Cognition and Intelligence

Cognition can be understood in at least two very different ways. In the human-centered tradition, cognition is defined as the set of mental processes: perception, memory, reasoning, language, and problem-solving, through which humans acquire and use knowledge. Intelligence, in this view, is a subset of these processes: the ability to reason, learn, and adapt. By contrast, the life-centered tradition identifies cognition with processes of life itself through which living systems maintain and adapt themselves through valuation, sense-making and interaction with their environments. In this broader perspective, intelligence refers to the competency with which organisms solve problems under conditions of novelty and uncertainty. These two frameworks, while rarely in direct debate, have far-reaching consequences for how we understand the nature of mind, life, and intelligent technologies.