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Why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational
The way organismic agents come to know the world, and the way algorithms solve problems, are fundamentally different. The most sensible course of action for ...
While self-organizing physical processes, such as candle flames, convection currents (e.g., Bénard cells), turbulent water flows, or hurricanes, share some important properties with living systems, including the temporary reduction of entropy at the cost of the local environment, they are not able to self-manufacture in the sense described above ( Kauffman, 2000; Deacon, 2011; Djedovic, 2020; Hofmeyr, 2021). This dialectic proceeds in the following way: an organismic agent identifies affordances in its surroundings through active sensing or perception (which may be based on predictive processing as described in section “3 Relevance realization”), generating its arena by delimiting the task-relevant region of its larger experienced environment. While still allowing for computationalist approaches as a part of its wider outlook (treating them explicitly as approximations or emulations of the physical processes being studied by simulation), it provides several advantages over (pan)computationalism as a philosophical stance in terms of its explanatory power and the range of questions it is able to address.
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