On the Variety of Cognitive Temperatures and Their Symmetry-Breaking Dynamics
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On the Variety of Cognitive Temperatures and Their Symmetry‑Breaking Dynamics Rodrick Wallace1 Received: 25 July 2019 / Accepted: 30 December 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories permit exploration of a surprising number of temperature-like measures and symmetry-breaking dynamics associated with cognition. Each of several markedly different perspectives produces a distinct temperature-analog, capturing a rich and highly-punctuated behavioral landscape across the complex, hierarchical cognitive phenomena that characterize life at every scale and level of organization. Theories of cognition may be confronted by canonical conundrums similar to those plaguing the study of consciousness and its regulation. In short, there may be a spectrum of interacting cognitive ‘temperatures’ for organisms, social structures, institutions, information processing machines, and their composite entities, that varies across different systems, and between similar systems having undergone different individual developmental trajectories. The complexities of cognitive failure—leading to a vast array of pathologies—may be far stranger than generally recognized. Keywords Control theory · Development · Groupoid · Information theory · Pathology · Phase transition Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system. — Maturana and Varela, 1980, p. 13.
1 Introduction Biological phenomena are already characterized by more than one ‘temperature’. There is, of course, the water-world requirement that DNA-based life be immersed in a relatively stable and approximately 300 K milieu. The real business of DNA/
* Rodrick Wallace [email protected]; [email protected] 1
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RNA biology, however, takes place in the energy realm of the hydrolysis of ATP to ADP, producing energy at about 50 kJ/mol. Crudely, the temperature-equivalence of this reaction, which is the basis of the mitochondrial energy cycle fundamental to eukaryotic life, in comparison with the typical available free energy from molecular motion at 300 K—about 2.5 kJ/mol—is approximately that of the surface of the sun. This is beyond remarkable. One hint from this for the topic of this analysis is that neural tissues can consume metabolic free energy at a rate ten times greater than other kinds of tissue. Cognition is, in a sense, very hot indeed, and this, we will show, generalizes across multiple scales, levels of organization, and perspectives. Assuming the viewpoint of Maturana and Varela, such generalization is important across much of biology. Here, we examine cognition most fundamentally characterized, in the Atlan and Cohen (1998) sense, as a process that compares incoming ‘sensory’ signals with an internal, learned or inherited, picture of the world, and then, upon that comparison, chooses a small s
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