Taking Cognition Seriously: A generalised physics of cognition
This work addresses the foundational problem of modeling cognition mathematically for researchers in complex systems and AI, but appears incremental as it extends existing category-theoretic approaches to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding cognition through category theory, proposing that cognitive systems have fundamental physical trade-offs leading to a utility problem and investigating topological defects in gauge fields over conceptual spaces.
The study of complex systems through the lens of category theory consistently proves to be a powerful approach. We propose that cognition deserves the same category-theoretic treatment. We show that by considering a highly-compact cognitive system, there are fundamental physical trade-offs resulting in a utility problem. We then examine how to do this systematically, and propose some requirements for "cognitive categories", before investigating the phenomenona of topological defects in gauge fields over conceptual spaces.