562 – Ecological Cognition III: Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (part 1)

560 – Ecological Cognition II: Resonance

560 What the heck does the brain do in Ecological Dynamics, if it isn’t computing, processing, or representing? An introduction to the concept of Resonance.Download link

ICPA - ICPA 2026

Welcome to the 2026 International Conference on Perception and Action (ICPA). This year, we meet in Omaha, Nebraska, bringing the international ecological psychology community together in a setting that reflects a growing culture of research and innovation.ICPA brings together scholars from around the world who study perception and action as inseparable, mutually constraining processes grounded in organism–environment relations. The program features work spanning affordances, perceptual learning, coordination and control, development, social interaction, ecological design, and methodological innovation.The conference is designed to support sustained dialogue across theoretical, empirical, and applied perspectives—welcoming diverse viewpoints and participants from across institutions, disciplines, and countries. We invite you to join us for a week of scientific exchange and community building as we continue to advance ecological approaches to understanding behavior in real-world contexts.

Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds

Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These advances are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose composition and origin are not like any of the available natural model species. In this Perspective, I introduce TAME-Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere-a framework for understanding and manipulating cognition in unconventional substrates. TAME formalizes a non-binary (continuous), empirically-based approach to strongly embodied agency. TAME provides a natural way to think about animal sentience as an instance of collective intelligence of cell groups, arising from dynamics that manifest in similar ways in numerous other substrates. When applied to regenerating/developmental systems, TAME suggests a perspective on morphogenesis as an example of basal cognition. The deep symmetry between problem-solving in anatomical, physiological, transcriptional, and 3D (traditional behavioral) spaces drives specific hypotheses by which cognitive capacities can increase during evolution. An important medium exploited by evolution for joining active subunits into greater agents is developmental bioelectricity, implemented by pre-neural use of ion channels and gap junctions to scale up cell-level feedback loops into anatomical homeostasis. This architecture of multi-scale competency of biological systems has important implications for plasticity of bodies and minds, greatly potentiating evolvability. Considering classical and recent data from the perspectives of computational science, evolutionary biology, and basal cognition, reveals a rich research program with many implications for cognitive science, evolutionary biology, regenerative medicine, and artificial intelligence.

The Care of the Self within a Biopolitical Paradigm: Integrating Cognitive Psychology to resist Subjectification

Contemporary theories of resistance to biopolitical subjectification often reify unfreedom by lacking a plausible model of agency. This thesis resolves this by establishing an ontological foundation for the agent as fundamentally autopoietic and semiotic, drawing on contemporary cognitive science. It then proposes a new foundation for resistance by synthesizing Michel Foucault’s later work on the care of the self with the 4P/5E model of embodied cognition. I show how this interdisciplinary approach establishes Foucault’s ethical techniques as a systematic ecology of practices for cultivating a free, self-determining agent and by reframing resistance as a practical, embodied ethics of self-formation, it inherently fosters two vital skills: the gain of self-knowledge and self-mastery.

Lectures on Perception: An Ecological Perspective

Lectures on Perception: An Ecological Perspective addresses the generic principles by which each and every kind of life form—from single celled organisms (e.g., difflugia) to multi-celled organisms (e.g., primates)—perceives the circumstances of their living so that they can behave adaptively. It focuses on the fundamental ability that relates each and every organism to its surroundings, namely, the ability to perceive things in the sense of how to get about among them and what to do, or not

Frameworks v0.2

FRAMEWORKS v0.2 Many of the thoughts in this document draw on and synthesize concepts from economics, math, physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. Here are a handful of core concepts that are often relied on as inputs: Activation energy Behavioral economics Cognitive biases Darwinism En...

The Fabric and the Brain

Articulating agent ecologies with high-personality planetary computation

Grounded world models in biological organisms and future embodied AI

Recent advances in generative and embodied AI have been driven by large-scale predictive learning over multimodal data. However, the resulting systems remain largely based on passive training regimes where linguistic regularities create the scaffold onto which information from other modalities is attached. Conversely, neuroscience and cognitive science suggest that biological intelligence is organized in the opposite way, where grounded world models acquired through interaction with the environment provide the semantic scaffold to which language is attached. Here, we illustrate five examples of neural circuits supporting grounded world modelling, which underlie navigation in physical and conceptual spaces, affordance-based perception and interaction with objects, active perception and exploratory learning, allostatic control and emotion, and the distinction between self- and world-generated outcomes. These examples highlight several features largely missing from current embodied AI, including the role of intrinsic dynamics as a foundation for learning, the centrality of action in aligning these dynamics with the external world, the prominence of autonomous experience and open-ended learning over passive assimilation of externally provided data, and the fact that early predictive and control mechanisms scaffold higher cognitive abilities such as reasoning, conceptual navigation, planning, imagination, understanding others' minds, and communication. Finally, we discuss whether and how principles derived from biological systems may inform future embodied AI, including training regimes based on social interaction to construct world models that are not only grounded but also socially shared and aligned with human norms and values.

The sentient cell: the cellular foundations of consciousness

"All species, extant and extinct, from the simplest unicellular prokaryotes to humans, have an existential consciousness. Without sentience, the first cells that emerged some 4 billion years ago would have been evolutionary dead-ends, unable to survive in the chaotic, dangerous environment in which life first appeared and evolved. In this book, Arthur Reber's theory, the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), is outlined and distinguished from those models that argue that minds could be instantiated on artificial entities and those that maintain consciousness requires a nervous system. The CBC framework takes a novel approach to classic topics such as the origin-of-life, philosophy of mind, the role of genes, the impact of cognition, and how biological information is processed by all species. It also calls for a rethinking of a variety of issues including the moral implications of the sentient capacities of all species, how welfare concerns need to be expanded beyond where they currently are, and critically, how all life is intertwined in a coordinated cognitive ecology. The Sentient Cell explores this revolutionary model, which updates the standard neo-Darwinian framework within which current approaches operate and examines the underlying biomolecular features that are the likely candidates for the "invention" of consciousness and outline their role in cellular life." --

The biogenic approach to cognition

After half a century of cognitive revolution we remain far from agreement about what cognition is and what cognition does. It was once thought that these questions could wait until the data were in. Today there is a mountain of data, but no way of making sense of it. The time for tackling the fundamental issues has arrived. The biogenic approach to cognition is introduced not as a solution but as a means of approaching the issues. The traditional, and still predominant, methodological stance in cognitive inquiry is what I call the anthropogenic approach: assume human cognition as the paradigm and work ‘down’ to a more general explanatory concept. The biogenic approach, on the other hand, starts with the facts of biology as the basis for theorizing and works ‘up’ to the human case by asking psychological questions as if they were biological questions. Biogenic explanations of cognition are currently clustered around two main frameworks for understanding biology: self-organizing complex systems and autopoiesis. The paper describes the frameworks and infers from them ten empirical principles—the biogenic ‘family traits’—that constitute constraints on biogenic theorizing. Because the anthropogenic approach to cognition is not constrained empirically to the same degree, I argue that the biogenic approach is superior for approaching a general theory of cognition as a natural phenomenon.

Movements of the Mind: A Theory of Attention, Intention and Action

Abstract. Movements of the Mind explains what it is to be an agent. Focusing on mental agency, the book’s eponymous topic, it investigates an agent’s doing

Co-Creation: Systems Thinking Beyond the Machine

Complexity thinking is all the rage — in the arts and sciences. Yet, there are two different strands of thinking about complexity, which are often confounded. The first comes from cybernetics, focussing on control in complex situations. The second is ecological, aiming at sustainable participation in a reality beyond control. Their difference rests on a fundamental distinction: is complexity rooted in feedback regulation or collective co-creation? While feedback remains mechanistic, co-creation generates new spaces of possibilities. We need it to understand life and its evolution. And it empowers us to rewrite our future, to escape our mechanistic cage without abandoning scientific rigor. In this paper, we illustrate how we implement these powerful yet abstract principles through our artistic and philosophical practice.

The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness

Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view fundamentally mischaracterizes how physics relates to information. We call this mistake the Abstraction Fallacy. Tracing the causal origins of abstraction reveals that symbolic computation is not an intrinsic physical process. Instead, it is a mapmaker-dependent description. It requires an active, experiencing cognitive agent to alphabetize continuous physics into a finite set of meaningful states. Consequently, we do not need a complete, finalized theory of consciousness to assess AI sentience—a demand that simply pushes the question beyond near-term resolution and deepens the AI welfare trap. What we actually need is a rigorous ontology of computation. The framework proposed here explicitly separates simulation (behavioral mimicry driven by vehicle causality) from instantiation (intrinsic physical constitution driven by content causality). Establishing this ontological boundary shows why algorithmic symbol manipulation is structurally incapable of instantiating experience. Crucially, this argument does not rely on biological exclusivity. If an artificial system were ever conscious, it would be because of its specific physical constitution, never its syntactic architecture. Ultimately, this framework offers a physically grounded refutation of computational functionalism to resolve the current uncertainty surrounding AI consciousness.

Learning Outside the Brain: Integrating Cognitive Science and Systems Biology

Learning is commonplace in organisms such as ourselves and even in organisms as far distant as the bee and the octopus. Such learning is implemented by brains, or neuronal networks, and has been extensively studied within ethology, psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Whether learning also takes place in nonneuronal settings has remained a matter of sustained controversy, too often dominated by ideological views. In this survey, I will explain how learning can be rigorously interpreted as a form of information processing and then explore the evidence for whether learning also takes place in organismal contexts outside the brain, such as physiology, development, and individual cells. I will try to explain why it is important to build bridges in this way between cognitive science and systems biology, why concepts and methods from various branches of engineering may be helpful in this task, and what the eventual impact may be on how we think about the organism.