Scaling Relevance Realization from Life to Mind: An Evolutionary Proposal for Cognition

Abstract

Meaning remains a central concept in cognitive science that has escaped clear elucidation. Building on enactivist and bio-semiotic traditions, this evolutionary proposal conceives meaning not only as subjective, linguistic, or cultural, but as arising from physical dynamics. Following Kováč [1], it is understood as semantic information linking entities with their environment in ways that causally impact their viability and flourishing. For living systems to persist far from thermodynamic equilibrium, they must realize what is relevant and meaningful to them in their environment to establish this dynamical coupling or 'existential fit'. Cognitive systems need to bring forth their Umwelt by framing and continually re-framing their environment, turning ill- into well-defined problems and so, zeroing in on relevant information. This fundamental process of cognition – called relevance realization [2] – has recently been naturalized and emerges in varying degrees across living systems through the organismic and co-constitutive dynamics of autopoiesis, anticipation, and adaptation [3].

Throughout evolutionary time, novel kinds of system-environment couplings and with them new modes of learning and information processing arose. Relevance realization should thus have qualitatively different emergent properties at different levels of organizational complexity. This thesis asks: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of 'minded' cognition from living systems? It investigates which adaptations and exaptations mark a threshold in the complexity of relevance realization via the following methodology. First, an interdisciplinary literature review and conceptual analysis (drawing from evolutionary epistemology, cognitive biology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science), synthesizing existing frameworks into an extended theory of evolving meaning-making qua relevance realization. Second, an examination of the evolutionary record via phylogenetic refinement, identifying key adaptive constraints and their cognitive or physiological innovations that afford such transformations. For instance, the emergence of counterfactual reasoning, epistemic agency, a recurrent cognitive architecture, or the capacity for temporal detachment may represent qualitatively new ways of enacting relevance realization.  

Crucially, the emergence of mind is here framed not in terms of representation or rationality, but through ontogenetic constraint transformation: Cognition is that which limits a system’s possible world into an interactable, affordance-laden Umwelt. Constraints are treated not as passive boundaries but as active informational structures that minded animals, in tandem with their environments, can reshape through a kind of cognitive niche construction. This “negative” conception of cognition, grounded in physical and evolutionary dynamics, clarifies the meaning of 'meaning' and offers a unified account of relevance realization and evolutionary transitions, with implications for cognitive evolution and the development of enactive AI.

References

[1] L. Kováč, “Information and Knowledge in Biology: Time for Reappraisal,” Plant Signaling & Behavior, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 65–73, 2007. doi: 10.4161/psb.2.2.4113.

[2] J. Vervaeke, T. P. Lillicrap, and B. A. Richards, “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science,” Journal of Logic and Computation, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 79–99, 2012.  doi: 10.1093/logcom/exp067.

[3] J. Jaeger, A. Riedl, A. Djedovic, J. Vervaeke, and D. Walsh, “Naturalizing relevance realization: Why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, 2024. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1362658.