Collective Cognition and Distributed Information Processing from Bacteria to Humans

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to propose a general info-computational model of cognition that can be applied to living organisms from the level of a single cell´s cognition to the level of groups of increasingly complex organisms with social, distributed cognition. We defend the project of new cognitivism, which unlike the old one acknowledges the central role of embodiment for cognition. Information processing going on in a cognising agent range from transduction of chemical signals and “quorum sensing ” in bacteria, via simple local rules of behaviour that insects follow and that manifest themselves as “swarm intelligence”, to human level cognition with full richness of human languages and other systems of communication.12