Reply To: Notes on Methodology, Experiments & Protocol

[Supah Protist]

@auburn is cognitive type not intended to model domain of interest? I think this is question of scope. I'm not clear on what aspects of psychology cognitive type is attempting to model. Cognition is not a well defined term in my opinion. Neuroscience studies the nervous system, a structure that is easily identifiable in organisms that have one. Cognitive science purports to study "the mind and its processes" except no one knows what a mind really is. At least from my perspective, I would expect any "model of the mind" or "cognitive architecture" to attempt to account for all mental phenomena, including interest at some level of granularity. Perhaps you use the word cognition to encompass a smaller scope of phenomena than I would expect. Can you have a complete picture of the mind without including interests? It may be the case that cognitive type is attempting to model a set of subsystems of the mind, but not the mind itself. I know that cognitive type isn't trying to model everything the nervous system does; respiration and digestion for example, but I don't have a good sense of the ground the theory is trying to cover. This also may come down to the following question. What is a cognitive function? Are one's cognitive functions responsible for everything a one does? If not, then what are they responsible for? Are they specific to humans or do all organisms have cognitive functions. A bacterium can certainly detect its environment, move through its environment and exhibit goal directed behavior and some would certainly argue that those activities qualify as cognition.
https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The%20free-energy%20principle%20A%20unified%20brain%20theory.pdf
This is a link to an article on the "Free Energy Principle"; a theory of self organizing systems. It describes a cycle consisting of perception, action, external states and internal states which may correspond to revising, conducting, decompressing and compressing respectively. I share this to illustrate my own potential presuppositions about cognition. Is your use of the word cognition meant to encapsulate the behavior of goal directed systems in general, a subset of human neural activity or perhaps something else?