Philosophical Analysis of the Biogenic Approach to Cognition

The subject of the article is a biogenic approach to cognition, considered from the perspective of the methodology of philosophical analysis. The essential basis of this approach is the study of cognition as a natural process that has an evolutionary history. The objectives of the biogenic approach are to identify the origins of cognition, to reveal its general manifestations at all levels of cognitive complexity. As a philosophical basis for this approach, one should single out a broad approach to cognition, when it is considered as a property of living things, and it is argued that the simplest biological beings functioning on a non-neural basis already have cognition. The biogenic approach proceeds from the fact that cognition is considered as a process aimed at achieving a favorable state of a biological agent for solving existential tasks (conservation and reproduction), taking into account a certain prototype of such a state based on the control of physico-chemical processes carried out inside the body and taking into account the infl uence of external factors and past experience. The article concludes that the biogenic approach has many strengths, as it allows us to determine the primary level of biological complexity of the cognition process, aims to find criteria for identifying biological beings with cognition, and provides an opportunity to initiate a discussion on the construction of a unified theory of cognition that takes into account and unites all manifestations of cognition at different levels of cognitive complexity. However, the biogenic approach cannot avoid a number of problems (terminological ambiguity regarding the definition of cognition, the lack of clear criteria for cognizing and non-cognizing biological beings, as well as the mechanisms of cognitive complexity, etc.). In this regard, the article proposes to formulate a broad and narrow interpretation of the concept of ‘cognition’, move away from a purely quantitative approach to understanding different levels of cognitive complexity, and investigate the causes and mechanisms of such complexity, taking into account the qualitative specifics of the levels of biological organization of living beings.