A Generative View of Rationality and Growing Awareness†

Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational

The way organismic agents come to know the world, and the way algorithms solve problems, are fundamentally different. The most sensible course of action for an organism does not simply follow from logical rules of inference. Before it can even use such rules, the organism must tackle the problem of relevance. It must turn ill-defined problems into well-defined ones, turn semantics into syntax. This ability to realize relevance is present in all organisms, from bacteria to humans. It lies at the root of organismic agency, cognition, and consciousness, arising from the particular autopoietic, anticipatory, and adaptive organization of living beings. In this article, we show that the process of relevance realization is beyond formalization. It cannot be captured completely by algorithmic approaches. This implies that organismic agency (and hence cognition as well as consciousness) are at heart not computational in nature. Instead, we show how the process of relevance is realized by an adaptive and emergent triadic dialectic (a trialectic), which manifests as a metabolic and ecological-evolutionary co-constructive dynamic. This results in a meliorative process that enables an agent to continuously keep a grip on its arena, its reality. To be alive means to make sense of one's world. This kind of embodied ecological rationality is a fundamental aspect of life, and a key characteristic that sets it apart from non-living matter.

Bounded rationality, enactive problem solving, and the neuroscience of social interaction

This article aims to show that there is an alternative way to explain human action with respect to the bottlenecks of the psychology of decision making. The empirical study of human behaviour from mid-20th century to date has mainly developed by looking at a normative model of decision making. In particular Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) decision making, which stems from the subjective expected utility theory of Savage (1954) that itself extended the analysis by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944). On this view, the cognitive psychology of decision making precisely reflects the conceptual structure of formal decision theory. This article shows that there is an alternative way to understand decision making by recovering Newell and Simon's account of problem solving, developed in the framework of bounded rationality, and inserting it into the more recent research program of embodied cognition. Herbert Simon emphasized the importance of problem solving and differentiated it from decision making, which he considered a phase downstream of the former. Moreover according to Simon the centre of gravity of the rationality of the action lies in the ability to adapt. And the centre of gravity of adaptation is not so much in the internal environment of the actor as in the pragmatic external environment. The behaviour adapts to external purposes and reveals those characteristics of the system that limit its adaptation. According to Simon (1981), in fact, environmental feedback is the most effective factor in modelling human actions in solving a problem. In addition, his notion of problem space signifies the possible situations to be searched in order to find that situation which corresponds to the solution. Using the language of embodied cognition, the notion of problem space is about the possible solutions that are enacted in relation to environmental affordances. The correspondence between action and the solution of a problem conceptually bypasses the analytic phase of the decision and limits the role of symbolic representation. In solving any problem, the search for the solution corresponds to acting in ways that involve recursive feedback processes leading up to the final action. From this point of view, the new term enactive problem solving summarizes this fusion between bounded and embodied cognition. That problem solving involves bounded cognition means that it is through the problem solver's enactive interaction with environmental affordances, and especially social affordances that it is possible to construct the processes required for arriving at a solution. Lastly the concept of enactive problem solving is also able to explain the mechanisms underlying the adaptive heuristics of rational ecology. Its adaptive function is effective both in practical and motor tasks as well as in abstract and symbolic ones.

Embodied and embedded ecological rationality: A common vertebrate mechanism for action selection underlies cognition and heuristic decision-making in humans

The last common ancestor shared by humans and other vertebrates lived over half a billion years ago. In the time since that ancestral line diverged, evolution by natural selection has produced an impressive diversity—from fish to birds to elephants—of vertebrate morphology; yet despite the great species-level differences that otherwise exist across the brains of many animals, the neural circuitry that underlies motor control features a functional architecture that is virtually unchanged in every living species of vertebrate. In this article, we review how that circuitry facilitates motor control, trial-and-error-based procedural learning, and habit formation; we then develop a model that describes how this circuitry (embodied in an agent) works to build and refine sequences of goal-directed actions that are molded to fit the structure of the environment (in which the agent is embedded). We subsequently review evidence suggesting that this same functional circuitry became further adapted to regulate cognitive control in humans as well as motor control; then, using examples of heuristic decision-making from the ecological rationality tradition, we show how the model can be used to understand how that circuitry operates analogously in both cognitive and motor domains. We conclude with a discussion of how the model encourages a shift in perspective regarding ecological rationality’s “adaptive toolbox”—namely, to one that views heuristic processes and other forms of goal-directed cognition as likely being implemented by the same neural circuitry (and in the same fashion) as goal-directed action in the motor domain—and how this change of perspective can be useful.