This paper introduces Waymaking, a philosophy that defines cognition by the trajectories of an agent’s movement through its ongoing encounter, whereby those trajectories are themselves dynamic patterns of nested (i.e., whole-body, neural) spatiotemporal movement. Here, an agent’s encounter incudes all realms traditionally named mental, physical, and virtual, distinguishing these by their affordances and sensory landscapes relative to the agent-base. Recent research on the hippocampal formation and entorhinal cortex has opened a way for cognition to be understood as trajectories within nested landscapes: We can now posit knowledge-acquisition, remembering, and spatiotemporal navigation as a common process through statistically diverse clustered regularities. This paper formulates these findings into a general framework that can be used heuristically to provide a practical definition of cognition applicable across disciplines and species, thus alleviating stubborn dichotomies such as those at the heart of the so-called mind-body problem and arguments around potential plant or animal cognition.

What are we saying when we say a body is cognitive? In various turns, we might be saying (or taken to be saying) that it is conscious, that it has mind, or that it is intelligent. But consciousness does not imply mind, and cognition may not imply consciousness. Still, this ambiguity is an unnecessary confusion that pervades scientific, philosophical, and everyday language. This paper proposes that we clarify this as follows: An embodied act can be assessed as cognitive if its activity can be modelled as a trajectory towards a goal, if this trajectory takes place in some state space (i.e., geographical, linguistic) that can also be modelled, and if, within this modelling, an affordance vector can be established from the agent to goal that does not depend upon another body for its relevance (i.e. a hammer would not have this vector because it acquires its directedness from another body).