Anna Riedl’s research while affiliated with University of Vienna and other places

The way organismic agents come to know the world, and the way algorithms solve problems, are fundamentally different. The most sensible course of action for an organism does not simply follow from logical rules of inference. Before it can even use such rules, the organism must tackle the problem of relevance. It must turn ill-defined problems into well-defined ones, turn semantics into syntax. This ability to realize relevance is present in all organisms, from bacteria to humans. It lies at the root of organismic agency, cognition, and consciousness, arising from the particular autopoietic, anticipatory, and adaptive organization of living beings. In this article, we show that the process of relevance realization is beyond formalization. It cannot be captured completely by algorithmic approaches. This implies that organismic agency (and hence cognition as well as consciousness) are at heart not computational in nature. Instead, we show how the process of relevance is realized by an adaptive and emergent triadic dialectic (a trialectic), which manifests as a metabolic and ecological-evolutionary co-constructive dynamic. This results in a meliorative process that enables an agent to continuously keep a grip on its arena, its reality. To be alive means to make sense of one’s world. This kind of embodied ecological rationality is a fundamental aspect of life, and a key characteristic that sets it apart from non-living matter.

The way organismic agents come to know the world, and the way algorithms solve problems, are fundamentally different. The most sensible course of action for an organism does not simply follow from logical rules of inference. Before it can even use such rules, the organism must tackle the problem of relevance. It must turn ill-defined problems into well-defined ones, turn semantics into syntax. This ability to realize relevance is present in all organisms, from bacteria to humans. It lies at the root of organismic agency, cognition, and consciousness, arising from the particular autopoietic, anticipatory, and adaptive organization of living beings. In this paper, we show that the process of relevance realization is beyond formalization. It cannot be captured completely by algorithmic approaches. This implies that organismic agency (and hence cognition as well as consciousness) are at heart not computational in nature. Instead, we show how the process of relevance is realized by an adaptive and emergent triadic dialectic (a trialectic), which manifests as a metabolic and ecological-evolutionary co-constructive dynamic. This results in a meliorative process that enables an agent to continuously keep a grip on its arena, its reality. To be alive means to make sense of one's world. This kind of embodied ecological rationality is a fundamental aspect of life, and a key characteristic that sets it apart from non-living matter.

Among the disciplines focusing on the rationality question and ultimately the phenomenon of intelligence in minds, brains, and machines, the Great Rationality Debate 2.0 is taking place between the axiomatic approach to optimality modeling on one side and ecological rationality on the other. The divide between the two stances can be reduced by integrating advancements of each tradition into the other. Traditionally, it is held that taking computational constraints of cognition into account, rational agents face a speed-accuracy trade-off. The resulting lowered normative ceiling of resource-rational optimality is often met by heuristics. We will modify the conception of this trade-off because it lacks a crucial element: Herbert Simon’s scissors analogy indicates that bounded rationality is limited both by internal cognitive constraints as well as the task environment. Examining heuristics through the bias-variance dilemma an organism faces in an unknown territory adds an efficiency-robustness trade-off. These two conflicts cannot be optimized a priori, but have to be negotiated in an emerging bottom-up manner by continuously resolving the frame problem. This process of overcoming the frame problem is referred to as ‘relevance realization’ and it rests on problem transformation, sense-making, abductive reasoning, or insight. The main question of rationality, therefore, changes from a priori optimality to an ongoing optimal fittedness of an organism-environment system. This implies a non-propositional perspective on cognition and a shift of the paradigm to enacted and embodied rationality. Our argument relocates the importance of the axioms of rationality into a sociocultural tool for “small worlds” once the statistical requirements of the large world have been transformed by relevance realization. These cognitive findings have implications for categorization and perception, philosophy of science, economic theory, as well as machine learning, and applied mathematics.