This article presents a naturalist approach to cognition understood as a
network of info-computational, autopoietic processes in living systems. It
provides a conceptual framework for the unified view of cognition as evolved
from the simplest to the most complex organisms, based on new empirical and
theoretical results. It addresses three fundamental questions: what cognition
is, how cognition works and what cognition does at different levels of
complexity of living organisms. By explicating the info-computational character
of cognition, its evolution, agent-dependency and generative mechanisms we can
better understand its life-sustaining and life-propagating role. The
info-computational approach contributes to rethinking cognition as a process of
natural computation in living beings that can be applied for cognitive
computation in artificial systems.Comment: Manuscript submitted to Computability in Europe CiE 201