The Five Task Model: A Substrate-Free Framework for Life, Cognition, and Intelligent Systems

The Five Task Model: A Substrate-Free Framework for Life, Cognition, and Intelligent Systems DOI presents an expository introduction and reader guide to the central architecture of the model. It explains how cognition can be understood as the control of behavior change (B1→B2) DOI under informational constraint, organized around recurrent task domains rather than around biological substrate, internal mechanisms, or anthropocentric assumptions. Within this framework DOI, organisms and intelligent systems are analyzed according to the informational tasks they must regulate in order to maintain the Energy–Safety–Reproduction (ESR) triad DOI. Comparative analysis across more than 1,530 species DOI provides the empirical foundation for the model’s claim that cognition is structured through a limited and cumulative set of recurrent task domains. This document functions both as an expository framework and as a reader guide. It clarifies the model’s methodological starting points, explains how the five tasks should be interpreted, and shows why the framework matters across evolutionary biology, psychology, artificial intelligence, and substrate-free approaches to cognition.