Work on minimal cognition raises a variety of questions concerning the boundaries of cognition. Many discussions of minimal cognition assume that the domain of minimal cognition is a subset of the domain of the living. In this article, I consider whether non-living ‘active materials’ ought to be included as instances of minimal cognition. I argue that seeing such cases as ‘minimal models’ of (minimal) cognition requires recognising them as members of a class of systems sharing the same basic features and exhibiting the same general patterns of behaviour. Minimal cognition in this sense is a very inclusive concept: rather than specifying some threshold level of cognition or a type of cognition found only in very simple systems, it is a concept of cognition associated with very minimal criteria that pick out only the most essential requirements for a system to exhibit cognitive behaviour.

中文翻译：

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活性材料：认知的最小模型？

关于最小认知的工作提出了关于认知边界的各种问题。许多关于最小认知的讨论都假设最小认知领域是生物领域的一个子集。在这篇文章中，我考虑是否应该将非生命的“活性材料”作为最小认知的实例包括在内。我认为，将这些案例视为（最小）认知的“最小模型”需要将它们识别为一类系统的成员，这些系统具有相同的基本特征并表现出相同的一般行为模式。从这个意义上说，最小认知是一个非常包容的概念：而不是指定某个认知的阈值水平或一种仅在非常简单的系统中才能发现的认知类型，