The role of information in formation of cognitive organization

Understanding the emergence of complex cognitive architectures during evolution, morphogenesis (evolution's "little sister") and life-time adaptation is faced with a dilemma: there is a quickly increasing understanding of the local rules that lead to the success of various schemes. However, the big picture of how and why these local processes work together seamlessly is still very murky.

In the last years, Shannon's information theory has demonstrated great value in characterizing constraints and bounds on decision making and cognitive tasks. This is partly due to the fact that decision making is subject to informational limitations which can be quantitatively characterized. It also relies on a high-level hypothesis that, in a quasi-equilibrium, and all other constraints kept equal, evolution tends to optimize an organism's cognitive processing in a suitable way.

Various incarnations of this generic idea are being studied, such as "information parsimony", "predictive information maximization", "empowerment maximization", or "compression progress" (the latter in a Kolmogorov setting). The talk will discuss a selection of such principles as to how they can provide a "top-down"-like understanding of the emergence of cognitive organizations which is not tied to a bottom-up understanding of the mechanisms which would implement them.