Speaker: Nick Brancazio

Active materials are self-propelled non-living entities which, in some circumstances, exhibit a number of cognitively interesting behaviors such as gradient-following, avoiding obstacles, signaling and group coordination. A live proposal across both scientific and philosophical discussions is that this may make them useful as minimal models of cognition (Hanczyc 2014, McGivern 2019). Batterman and Rice (2014) have argued that what makes a minimal model explanatory is that the model is ultimately in the same universality class as the target system, which underpins why it exhibits the same macrobehavior. I argue that cognitive behaviours have no such universality class. Turning to the minimal cognition methodology of Randall Beer (1996, 2020), I argue instead that active materials can be minimally cognitively interesting because they undertake cognitive tasks that have traditionally been expected to involve internal representational dynamics. Beer’s (1996) minimal modeling approach demonstrates how minimal models of cognition can be explanatorily valuable, and without positing a distinct class of cognitive behaviours or putting these models in the same universality class as cognitive systems.