Cognition as a global biological process

Living systems implement a suit of informational processes in the service of driving appropriate actions. The multitude of cellular signaling pathways has been described as enabling organisms without nervous system to implement cognitive processing that gives the knowledge necessary for guiding behavior. We discuss the relationship of cognition, information processing and cellular signaling. Cognition is not merely the processing of information or the signaling pathways: it is a particular architecture of how these processes are realized. We expand this perspective advancing a framework in which cognition is recognized as a global biological process with the same overall status as metabolism. Cognition is an organism-level process that implements though a signaling network the key steps of information processing necessary for bringing forth a range of integrated cognitive components. It is the cyclic and interconnected web of multi-step and multi-level parallel processing that manipulate information to derive knowledge of the organism and its situation, all in the service of producing the optimal changes for safeguarding the proper maintenance of the organism. Such cognitive architecture is conceptually similar to that of metabolism, which warrants the notion of cognition as a proper global biological process. Thus conceptualized, cognition sits side by side with metabolism in orchestrating the processes necessary for the existence of life as we know it.