Adaptivity, the capacity to adjust in the face of perturbation, is a prerequisite for cognition. This assumption underlies prominent modelling approaches such as enactivism (Thompson, 2007) and active inference (Parr, Pezzulo, and Friston, 2022). Yet, despite its central role, adaptivity remains conceptually underdeveloped in these frameworks. I argue that models of cognition generally fail to recognise that adaptivity presents its own unique puzzles. By explicating these issues, I advance an approach that enables genuinely incorporating adaptivity into models of cognition and intelligence developed in cognitive science.
My main claim is that a rigorous account of adaptivity should address three core puzzles:
- The Puzzle of Identity: Who or what is adjusting to what?
- The Puzzle of Norms: What norms guide these adjustments?
- The Puzzle of Scope: What phenomena does adaptivity apply to?
Without addressing these questions, our attribution of adaptivity will be arbitrary. Living systems that adapt their behaviour would not be meaningfully different from rivers that “adapt” their flow or thermostats that “adapt” to the changing room temperature. To avoid such trivialisation of adaptivity, our investigation should focus on identifying candidate criteria and assessing their appropriateness. Thus, existing models involving the concept of adaptivity (e.g., “adaptive active inference”, Kirchhoff, Parr, et al., 2018) could be scored based on how well they resolve these puzzles. In this way, the puzzles can also be used as a guideline for formulating new modelling approaches.
Finally, by focusing on these conceptual puzzles, we are also in a more natural position to address an issue that has, to my knowledge, not been addressed in philosophy of cognitive science at all, namely, the origin of adaptivity. How did adaptivity emerge in evolutionary history? The answer to this simple question has profound consequences for our understanding of the evolution of intelligence and life in general. While it is often assumed that adaptivity is necessary for intelligence, it is not clear whether life requires adaptivity. Life without adaptivity is not just a conceptual possibility (Di Paolo, 2005)—it can also serve as a legitimate hypothesis about the origins of life (Frenkel-Pinter et al., 2021; Runnels et al. 2018).
References
Di Paolo, E. (2005). Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4(4), 429–452. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-005-9002-y
Di Paolo, E., Thompson, E., & Beer, R. (2022). Laying down a forking path: Tensions between enaction and the free energy principle. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 3. https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2022.9187
Frenkel-Pinter, M., Rajaei, V., Glass, J. B., Hud, N. V., & Williams, L. D. (2021). Water and Life: The Medium is the Message. Journal of Molecular Evolution, 89(1–2), 2–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00239-020-09978-6
Kirchhoff, M., Parr, T., Palacios, E., Friston, K., & Kiverstein, J. (2018). The Markov blankets of life: Autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 15(138), 20170792. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2017.0792
Parr, T., Pezzulo, G., & Friston, K. (2022). Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. The MIT Press.
Runnels, C. M., Lanier, K. A., Williams, J. K., Bowman, J. C., Petrov, A. S., Hud, N. V., & Williams, L. D. (2018). Folding, Assembly, and Persistence: The Essential Nature and Origins of Biopolymers. Journal of Molecular Evolution, 86(9), 598–610. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00239-018-9876-2
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and The Sciences of Mind. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
