Bio Systems
October 1, 2016
Slawomir J Nasuto, Yoshikatsu Hayashi
27 citations
Current robotic technologies cannot have intentional states beyond what is possible within the sensorimotor variant of embodied cognition. Anticipation is an emerging concept that bridges philosophical theories about life and cognition with empirical biological and cognitive sciences grounded in reductionist and Newtonian causality. To advance, cognitive robotics needs new platforms and a conceptual framework for investigating autonomy and purposeful behavior. Hybrid systems combining robotics with neuronal cultures offer experimental platforms where different dimensions of enactivism—sensorimotor processes and constitutive foundations of biological autonomy including anticipation—can be studied in an integrated way. This approach may unify theoretical and empirical biological sciences where reductionist approaches have faltered.
Bio Systems
January 1, 2025
F Baluška, W B Miller, P Slijepcevic et al.
10 citations
Cells are not merely structural building blocks but cognitive agents with subjective feelings, sentience (consciousness), and cognitive infocomputational competence. They function as 'Kantian Wholes' where all parts exist for and by means of the whole system, using sentient agency to solve existential problems and evolve as self-organizing units. Cell sentience arises from the excitable plasma membrane, which generates bioelectromagnetic fields linked to a whole-cell sensory architecture. This sensory apparatus, termed the senome, encompasses the totality of cellular self-referential information obtained through sensory systems, including the subjective cellular inside and self-referential appraisal of the external environment. The plasma membrane was invented by the first cells and has been inherited uninterruptedly for billions of years through successive cell divisions.
Bio Systems
December 1, 2024
Breno B Just, Sávio Torres de Farias
7 citations
Cognition is defined as the set of informational and dynamic processes that allow an organism to interact with and grasp aspects of its world. The authors argue that, from an evolutionary perspective, basic cognitive processes such as perception, memory, learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and action are fundamental features of all living beings. They contend that similarities between simple and complex cognitive processes cannot be ignored, nor can differences be blurred, and that a final cognitive framework must account for both ends of the complexity spectrum. Thus, cognition can be expanded to every living organism.
Bio Systems
December 1, 2024
Sergio J Martínez García, Pablo Padilla Longoria
7 citations
A proposed index based on Shannon's entropy can discriminate between the Neurocentrist hypothesis (consciousness is in the brain) and the Embodied hypothesis (consciousness involves the whole organism). Current theories like information integration theory and global workspace theory focus only on the brain, failing to account for embodied processing. The index measures whether information processing is primarily internal or external, and simulations with networks of varying internal and outer layers validated the index as unbiased. This offers a way to test which hypothesis better explains consciousness without relying on physical network structure.
Bio Systems
May 1, 2025
Andres Kriete
5 citations
Cognition and conscious thought are integral to how biological systems control themselves to find and use meaningful information for survival. The development of key cognitive abilities in centralized nervous systems—decision-making with partial sensory information, learning and memory, and symbolic communication—can be categorized as distinct decision processes. Conscious thought arises from a control mechanism for speech production, known as the phonological loop, which provides feedback from motor to sensory cortex. This continuous loop updates working memory and gives humans an advanced layer of control through a sense of self, agency, and perception of time flow, defining distinct degrees of information fitness in evolution.
Bio Systems
April 1, 2023
Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen, Robert Prinz
5 citations
A Code Biology-informed account of human sense-making avoids the dualism between individual autonomy and social heteronomy. Code biological principles apply across biological and non-biological levels, crossing the self-non-self border. Codified relations, irreducible to operational closure, connect the sense-making agent's social interactions to those of others, giving external norms a constitutive role in altering internal embodied integrity. Using prosthetics in amputees as a case, successful integration of a prosthesis requires experienced bodily wholeness achieved by attuning to the device while internalizing social norms and values. Many aspects of the living actualize codified relations incorporating both heteronomous and autonomous traits.
Bio Systems
June 1, 2025
Thomas Görnitz
4 citations
A generalized concept of quantum information offers a scientific explanation for consciousness and its evolution. Matter and photons are understood as manifestations of abstract, absolute quantum information bits (AQIs), which provide a common basis for consciousness, energy, and matter. This framework explains how information absorbed from the body and environment—processed by consciousness as an information structure—interacts with matter and energy, grounded in the equivalence of matter and motion via Einstein's E=mc².
Bio Systems
May 1, 2025
Danko D Georgiev
4 citations
Functional theories of consciousness, which treat it as an emergent property of brain functions, struggle with the hard problem of why an insentient brain would produce any conscious experience at all, a difficulty worsened by classical physics' determinism, which leaves emergent consciousness causally impotent. This paper presents a quantum information theoretic approach that avoids these drawbacks by reductively identifying first-person subjective conscious states with unobservable quantum state vectors in the brain. The observable brain is viewed as a third-person construct created by classical bits from environmental measurements of commuting quantum brain observables. Quantum resource theory implies that quantum features of consciousness, protected by no-go theorems, cannot be replicated by any classical device.
Bio Systems
February 1, 2025
Nikolai S Rozov
2 citations
This article refines theoretical explanations for the main stages of linguistic and cognitive evolution in human origins. It introduces the concepts of "concern" and "providing structure" as extensions of biological adaptation within the extended evolutionary synthesis. Concerns about sustenance, safety, sexuality, parenthood, status, and emotional support drive behavioral tries, which consolidate into providing structures—practices, abilities, and attitudes—via interactive rituals and internalization. These structures reshape environmental and group niches, generating new challenges. During African multiregionalism, hominin groups faced demographic bottlenecks where only the most advanced survived. Abilities became innate through the Baldwin effect and multilevel selection, explaining the evolution of language from holophrases to complex syntax and consciousness from expanded attention to self-consciousness and the self.
Bio Systems
December 1, 2025
Joseph J Trukovich
1 citation
Consciousness arises when a biological system builds an explicit, recursive model of itself, and that model is saturated with homeostatic significance under perspectival entrapment. This theory, Value Saturation, identifies phenomenal consciousness with this specific organizational architecture. It distinguishes sentience (implicit recursion under survival stakes) from subjective consciousness (explicit, manipulable self-models). Three necessary components are interoceptive binding, homeostatic saturation, and perspectival entrapment. Testable predictions include a developmental shift from sentience at birth to subjective consciousness around ages 3-5, an asymmetry between awareness and manipulation, and clinical dissociations that produce aberrant rather than absent phenomenology. Converging evidence from prediction error processing, homeostatic feelings, and biological computing supports these claims.