The cognitive agent’s problem

A lot of theorizing about cognition has to do with the such questions as

• What is thinking, and how is it done?
• What is experience, and how come we have it?

Then, having selected such issues, theorists then set themselves the problem of how would one design an agent or a robot which can do such things as think and have experience.

When I started thinking about cognition, I took a different approach.  I looked at the problems that a cognitive agent needs to solve.  Most obvious, among those, is the problem of survival as a biological organism.  And, having settled on a problem that agent needs to solve, I set about trying to understand what could evolve to solve that problem.