The Cognitive Agent

In this project I investigate what minimal conditions can allow a system to be regarded as a cognitive agent, i.e. what the subject of cognitive science is. An agent is a highly organized complex system which has intrinsic goals (in its minimal sense, persistence within viability boundary) and whose dynamical organization supports an informational description. Every agent, it follows, is informationally deprived. This deprivation raises a design problem: How can the organization begin to overcome this informational limitation? I claim that cognition is the general strategy for resolving this design problem. More precisely, I define cognition as follows: Cognition is the set of the mechanisms/organizational constraints of an autonomous agent that allow lowering of the conditional information entropy of selected important informational sources in the environment on the 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. I suggest that standard cognitive capacities — learning, memory, feature detection, representation, reasoning, etc. — can be viewed as special cases of this general strategy. The concept of agent has many uses in philosophical discussions. Epidemiologist assume different characteristic of agents from the ones moral philosophers assume; which are yet different from the ones metaphysicians assume in (e.g.) debates over free will. Such differences of desired characteristics are relatively innocent because the target of investigation is usually human agency, which