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Paul Lyon

Referenced for work on minimal cognition and proto-cognition in biological systems.

biology
cognitive science
Authored
1
Introduces
0
Studies
2
Affiliations
1
Cited by
11

Authored papers (1)

  • The biogenic approach to cognition2005ⓒ 247

    Lyon's biogenic approach establishes that cognition is coextensive with life itself, not a property exclusive to nervous systems or brains, grounding this claim in the autopoietic framework developed by Maturana and Varela (1980) and extending it through a systematic survey of unicellular and sub-neural biological systems. The paper introduces the biogenic approach as a named theoretical framework — distinct from anthropogenic and neurogenic approaches — that takes the minimal living cell as the baseline cognitive unit, citing evidence from bacterial chemotaxis research (Macnab and Koshland 1972; Adler and Tso 1974) and di Primio et al.'s (2000) work on minimal cognition in unicellular organisms to argue that sensing, valuation, and adaptive response are operational in prokaryotes. Jellyfish larvae possessing a functional visual system without neurons (Nordstrom et al. 2003) and the woodpecker finch Cactospiza pallida demonstrating tool-use cognition (Tebbich and Bshary 2004) further anchor the claim that cognitive capacity distributes across the phylogenetic tree in a graded, biologically continuous fashion. The biogenic framework explicitly rejects the cognitivist assumption, traced through McCulloch and Pitts (1943) and the computational tradition, that representation and symbol manipulation are necessary for cognition. The paper argues this implies that any adequate theory of human or animal cognition must be built upward from a biology-of-cognition foundation — treating mentalistic and neural specializations as elaborations of capacities already present at the prokaryotic level — and that failing to do so leaves cognitive science without a viable account of the origins and continuity of mind.

More papers — OpenAlex / S2

Studies (2)

Humberto MaturanaBasal Cognition

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Recent mentions (7)