Cybernetics & Human Knowing - Thesaurus pilot project
Edited by M&T Thellefsen

Cognition

Definition
"A notion which represents the interactions of the observer, not a phenomenon operative in the observed domain. A mapping of a process that occurs in the space of autopoiesis into a process that occurs in the space of human beings (heteropoiesis) and, thus, not a reformulation of the phenomenon." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 135)

The physical and / or semantic translation of a message into a precisely defined code.

Relations:
autopoietic systems
autopoiesis
autopoietic machine
cognitive science
information processing paradigm
observer

 

Articles:

1997
Virtual Logic - The Gremlin and the Self / Louis H. Kauffman. -  vol. 4 no. 4

Definitions:

Principia Cybernetica
Encyclopedia Autopoietica
International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics

 

Principia Cybernetica (web)
Originally used to separate the rational processes involved in the acquisition, organization and use of knowledge from the emotional, instinctive, or impulsive reactions, it now designates all INFORMATION processing activities of the brain (see ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE), including PERCEPTION, thinking, DECISION making, linguistic COMPETENCE and motor CONTROL. (Krippendorff).

 

Encyclopedia Autopoietica
"Cognition is a biological phenomeon and can only be understood as such; any epistemological insight in the domain of knowledge requires this understanding." (Maturana, 1970a, p. 3)

Maturana and Varela proceeded from the perspective of individual organisms’ cognitive activities as a function of their embodied experience. For them, cognition is a consequence of circularity and complexity in the form of any system whose behavior realizes maintenance of that selfsame form. This shifts the weight of discussion from discernment of those active agencies and replicable actions through which a given process ("cognition") is conducted (the viewpoint of cognitivism) to the discernment of those features of an organism’s form which determine that entity’s engagement with its milieu. In other words, cognition is a matter of interacting in the mannar(s) in which one is capable of interacting, not processing what is objectively there to be seen. "Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, P. 13

In this view, cognition is a consequence of (structurally-realized and structurally-determined) interactions. "A cognitive system is a system whose organization defines a domain of interactions in which it can act with relevance to the maintenance of itself, and the process of cognition is the actual (inductive) acting or behaving in this domain." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 13) More specifically, "... for every living system the process of cognition consists in the creation of a field of behavior through its actual conduct in its closed domain of interactions, and not in the apprehension or the description of an independent universe. Our cognitive process (the cognitive process of the observer) differs from the cognitive processes of other organisms only in the kinds of interactions into which we can enter, ... and not in the nature of the cognitive process itself." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 49)

[her er udeladt et afsnit med !?]

International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics
The acquistion of an ordered and operative understanding of ourselves and our environment.

H. MATURANA thus states the autopoietic view on cognition: "... reality and its cognition had to (i.e. have to) be accepted as a mode of operation of the nervous system as a closed neuronal network" (1979, p. 25).

He also writes: " Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition" (1980, p. 13).

As to "reality", this view may seem somewhat extreme. We should perhaps speak here of "perceived reality".

As to cognition, we seemingly cannot do without some explanation about the autogenesis of such "closed neural networks".

Also von FOERSTER presented "... evidence that cognition is a continuously recursive computation of descriptions of reality" (K. WILSON, 1979, p. 32).

This amounts to an analogy of the brain as a biological computer. This analogy however should be taken with much care, because the brain, in any case, is obviously not a simple sequential computer and appearently constructs, in some not yet very well understood way, its own recursive algorithms.