Autonomous Agents, Cognition and Intelligence

Paper in proceeding, 2024

This paper proposes agent-based models as a foundation for the description of nature, at differentlevels of abstraction, from physical to ecological. It builds on the distributed concurrent informationprocessing performed by diverse types of agents, from elementary physical to chemical, sub-cellularto cellular, organismic, and ecological agents connected in networks of networks. It contributes aninterdisciplinary synthesis of research results from a variety of research fields providing a commonframework for conceptual analysis and applications to emergent levels of organization, “activematter”, cognition and intelligence, development, and evolution.