Cognitive Substrates: What They Are and What They Learn

Abstract

The fabrication of veritable cognizers relies on an understanding of possible substrates of cognition. Cognitive substrates are subsystems of cognizers, though cognition itself is not a property of them alone but from interaction with the rest of a cognizer and the environment. Ultimately, all cognitive functions including cognitive development and learning need to be explained in terms of processes in cognitive substrates without recourse to logically incoherent reified knowledge, concept structures, behaviors, etc. We describe what cognitive substrates are and where they fit in. We discuss what learning means from the view of cognitive substrates and what can and must be learned by them. We conclude that learning is ongoing change in the system organization of the cognitive substrate itself and that the only representation available in a cognitive substrate is about the innards of the cognizer itself. The only models that can exist in and be learned by a cognitive substrate are not of the external environment or objects and events in it, but of the processes and states the system engages in when interacting with the environment or things in the world