The cognitive light cone is the span of space and time over which an Agent can represent, pursue and care about goals. It measures the size of the goals a system can hold – how far its concern and its competency reach, from the immediate and local to the distant and abstract.
The term is Michael Levin’s, borrowed from relativity. A physical light cone bounds the region of spacetime a point can causally affect or be affected by; the cognitive light cone bounds the region over which an agent can set and steer toward goals. A bacterium’s is minute – a chemical gradient in the next moment. A dog’s extends to its territory and its near future. A human’s can span decades, distant strangers and abstractions like justice. A Collective Agency|collective agent’s can be larger still.
It is one of the three parts of the coherent self an Agent comprises, alongside a Problem Space and the cognitive processes that navigate it. Because it fixes the reach of an agent’s goals, it is the measure of the agent’s Intelligence and agency: a larger light cone is a larger capacity to act on the world’s behalf rather than merely one’s own.
The light cone is not fixed
An agent’s light cone can grow or contract.
For a higher-order agent it grows with the interconnection between its parts: the more freely information flows between them, the larger the goals the whole can hold, and the more its parts can be guided by the whole’s intelligence. Enlarging a collective’s light cone – through research, shared sensemaking, communications infrastructure, deliberation – therefore is building its collective agency.
It collapses when a part is cut off from the feedback that bound it into the larger agent: the part defects, reverting to smaller-scale goals – for example a cancer cell whose light cone shrinks from “the organism” to “this cell”. Being in service to life is being in right relations is the condition that keeps a part’s light cone matched to the whole it is part of.
References
- Levin (2019), “The Computational Boundary of a ‘Self’: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition”
- Levin (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME)”