Still No Free Lunch: Failure of Stability in Regulated Systems of Interacting Cognitive Modules

The asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories, instantiated as the Rate Distortion Control Theory of bounded rationality, enable examination of stability across models of cognition based on a variety of fundamental, underlying probability distributions likely to characterize different forms of embodied ‘intelligent’ systems. Embodied cognition is inherently unstable, requiring the pairing of cognition with regulation at and across the various and varied scales and levels of organization. Like contemporary Large Language Model ‘hallucination,’ de facto ‘psychopathology’—the failure of regulation in systems of cognitive modules—is not a bug but an inherent feature of embodied cognition. What particularly emerges from this analysis, then, is the ubiquity of failure-under-stress even for ‘intelligent’ embodied cognition, where cognitive and regulatory modules are closely paired. There is still No Free Lunch, much in the classic sense of Wolpert and Macready. With some further effort, the probability models developed here can be transformed into robust statistical tools for the analysis of observational and experimental data regarding regulated and other cognitive phenomena.