The issue is not merely terminological: how cognition is defined fundamentally shapes our understanding of learning, evolutionary processes, animal minds, and humanity’s place within the natural order. Definitions that are overly restrictive risk obscuring non-human forms of intelligence, while overly permissive accounts threaten to broaden the concept to the point of explanatory uselessness.

This presentation proposes a theoretically robust framework for minimal cognition grounded in experience-based predictive modelling and in two embodied expectations: an inductive expectation that the future will resemble the past, and a sceptical expectation that it will not do so perfectly. It further argues that these predictive dynamics are recapitulated across levels of biological organization, emerging both in evolutionary processes at the population level and in learning processes within individual organisms.

_____________________________________________