”At successive levels, it is the availability of similar mathematical
descriptions from related problems that makes the next step appear
with simplicity and elegance.”
Successive levels may have self-similar structures —even when the concrete re-
alisations may appear entirely different— and hence it is possible to think on clos-
ing the progressive recursiveness if the model of the metalevel is able to capture
its own core structure; i.e. a particular control level is able to reason about itself as
a metalevel controller (this is what is proposed by Krieger Kriegel and Williford
(2006)). The system then becomes cognitively closed and the metareasoning can
progress ad infinitum —up to the limits of resources — without the need on new
implementational substrates.
As final conclusions of this paper, let’s comment on some of the proposed focus
points sugested by Taylor and mentioned in Section 2.1:
1. General principles for cognitive systems. Some proposals for principles are in-
troduced in this paper. All of them centered around the issue of model-based
action generation up to the level of reflective, model-based action.
2. The pros and cons of embodiment for cognitive systems. From the reasons shown
above, cognitive systems are necessarily situated and are necessarily embod-
ied to the extent of the action generation resources and the self-awareness
capabilities necessary for unified cognitive action generation (which is neces-
sary for preserving system cohesion).
3. The desirability or otherwise of guidance from the brain. The brain demonstrates
the effectivity of the principles shown above. This does not imply that build-
ing direct copies of the brain is the best approach but extracting structural
patterns that can be analysed formally.
4. Specific cognitive system designs and their powers. We have summarily analysed
three cognitive systems designs —cognitive, metacognitive and reflective—
and have argued for the possibility of closing the list of progressively meta
structures at this last one.
5. The best future pathways for development of cognitive systems. Explore the issue
of cognitive architectures based on hierarchical unified modeling of the sys-
tem/object structures.
9 Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the support of the European Commission through the grant ICEA:
Integrating Cognition, Emotion and Autonomy and of the Spanish Ministry of Educa-
ASLab.org / Principles for Consciousness / A-2007-011 v 1.0 Final
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