What is cognition?
“Cognition” is one of those terms that we use a lot, but which is actually rather hard to define. The question of what constitutes cognition looms large in debates about whether other organisms, besides humans, do it or have it. Most people are willing to grant that many animals are in some way cognitive, but what about simpler critters, like nematodes or jellyfish? Are they capable of cognition? For that matter, what about bacteria or plants? Can they cognize? How about artificial systems, like large language models? Does cognition require a nervous system? Does it necessarily involve “thinking”? Or some kind of “mental” activity? Once you start defining it in that rather circular fashion, you quickly realise we don’t have good definitions of “thinking” or “mental” either! Is cognition just “what cognitive scientists study”? Or are they only studying a particular version of it – the kind of cognition we see in humans? Maybe there is a less anthropocentric way to define i...
