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Cognitive Architectures: The Dialectics of Agent/Environment

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Part of the book series: Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering ((ISCA,volume 94))

Abstract

In what concerns living systems, cognition is an embodied, embedded and always situated experience. This means that it involves an entity endowed with a particular physical architecture bound in a dialectical relationship with the environment in which it is immersed, behaving according to the prompts placed by this environment, reacting, learning and adapting to it defining this way its own existential narrative and history. Highlighting the fact that human cognition stems from more simple and basic forms of cognition with which it shares essential life mechanisms, the present chapter focuses on the essential semiosic process that is inherent to the dialectics agent/environment and the role played by corporeal architectures in the construction of meaningful worlds, namely, the hybrid realities, where natural and artificial intelligence cohabit.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cf [4, p. 32] on these concepts.

  2. 2.

    We follow the German plural form.

  3. 3.

    As Uexkull also reveals, experiments have proved that only the butoric acid seems to be responsible for triggering the particular sequence of responses.

  4. 4.

    If we imagine how this applies to other life forms as mammals … fish … plants … bacteria, viruses …, cells.

  5. 5.

    The term agent is here assigned to all cognitive entities indistinctively.

  6. 6.

    Author’s translation from the Portuguese version.

  7. 7.

    In general (Nl × Nc) indicates de dimensions of a matrix, Nl being the number of its rows and Nc that of its columns; thus, (N × 1) represents an N-component vector in the form of a column matrix.

  8. 8.

    Subjective in the sense that they result from individual experience.

  9. 9.

    This spatio/temporal framework is the observer’s—the human—spatio/temporal frame. Each life form, in fact, develops according to a virtual “timeline” that is exclusively defined by its internal corporeal dynamics and by the environmental circumstances it will face within a pre-set potential life span.

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Correspondence to Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira .

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Aldinhas Ferreira, M.I. (2019). Cognitive Architectures: The Dialectics of Agent/Environment. In: Aldinhas Ferreira, M., Silva Sequeira, J., Ventura, R. (eds) Cognitive Architectures. Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering, vol 94. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97550-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97550-4_1

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