Table Of ContentCognitive Biology
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Cognitive Biology
Dealing with Information from Bacteria to Minds
Gennaro Auletta
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GreatClarendonStreet,Oxfordox26dp
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Alla memoria di mia madre e mio padre, Chiara e Ferdinando.
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Foreword
I imagine you reading the first page of this book with a sense of anticipation and, perhaps, a
degree of trepidation. This is a big book that addresses big questions. It will take you on a long
journey, probably through unfamiliar terrains. This book addresses one of the most important
challenges facing science and philosophy; namely a deep and easy understanding of ourselves.
This is clearly not a trivial challenge. Indeed, despite remarkable progress over the past century,
no single discipline has provided a satisfactory answer. The path taken in this book captures and
incitesaparadigmshiftinneuroscientificthinking;ittranscendsanysingledisciplinetoprovidean
inclusiveandprincipledapproachtoquestionsaboutwhywearehereandhowwework.Itsagenda
is to establish a cognitive biology that situates cognitive neuroscience in its biological substrates.
This approach allows the author to call upon powerful constraints and constructs, which are used
to dissolve fundamental problems in cognitive science and related fields. The result is a picture of
thebrainthatisilluminatedfromseveralperspectives;apicturethatcoulddescribeanyadaptive,
self-organizing biological system.
The inclusive and eclectic treatment offered by this book rests on building bridges between
differentdisciplinesandformalisms.Forexample:bridgingbetweenquantumphysicsandinforma-
tion theory; information theory and perception; perception and semiotics; semiotics and behavior.
The author’s remarkable capacity to bridge these distinct fields reflects his role as Professor at
the Pontifical Gregorian University. The breadth of knowledge and scholarship that underwrites
this grand synthesis is truly remarkable. I was genuinely surprised to find that one person could
write so fluently and didactically about so many diverse scientific takes on the same problem.
Furthermore, in the areas that I am familiar with, I found his treatment very contemporary; as
if the author had magically attended all the key conferences and workshops relevant to this work
in the past couple of years. His panoramic approach works very well and enables each part of the
synthesis to be presented in a concise and contextualized fashion.
This book has three parts, all framed around the notion of information. The first deals with
the fundamental nature of information, its acquisition and measurement. The second considers
information in the exchange of agents with their environment and considers the general principles
of self-organization and dynamics in biological systems. In the third part of the book, we turn to
the interpretation of information, touching on high-level issues that attend language acquisition
and awareness. Information is a crucial theme throughout; it ties together the most elementary
formulations of our physical world, in terms of quantum physics, all the way through to symbolic
representations and pragmatics. It speaks to the underlying premise that the brain is an active
organ constructing, selecting and exchanging information with its environment. This builds upon
the early work of physicists like Helmholtz, who viewed the brain as making inferences about its
sensorium,generatingpredictionsandtestinghypothesesthroughinteractionwiththeworld.This
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view has dominated modern treatments of brain function (and indeed machine learning) in recent
years. Information is inherently probabilistic and is only defined in relation to some model of the
systemgenerating information. Again, thisprobabilistic viewisverycurrentand isattheheartof
things like the Bayesian brain hypothesis. However, this book takes us beyond the Bayesian brain
and considers why the selection and control of sensory information is mandated in all complex
self-organizing systems. It is this contextualization of modern treatments of the brain that lends
the author’s synthesis simplicity and substance.
Ifyoureadthisbookyouwilllearnalot.Furthermore,itmayhelpleverageyourowninsightsin
a larger context. Having said this, there are lots of ideas and material that need to be assimilated.
This assimilation is made relatively easy by the book’s primer-like style when covering technical
material.IconfessIwasabitsurprisedthatthepublishersallowedsomuchmathematicstoadorn
the text. Although it looks a little daunting at first glance, the mathematics are used in a largely
iconic and useful way and, with a little perseverance from the reader, it works very well.
We are invited to start this book with some quantum physics. Although this is probably
not in the comfort zone of most neuroscientists, let me reassure you and encourage you to start
reading. The quantum mechanical treatment is simply presented to underscore the fact that
information is inherently probabilistic and is the product of an explicit measurement or action.
In one sense, we are invited to engage in our own information acquisition at this level, and realize
the book’s latent information, in terms of our understanding of what we are. I guarantee that
whenyoureachtheendofthebookyouwilllookatthebrain,andperhapsyourself,inanewlight.
Karl J. Friston∗
University College London
∗Professor Karl J. Friston MB, BS, MA, MRCPsych, FMed.Sci, FRS Scientific Director: Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging,InstituteofNeurology,UCL,k.friston@fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk.
Author’s Preface
This book is the result of a lifetime of study and especially of ten years of intensive research. The
original idea was to search for the biological bases of cognition. However, during this preparatory
study I understood that we cannot deal with this issue without resorting to an engagement
with both physics and information theory. These two aspects are deeply connected in quantum
mechanics and, as the reader will see, in many respects this is very helpful for reading the book.
The turning point in my research was when I became acquainted with the work of those
neuroscientists who,against atraditional cognitivist understandingof cognition, have stressedthe
activeroleofthebrain.IrecallhereMarcJeannerodinparticular.Thisframeworkwasparticularly
suitable to me since I was (and still am) very much influenced by C. Peirce’s pragmatism. The
insights provided by this neurological approach allowed me to consider the role of cognition for
biology for the first time.
A second step was represented by the contributions coming from biology, especially from the
field of studies known as epigenetics and its impact on traditional evolution theory (the so-called
Evo-Devo). Here, I was very much influenced in particular by the work of Scott Gilbert. This was
a new, dynamic and interactive way of understanding the organism. Such a point of view was not
only in perfect agreement with the previous one but opened the door to unexpected possibilities
of conceiving the interconnections between cognition (understood here in the largest sense of the
word) and biology. In such a context I was also supported by the important insights developed by
FranciscoAyalaonthedistinctionbetweenteleonomyandteleology.Iwishalsotorecallherethat
some interactions with George Ellis (Capetown University) were very fruitful for the definition of
complexity and the issue of top-down causation.
A third important turn was when I became aware of Karl Friston’s research. His work on
Bayesian probabilities and on the connection between lowering the informational surprisal and
loweringthestatisticalequivalentofthefreeenergyprovidedmewithstrongtiesbetweencognitive
and biological processes, at least at an ontogenetic level. Moreover, it explained how the specific
information-controlling activity of organisms could have arisen at all. Previously, I had looked
on my own for a connection between inverse Bayesian probabilities and information in order to
establish an informational framework in which the specific activity of organisms in controlling
their environment could have arisen. Unfortunately, I could not arrive at a straight result like
that provided by Friston, so that when I had the opportunity to read his papers it was a sort of
revelation.
This book is addressed to any scholar (from undergraduate students to senior researchers)
interested in learning a little more about biology and cognition. It is not necessary to read the
wholebookbutisalsopossibletosimplyreadspecificargumentsorselectapersonalreadingpath
thanks to the summary, indexes, definitions, and cross-references. Moreover, interested scholars
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