A DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH TO PURPOSEFUL SYSTEMS AND INTELLIGENCE

In order to survive, the actions of a purposeful system must be governed in such a way that its more prepotent needs are satisfied. A purposeful system's actions are largely governed by its representation of its world, and hence if it has an inappropriate representation it will not survive. Our premise is that intelligence is a property only reasonably attributable to purposeful systems which compute a representation of their world. Using this premise, we consider cognition to be the continual process of computing/recomputing representations and argue that it implies forms of computation, described in this paper, which make distinctions.