Cognitive architectures: The dialectics of agent/environment

Abstract

In what concerns living systems, cognition is an embodied, embedded and always situated experience. This means that it involves an entity endowed with a particular physical architecture bound in a dialectical relationship with the environment in which it is immersed, behaving according to the prompts placed by this environment, reacting, learning and adapting to it defining this way its own existential narrative and history. Highlighting the fact that human cognition stems from more simple and basic forms of cognition with which it shares essential life mechanisms, the present chapter focuses on the essential semiosic process that is inherent to the dialectics agent/environment and the role played by corporeal architectures in the construction of meaningful worlds, namely, the hybrid realities, where natural and artificial intelligence cohabit.