BI 246 Andrea Gambarotto: Cognition Requires Agency

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Andrea Gambarotto is a postdoctoral philosopher and researcher at the University of Luxembourg. He is an expert in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, most commonly known as Hegel. More recently he has been studying the relation between some of Hegel's ideas and those of modern theoretical biology regarding questions of autonomy and agency. Andrea argues that, where Immanuel Kant  believed we should explain biological stuff and inanimate stuff the same way- via mechanistic explanations, Hegel believed to explain the biological stuff, we should leverage the fact the biological organisms have intrinsic purpose… agency. And, Hegel's approach is in line with what's called the enactive approach in cognitive science, which has a long history and continues to thrive. Andrea explains all of that during our discussion. One reason I invited Andrea on is because these issues get the heart of what some of us care about, which is, what are the differences and similarities between our natural intelligence and engineered artificial intelligence? Why should we care about those differences? A large language model isn't alive, but does it have a mind? Should we call what it does cognition? What are the relations between life, mind, cognition, intelligence, consciousness? Those kinds of questions. We even discuss why the famed octopus might be really intelligent but not conscious. Andrea Gambarotto Gambarotto papers Enactivism and the Hegelian stance on intrinsic purposiveness Body plan organization and the evolution of conscious agency Blog: Dialectical Systems Papers also mentioned Weber & Varela 2002: Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality. Mossio & Bich 2014: What makes biological organisation teleological? Bechtel & Bich & 2021: Grounding cognition: heterarchical control mechanisms in biology. Pessoa 2026: Beyond networks: Toward adaptive models of biological complexity. Levins 1998: Dialectics and Systems Theory. Barandiaran & Moreno 2006: On What Makes Certain Dynamical Systems Cognitive: A Minimally Cognitive Organization Program. Books mentioned Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language Radical Embodied Cognitive Science An Evolutionary Story of Agency 0:00 - Intro 7:51 - Intrinsic and extrinsic purposiveness 14:39 - Hegel, Kant, and autonomy 28:07 - Constraint closure and enactivism 35:13 - How Hegel and Enactivitsm agree 43:58 - Dialectics 57:44 - Brain activity and enactivism 1:20:02 - Heidegger and cognitive science 1:26:59 - Artificial intelligence and Hegel 1:29:15 - Mind agency decoupling 1:43:38 - Evolution of conscious agency 1:52:42 - Heterarchy via McCulloch