Autonomous Agents, Cognition and Intelligence

Paper in proceeding, 2024

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