ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Grounding cognition: heterarchical control mechanisms in biology.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Continual decision-making dynamics across biological organisms.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Attention- and action-related oscillatory dynamics in a visuomotor network.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Brain-like variational inference.ArXiv · 2025Article
- Controlling the input: How one-year-old infants sustain visual attention.Developmental science · 2024Article
- Motor cognition in plants: from thought to real experiments.Theoretical and experimental plant physiology · 2024Article
- The Role of Information in Evolutionary Biology.Acta biotheoretica · 2023Article
- Decision Making in Plants: A Rooted Perspective.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Entropy and Cross-Level Orderliness in Light of the Interconnection between the Neural System and Consciousness.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Health and environment from adaptation to adaptivity: a situated relational account.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2022Article
- Allostasis, Action, and Affect in Depression: Insights from the Theory of Constructed Emotion.Annual review of clinical psychology · 2022Review
- Scaffolding layered control architectures through constraint closure: insights into brain evolution and development.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Mind the matter: Active matter, soft robotics, and the making of bio-inspired artificial intelligence.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2022Article
- Self-Concern Across Scales: A Biologically Inspired Direction for Embodied Artificial Intelligence.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2022Review
- Reframing cognition: getting down to biological basics.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
We advance an account that grounds cognition, specifically decision-making, in an activity all organisms as autonomous systems must perform to keep themselves viable-controlling their production mechanisms. Production mechanisms, as we characterize them, perform activities such as procuring resources from their environment, putting these resources to use to construct and repair the organism's body and moving through the environment. Given the variable nature of the environment and the continual degradation of the organism, these production mechanisms must be regulated by control mechanisms that select when a production is required and how it should be carried out. To operate on production mechanisms, control mechanisms need to procure information through measurement processes and evaluate possible actions. They are making decisions. In all organisms, these decisions are made by multiple different control mechanisms that are organized not hierarchically but heterarchically. In many cases, they employ internal models of features of the environment with which the organism must deal. Cognition, in the form of decision-making, is thus fundamental to living systems which must control their production mechanisms. This article is part of the theme issue 'Basal cognition: conceptual tools and the view from the single cell'.
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