Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Eros Moreira de Carvalho, Giovanni Rolla
32 citations
Information is central to cognitive science and neuroscience, but its meaning for a cognitive system acquiring information about its surroundings is debated. This theoretical paper argues that the ecological psychology concept of information for action can be understood as covariant information, as developed by some enactivists. Learning to perceive this covariant information involves minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance, aligning with Shannon's idea of uncertainty reduction. The authors propose that an agent's cognitive system conveys information for acting by minimizing uncertainty about achieving intended goals. They review empirical findings showing that direct learning, an instance of ecological rationality, transforms mere possibilities for action into embodied know-how, and note its affinity with sense-making activity.
Adaptive Behavior
June 10, 2021
Giovanni Rolla, Jeferson Huffermann
20 citations
Two branches of the enactivist research program—Radically Enactive Cognition and Linguistic Bodies—converge on the idea that the normativity of human cognitive capacities rests on shared know-how. Radical enactivism emphasizes the diachronic dimension of shared know-how, while linguistic bodies emphasize the synchronic one. Because know-how is normative, it implies basic content: the content of successful ongoing interactions between agent(s) and environment. Basic content does not involve accuracy conditions or representational content, thus avoiding the Hard Problem of Content. This account aligns with the claim that participatory sense-making in linguistic exchanges is continuous with biological organization and sensorimotor engagements.
Kriterion: Revista de Filosofia
September 1, 2018
Giovanni Rolla
4 citations
A middle-ground account of self-knowledge is proposed, reconciling perceptual models (where mental states are accessed via causal mechanisms) with rationalist models (where self-knowledge is constituted by rational agency). By analogy with how sensorimotor abilities support perceptual knowledge, self-knowledge is characterized as an exercise of action-oriented and action-orienting abilities. This view preserves the privileged access typically associated with self-knowledge while avoiding an unbridgeable gap between knowledge of oneself and knowledge of other minds.
Philosophy & Technology
June 30, 2026
Giovanni Rolla
Despite recent advances, artificial intelligence systems fundamentally differ from human cognition because they lack biological embodiment, situatedness, and autonomy. Humans learn through embodied, intersubjective experiences tied to survival and adaptation, whereas AIs cannot undergo structural changes due to their disembodied nature. The embodiment challenge argues that without these self-sustaining, survival-driven processes, artificial systems cannot replicate natural cognition. Creating a genuinely cognitive artificial intelligence would require first achieving artificial life.