  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 Cognitio 09

  11. Cognitive Agents • Conditional informational entropy (CIE) – information deficit • Form: Entropy of Source onReceiver • 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 IVare 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 importantinformational sources in the environment onthe 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. Cognitio 09

  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. Cognitio 09

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