The Asymmetry of Cognitive Domains: Life, Milieu, and the Meta-Ecology of Cognition

1 The Asymmetry of Cognitive Domains: Life, Milieu, and the Meta-Ecology of Cognition David Matta American University of Beirut Email: dm[email protected] ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5688-0687 Preprint DOI: [Zenodo DOI to be assigned upon deposit] Running Head: Asymmetry and Milieu in the Meta-Ecology of Cognition Abstract This paper proposes a new framework for understanding cognition as an inherently asymmetric and milieu-bounded phenomenon. Building on Michael Levin's concept of the cognitive lightcone—the spatio-temporal reach of a system's goals—it argues that every living system occupies a cognitive domain defined by both its scope of concern and the environment that sustains it. Knowledge thus flows downward, toward smaller scales, while regulation and emergence flow upward, from encompassing systems that remain epistemically opaque. This asymmetry of cognitive domains reveals a structural limit of knowing: organisms can model their sustaining milieu but cannot apprehend the total of possible milieus or the higher orders of life that contain them. Integrating insights from Uexküll, Merleau-Ponty, von Foerster, and Thompson, the paper outlines a meta-ecology of cognition—a multiscale philosophy of life that reframes cognition as local participation within a larger, unknowable ecology of being. Keywords: Cognitive domains; Asymmetry; Milieu-bounded cognition; Phenomenology of life; Multiscale agency; Meta-ecology; Michael Levin 1. Introduction: The Problem of Cognitive Asymmetry Living systems, from the simplest bacterium to complex human societies, exhibit a remarkable capacity: they pursue goals, maintain themselves, and navigate their environments with apparent intelligence. Yet this intelligence is not uniform or universal— it is always situated, bounded, and partial. Each organism inhabits what might be called a cognitive domain: a bounded field of perception, valuation, and action that defines what it means to be alive for that particular form of life. 2 The central thesis of this paper is that these cognitive domains are structured by a fundamental asymmetry. Living systems possess the capacity to know "downward"—to represent, model, and manipulate systems smaller or simpler than themselves. A human can study cellular processes; a cell can respond to molecular gradients. Yet these same systems remain systematically blind "upward" to the larger wholes that contain, regulate, and give meaning to their existence. We exist within hierarchies of cognition we can only partially intuit, embedded in forms of life whose operations exceed our representational capacity. This asymmetry is not merely an epistemic limitation to be overcome through better science or expanded consciousness. It is a structural feature of cognition itself—built into the very nature of knowing as a localized, embodied, and materially constrained phenomenon. Our scientific gaze mirrors this asymmetry: we study the micro and the personal with increasing precision, yet the supra-organismic systems that regulate human life—ecological, planetary, perhaps cosmic—remain epistemically inaccessible in their full scope. To establish this framework, I draw upon three interconnected conceptual resources: 1. Michael Levin's cognitive lightcone (2024): the spatio-temporal horizon of a system's goals and concerns, expanding as life evolves greater complexity. 2. The principle of milieu-bounded cognition: extending Uexküll's *Umwelt* and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, showing that cognition is always conditioned by the environment that sustains it. 3. The asymmetry thesis itself: knowledge flows downward while regulation flows upward, creating nested hierarchies of partial knowers. Before developing these concepts, it is essential to define the core terms that structure this analysis: Cognitive domain refers to the field of sense, value, and action that sustains a system's autonomy. It encompasses what a system can perceive, care about, and act upon— its lived world. Asymmetry denotes the structural difference between what a system can model (smaller-scale phenomena) and what it is embedded within (larger-scale systems that remain opaque). Milieu-bounded cognition describes how cognition is necessarily constrained by the specific environment that affords its persistence. No system transcends the conditions of its own possibility. 3 A note on terminology: This paper employs "knowledge," "knowing," and "cognition" in a deliberately broad, non-anthropocentric sense that departs from classical epistemology's restriction of these terms to propositional, linguistically mediated human states. Following the enactive tradition (Thompson, 2007; Varela et al., 1991) and Levin's (2024) framework of basal cognition, I use "cognition" to refer to any goal-directed sensemaking activity that enables a system to maintain its identity and navigate its environment. A bacterium tracking a chemical gradient "knows" its environment in this functional sense—not through representations or beliefs, but through embodied sensitivity and adaptive response. This usage is justified on several grounds. First, restricting cognition to humanlevel symbolic thought creates an arbitrary boundary that obscures continuities across scales of life (Thompson, 2007). Second, contemporary cognitive science increasingly recognizes that representation-free forms of intelligence pervade biological systems (Levin, 2024; Baluška & Levin, 2016). Third, phenomenologically, all knowing begins as embodied engagement before crystallizing into explicit propositions (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). The bacterial "knowing" and human scientific knowing differ in degree and structure, but both exemplify situated sense-making within a milieu. When traditional epistemological precision is required, I specify "propositional knowledge" or "explicit representation." Otherwise, "knowledge" denotes the broader capacity of living systems to be informationally coupled with their environments in ways that support adaptive action—what might be called "operative knowing" or "enacted intelligence." This terminological strategy allows the framework to address cognition at all scales without collapsing important distinctions between levels. Roadmap: Section 2 surveys existing hierarchical theories of life and cognition, identifying where they approach but do not fully articulate the asymmetry thesis. Section 3 introduces Levin's empirical work on cognitive lightcones and multiscale competency, providing biological grounding for the framework. Sections 4–5 develop milieu-bounded cognition and show how it complements the lightcone concept, while Section 6 explores epistemic and ethical implications for AI, ecology, and governance. Section 7 addresses philosophical objections and synthesizes the framework into a meta-ecology of cognition. This paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 examines existing theoretical frameworks that address hierarchical organization in life and cognition, identifying where the asymmetry thesis departs from or extends these traditions. Section 3 introduces Michael Levin's work on the cognitive lightcone and multiscale competency, showing how his empirical research provides biological grounding for the asymmetry framework. Section 4 develops the concept of milieu-bounded cognition, arguing that even complete understanding of one's environment cannot reveal the totality of possible environments. Section 5 bridges these insights, demonstrating their complementarity. The conclusion 4 synthesizes these threads into a meta-ecology of cognition and explores the philosophical and practical implications of recognizing our epistemic limits. 2. Theoretical Background: From Hierarchies to Domains The idea that life is organized hierarchically—with cells composing tissues, tissues composing organisms, organisms composing ecosystems—is well-established in biology and systems theory. Yet most hierarchical models assume either a flat ontology (all systems are equally knowable) or a symmetrical hierarchy (higher systems can be modeled by lower ones and vice versa through sufficient analysis). What remains largely unexamined is the directional character of cognitive access across these levels. Several theoretical traditions have approached the relational and perspectival nature of life without fully articulating this asymmetry: Gregory Bateson (1972) introduced the concept of an "ecology of mind," emphasizing that mind is not located in individual organisms but distributed across systems of relationship. His notion of information as "a difference that makes a difference" implies that what counts as information depends on the observing system's structure. Bateson recognized nested levels of learning and communication but did not explicitly theorize the epistemic gradient between them—that each level can observe "down" but not "up." Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana (1980) developed the theory of autopoiesis, describing living systems as organizationally closed yet materially open. An autopoietic system defines its own boundaries and maintains itself through recursive processes. Their framework emphasizes the operational closure of cognition: a system can only represent what its organization permits. However, autopoietic theory focuses primarily on the autonomy and self-production of individual systems rather than on the asymmetrical relations between nested levels of organization. Niklas Luhmann (1995) extended autopoietic concepts to social systems, arguing that psychic, biological, and social systems observe one another only through their own operational codes. A social system cannot directly access individual consciousness, and vice versa. Luhmann's work gestures toward the asymmetry thesis: systems at different scales operate according to distinct logics and cannot fully translate across levels. Yet his focus remained on functional differentiation rather than on the phenomenological experience of embeddedness. Terrence Deacon (2011) offers a process-oriented account of how teleology—goaldirected behavior—emerges from purely physical dynamics. His concept of "teleodynamics" describes constraint hierarchies in which higher-order processes constrain 5 and organize lower-order ones. This mirrors the regulatory dimension of the asymmetry thesis: upward causation shapes lower systems without being fully visible to them. Deacon's work provides a naturalistic explanation for how purpose emerges in nature but does not address the epistemic consequences of this hierarchical organization. Mark Bickhard (2009) develops an interactivist model of representation that emphasizes cognition as a dynamic, interactive process rather than passive encoding. His framework shows how representation emerges from an organism's anticipatory engagement with its environment—what he calls "interactive differentiation." Bickhard's work resonates with the milieu-bounded view: knowing is not about mapping pre-existing structures but about participating in ongoing processes of environmental engagement. However, Bickhard focuses primarily on the horizontal dimension of interaction rather than the vertical asymmetry between embedded levels. Gilbert Simondon (2009) offers a process ontology of individuation that is particularly relevant to understanding nested cognitive domains. For Simondon, individuals do not pre-exist their processes of becoming; rather, they emerge through ongoing resolution of pre-individual potentials. His concept of "transindividual" relations—connections that operate across and between individuated entities—points toward the kind of multi-scale organization this paper addresses. Simondon helps us understand how cognitive domains at different scales are not discrete entities but phases in continuous processes of individuation. Each level individuates through its relation to both smaller components and larger contexts, though—crucially—it cannot fully represent the latter. Recent empirical work from Levin's laboratory continues to provide striking evidence for multiscale cognition. His team's development of "anthrobots"—multicellular constructs that self-organize from human tracheal cells and exhibit collective problemsolving behaviors—demonstrates that agency and goal-directedness emerge spontaneously when cells are placed in novel contexts (Gumuskaya et al., 2023). Studies on planarian regeneration show that bioelectric networks encode morphological "target states" that guide reconstruction even when genetic information is disrupted (Emmons-Bell et al., 2021). This research substantiates the claim that cognitive lightcones exist at cellular and tissue levels, not only in organisms with nervous systems. Evan Thompson (2007) synthesized phenomenology and cognitive science, arguing that life and mind exist on a continuum. His enactive approach emphasizes that cognition arises through the dynamic coupling of organism and environment. Thompson builds on Merleau-Ponty's insight that perception is always embodied and situated. However, while Thompson recognizes that different organisms inhabit different phenomenal worlds, he does not explicitly theorize the asymmetry between an organism's capacity to know its parts versus its inability to know the whole that contains it. 6 What these frameworks share is an attention to relationality, emergence, and the situated nature of knowing. What they lack is an explicit account of the directional asymmetry that structures these relations. The present framework builds on this foundation by arguing that: 4. Cognitive access is not merely limited but *directionally constrained*: systems know downward and participate upward, but cannot observe upward with the same clarity. 5. This asymmetry produces an epistemic gradient inherent to nested life, not merely a contingent limitation of current knowledge. 6. Recognizing this gradient has profound implications for epistemology, ethics, and systems design—it demands a philosophy of cognitive humility. Adjacent literatures: This framework is complementary to predictive processing and active inference approaches (Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2013), which model how systems minimize prediction error through downward precision allocation—the asymmetry thesis adds the dimension of upward opacity that escapes predictive modeling. Similarly, biosemiotics (Hoffmeyer, 2008; Sebeok, 1991) shares interest in organism-environment meaning-making across scales; the present work supplies the directional asymmetry that structures these semiotic relations. What constitutes "regulation" in the asymmetry thesis? The concept of upward regulation requires theoretical precision, as it operates across multiple dimensions simultaneously: Informational regulation: Higher-level systems constrain the information space available to lower levels. An organism's metabolic state, for instance, modulates which genes cells express, effectively regulating cellular "decisions" through biochemical signaling that cells respond to but cannot fully model. The regulatory influence here is informational—it shapes what counts as relevant signal vs. noise for the embedded system. Bioelectric and morphogenetic regulation: As Levin's work demonstrates, bioelectric networks at the tissue level establish voltage patterns that guide cellular behavior during development and regeneration (Levin, 2024; Emmons-Bell et al., 2021). Individual cells sense these fields and adjust their activities accordingly, yet they do not "know" the target morphology encoded at the tissue scale. The regulation is biophysical— electromagnetic gradients that constrain cellular action spaces. Thermodynamic and energetic regulation: Higher-order systems regulate the energy flows available to lower levels. Ecosystems regulate organismic populations through nutrient availability; organisms regulate cellular metabolism through resource distribution. This is material-energetic regulation—the literal sustenance conditions that enable lower-level operation. 7 Semantic and normative regulation: In social and cultural systems, regulatory influence becomes semantic—shared meanings, institutions, and norms shape individual cognition in ways individuals participate in but cannot fully objectify (Luhmann, 1995). A person thinks through language and cultural categories without seeing the full system of meaning-generation that makes such thinking possible. Constraint propagation: Across all these dimensions, regulation functions through constraint rather than command (Deacon, 2011). Higher levels do not micro-manage lower levels but establish boundary conditions, attractors, and possibility spaces within which lower-level agency operates. A cell is not "told" what to do by the organism but acts within bioelectric, chemical, and mechanical constraints that channel its autonomous activity toward organismic coherence. Crucially, this regulatory influence is constitutive rather than merely causal. Higher systems do not simply act on lower ones from outside; they provide the very conditions within which lower systems can be what they are. The organism does not merely influence cells—it is the milieu that makes cellular agency intelligible. Humanity does not merely interact with ecosystems—we are constituted by the biosphere that regulates our biological possibility. The asymmetry, then, is not that lower systems lack information about higher ones (they may receive abundant signals), but that they cannot apprehend the organizing principles at work—the goals, patterns, and intelligibility structures operating at scales beyond their epistemic horizon. Regulation flows upward as the establishment of conditions; knowledge flows downward as the capacity to represent and manipulate. This asymmetry is structural, not contingent. The asymmetry thesis thus complements and extends these traditions while introducing a new dimension of analysis: the phenomenology of unknowing as a structural feature of embodied intelligence. 3. Michael Levin and the Cognitive Lightcone Michael Levin, a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, has pioneered research demonstrating that cognition—understood as goal-directed behavior— operates at multiple scales of biological organization, not merely at the level of brains or nervous systems. His work on bioelectricity, morphogenetic fields, and "basal cognition" reveals that cells, tissues, and even aggregates of cells exhibit problem-solving capacities, memory, and adaptive learning (Levin, 2024). 8 Central to Levin's framework is the concept of the cognitive lightcone: the slice of reality that a system can sense, model, and care about. This notion draws metaphorically from physics, where a lightcone represents the region of spacetime that can be causally connected to an event. For Levin, each living system has a cognitive lightcone that defines the spatio-temporal scope of its agency. A bacterium's lightcone is narrow—it tracks nutrient gradients over millimeters and seconds. A human's lightcone is vastly larger—it encompasses abstract futures, descendants, global conditions, and even cosmic timescales. Evolution, in this view, is not merely the diversification of forms but the progressive expansion of life's capacity to care about an ever-wider domain of reality. As Levin succinctly states: "Life is matter expanding what it can care about" (Levin, 2024). This expansion is not uniform or unlimited. The cognitive lightcone has boundaries, and these boundaries define what is real and actionable for that system. Beyond the edge of the lightcone lies a domain that may act upon the system but cannot be represented or responded to within its operational closure. Levin's empirical research substantiates this view. He has shown that manipulating bioelectric patterns in flatworms can produce two-headed organisms, demonstrating that morphology is not rigidly determined by genetics but emerges from bioelectric goal states that cells collectively pursue (Levin, 2024). Similarly, his work on "xenobots"—motile aggregates formed from frog skin cells—illustrates that collectives of cells can reorganize themselves to pursue novel goals when placed in new contexts. These findings suggest that agency and intelligence are not properties exclusive to organisms with nervous systems but are distributed across scales of biological organization. However, Levin's framework, while empirically grounded and conceptually rich, remains largely functional and descriptive. It maps the reach of cognition but does not address the phenomenological or epistemic implications of that reach. What does it mean, experientially and philosophically, to inhabit a cognitive lightcone? How does the boundedness of concern relate to the embeddedness of the knower? This is where the present analysis departs from and extends Levin's work. While he focuses on the extent of cognition—how far a system's goals reach in space and time—I introduce two additional dimensions: 7. The asymmetry of cognitive access: Systems know downward (modeling smaller domains) but remain blind upward (to the larger systems that regulate them). 8. Milieu-boundedness: The cognitive lightcone is not merely a quantitative measure of reach but is qualitatively shaped by the environment that sustains the system's existence. 9 These dimensions transform Levin's biological insight into a philosophical framework. The cognitive lightcone describes the horizontal and temporal reach of agency; the milieu defines its vertical ground; and the asymmetry reveals the directional structure of knowing across nested levels. Together, they outline a meta-ecology of cognition in which every system is simultaneously a knower and a participant in a larger intelligence it cannot fully perceive. 4. The Limits of Ecological Knowledge: Milieu-Bounded Cognition 4.1 The Milieu as Condition of Cognition While the asymmetry of cognitive domains reveals that knowledge flows downward and regulation upward, a deeper layer of asymmetry lies in the organism's relation to its own environment. Every living system, from the simplest cell to the human species, exists within a milieu that sustains and constrains its form of life. This milieu defines not only the physical conditions of survival but also the cognitive space within which sense, value, and agency emerge. What an organism can know is inseparable from the environment that affords its knowing. Yet this environment is never the total of all possible environments. Even the most ecologically sophisticated organism or species perceives and models only the field of relations that enables its own continuity. The domain of life is thus milieu-bounded: cognition is always partial, situated, and conditioned by the particular slice of reality that supports its persistence. Humans, for instance, may understand the terrestrial biosphere in remarkable detail, but such understanding remains anthropocentric—it is an interpretation of the environment that sustains human cognition, not of "environmentality" itself. 4.2 From Uexküll's Umwelt to Bounded Milieus This principle of milieu-bounded cognition extends Jakob von Uexküll's notion of the Umwelt (1934/2010), the subjective world that each organism inhabits according to its sensory and motor capacities. Uexküll demonstrated that a tick's universe, defined by the scent of butyric acid and the warmth of mammalian skin, is a closed and sufficient cosmos. The tick does not perceive a "deficient" version of reality; rather, it inhabits its own complete phenomenal world. Similarly, the human cosmos is larger and more complex, but no less bounded. We do not step outside the conditions that make us possible. Even our most sophisticated scientific models of the cosmos are human translations, shaped by the biological and cognitive scaffolds of our species. 4.3 Phenomenological and Cybernetic Perspectives 16 bioelectric signals), but inference is not direct perception or full comprehension. Our theory of asymmetry is itself bounded—it is a human philosophical model, not a view from nowhere. We recognize our embeddedness conceptually without thereby escaping it experientially or operationally. These objections, when addressed, actually strengthen the framework by clarifying what it does and does not claim. If life can be described as matter acquiring the capacity to care, then cognition is the pattern by which that caring becomes structured in space, time, and relation. From bacteria following a chemical gradient to humans designing futures, each organism manifests a unique intersection of perception, valuation, and action—a domain of life. This paper has argued that such domains are neither continuous nor symmetrical but arranged within a hierarchy of partial knowers, each defined by its cognitive horizon and by the milieu that sustains it. Levin's notion of the cognitive lightcone reveals that every living system possesses a finite reach—the slice of reality that it can sense, model, and transform. Evolution can then be seen as the gradual widening of these cones, the expansion of life's temporal and spatial scope of concern. Yet this expansion is never absolute; it always occurs within boundaries that define what life can be for that particular system. The lightcone's edge is not merely a limit of perception but the threshold of ontological participation: beyond it lies a region of life that acts upon the system but cannot be known from within. This is where the asymmetry of cognitive domains becomes apparent. Organisms can know downward—they can represent and manipulate systems smaller or slower than themselves—but they remain blind upward to the larger wholes that contain and regulate them. Cells comprehend molecular networks but not the organism that orchestrates them; humans model ecosystems but cannot directly perceive the total ecology of life that enfolds humanity. Knowledge thus flows downward, while regulation and emergence flow upward. This asymmetry is not an epistemic failure but the necessary structure of embedded cognition: every knower exists inside a higher order of life whose operations exceed its representational capacity. The idea of milieu-bounded cognition clarifies the conditions of this embeddedness. To know at all is to know from within a sustaining environment—physical, biological, and cultural—that renders cognition possible. No system can transcend the milieu that gives rise to its mode of knowing, and even the most advanced understanding of its environment remains local to that mode. What we call "the ecosystem" is, therefore, only the human portion of a much vaster ecology of possible milieus. The total of life's domains—the full architecture of being—remains unthinkable from any single perspective. 17 Together, these three insights outline a meta-ecology of cognition: a view in which knowing is always nested, directional, and partial. The cognitive lightcone marks the reach of concern; the milieu provides its ground; and the asymmetry between upward and downward knowing defines the relation between them. Life, in this account, is not a closed system but an unfolding hierarchy of partial intelligences, each extending the universe's capacity to know itself while remaining bounded by what makes such knowing possible. To recognize these bounds is not to diminish our understanding of life, but to see it truthfully—as a vast and luminous web of local awarenesses, each both participant in and mystery to the greater life that sustains it. This recognition does not lead to skepticism or paralysis but to a deeper form of engagement: one that acts within cognitive horizons with humility, learns through participation rather than control, and cultivates responsiveness to the intelligence of systems that exceed our comprehension. The practical value of this framework lies not in prescriptive applications but in reframing how inquiry and action themselves are conceived. Recognizing the asymmetry and milieu-boundedness of cognition compels scientists, technologists, and leaders to design systems aware of their own cognitive limits. The meta-ecology of cognition thus functions as both a philosophical orientation and a methodological guide: it teaches us to act within our horizons of intelligibility, to design responsibly for the domains we can know, and to honor the larger domains of life that we cannot yet—and perhaps never will— fully comprehend. Core Theses of the Asymmetry Framework: 12. Directional asymmetry: Knowledge flows downward (toward smaller scales); regulation flows upward (from encompassing systems). 13. Milieu-boundedness: Every cognitive system knows only within the environment that sustains its particular mode of being. 14. Cognitive lightcones: Each system's reach of concern defines what it can sense, model, and care about—but this reach has limits. 15. Epistemic opacity: Systems participate in larger wholes whose organizing principles exceed their representational capacity. 16. Local objectivity: Knowledge is objective within its scale and milieu, not relativistic—but never universal or view-from-nowhere. 17. Constitutive regulation: Higher systems provide the conditions of possibility for lower ones, not merely external influences. 18. Meta-ecological humility: Recognizing embeddedness transforms epistemology from mastery to participatory learning. 18 Literature Note The notion of milieu-bounded cognition extends several traditions that have addressed the relational and perspectival nature of life. Jakob von Uexküll's concept of the Umwelt (1934/2010) first articulated how each organism inhabits a subjective world defined by its perceptual and motor affordances. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2003) deepened this view phenomenologically, describing nature as an "open field of inter-being" that no organism can apprehend from the outside. Second-order cybernetics (von Foerster, 1981; Bateson, 1972) emphasized the self-referential limits of observation, while autopoietic theory (Maturana & Varela, 1980) formalized cognition as operational closure within a sustaining environment. Later thinkers such as Edgar Morin (1980), Terrence Deacon (2011), and Evan Thompson (2007) developed systemic and enactive accounts of mind-inlife, and Timothy Morton (2013) extended ecological thought to hyperobjects that exceed human cognitive scale. What remains largely unexamined, however, is the asymmetry between the milieu that an organism can know and the larger set of possible milieus that remain inaccessible. The framework of milieu-bounded cognition therefore builds on these traditions while introducing a new dimension: the recognition that every cognitive system is embedded within a hierarchy of environments whose totality can never be experienced from within. 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The author takes full accountability for the content, originality, and academic integrity of this manuscript. Conflict of Interest Statement The author declares no conflicts of interest.