Scale-free Niche Construction: expanding agent-microenvironment co-development to unconventional substrates

Niche construction typically refers to a set of ideas around bi-directional feedback between a species and its environment, and its impacts on the course of evolution. More fundamentally, it emphasizes the active aspect of life forms that alter their environment and establish a feedback loop in which that environment inevitably changes their behavior, structure, and future evolution. Here, we argue that this powerful dynamic is general, and extends far beyond its typical application in ecology and evolutionary biology. We start from a predictive processing view of the brain and explain how niche construction extends the scope of classical predictive and control loops beyond the nervous system and organism-level. We then use examples from cognitive science, psychopathology, developmental biology, robotics, and AI, illustrating how agents use both living and non-living aspects of their microenvironment as a scratchpad, allowing a form of active long-term memory that supports cohesion of agency over time. Besides its memory function, niche construction enables "offloading" to the environment (externalizing) various cognitive operations, including planning, problem solving, and social coordination. We also discuss niche construction an example of the plasticity of the machine/data mapping, enabling analysis of systems from the perspective of the patterns within excitable media (agential data). By recognizing niche construction dynamics at novel spatiotemporal scales, important invariants across disciplines and substrates can be recognized and used to drive advances in biomedicine, engineering, and AI.