Thomas M. Gaul

Cognitive Distinctions in Minimally Cognitive Agents

Spring 2023 to Spring 2024


This project aims to develop a more rigorous method of cognitive descrption that avoids the anthropocentricism implicit in natural language. I have proposed that by focusing on a concept I call cognitive distinctions, we can construct representations of an agent’s behaviour that are more consonant with that agent’s perspective. I have further proposed a graph theoretic formalism as a preliminary method to construct these descriptions from times series of a minimally cognitive model agent. Beyond this, an exploration of other formalisms would certainly be profitable. At the very least, the concept of cognitive distinctions can provide a certain framework in which to consider the relation between an agent’s perspective and our own such that we may avoid making epistemological errors in cognitive science.

The code for this project is available in this Gitlab repository.


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