From cognition to consciousness: a discussion about learning, reality representation, and decision making

The scientific understanding of cognition and consciousness is currently hampered by the lack of rigorous and universally accepted definitions that permit comparative studies. This article proposes new functional and unambiguous definitions for cognition and consciousness in order to provide clearly defined boundaries within which general theories of cognition and consciousness may be developed. The proposed definitions are built upon the construction and manipulation of reality representation, decision making, and learning and are scoped in terms of an underlying logical structure. It is argued that the presentation of reality also necessitates the concept of absence and the capacity to perform transitive inference. Explicit predictions relating to these new definitions, along with possible ways to test them, are also described and discussed.