fundamental definition of an Individual based on the ability to pursue goals at an appropriate level of scale and organization and suggest a formalism for defining and comparing the cognitive capacities of highly diverse types of agents.
Any Self is demarcated by a computational surface – the spatio-temporal boundary of events that it can measure, model, and try to affect. This surface sets a functional boundary - a cognitive “light cone” which defines the scale and limits of its cognition.
The mechanisms of developmental bioelectricity - the ability of all cells to form electrical networks that process information - suggest a plausible set of gradual evolutionary steps that naturally lead from physiological homeostasis in single cells to memory, prediction, and ultimately complex cognitive agents, via scale-up of the basic drive of infotaxis
one of the assumptions: it is assumed that all metaphors are to be judged by their utility in driving scientific progress and that there is not a binary categorization of scientific pictures which should be taken literally or not, which can be decided a priori. Thus, whether a way of thinking about a system is correct or mere metonymy is to be determined by whether the specific metaphor gives rise to new, robust research programs – it is an empirical question to be answered in time, based on whether a given metaphor improves prediction and control in novel cases at the bench, compared to other existing metaphors.
It is a well-known fact that the biosphere is a set of nesting dolls
Do integrated Selves only exist at the level of “organisms” (bodies), or could they arise and co-exist at multiple levels of organization and be recognized in novel contexts and implementations?
Selves as goal-directed computational agents regardless of implementation
defines this Self is the boundary of information being able to pass between the subunits
unified Self out of its constituent components and the surrounding environment is the set of parts that operate toward reaching specific goal
The cognitive boundary of an Individual [a “Center of Concern” (Murase and Asakura, 2003)] is the most distant (in time and space) set of events that this system can measure and attempts to regulate in its goal-directed activity
Developmental bioelectricity is the ubiquitous exchange of slowly changing ion-based voltage signals within and among cells (Funk, 2013; Levin and Martyniuk, 2018). All cells are electrically active, and modern neurons evolved from pre-neural precursors that were already reaping the benefits of ionic signaling for computation
Identifying the most efficacious level of organization in a given system is critical for selecting targets in biomedical or engineering approaches to understand and control
A very simple organism can only have preferences about what is occurring at the current time, in its immediate environment. A more complex organism whose causal structure enables associative learning can pursue or avoid stimuli that are several steps removed in space, time, and causal connection from whatever it is choosing among.
The edges of a given Agent’s goal space define a sort of “computational light cone” – the boundaries beyond which its cognitive system cannot operate. For example, a tick has a relatively small cognitive boundary, having very little memory or predictive power in the temporal direction, and sensing/acting very locally. A dog has much more temporal memory, some forward prediction ability, and a degree of spatial concern. However, it is likely impossible for a dog’s cognitive apparatus to operate with notions about what is going to happen next month or in the adjacent town. Human minds can operate over goals of vastly greater spatial and temporal scales, and one can readily imagine artificial
