We need and want to achieve goals in life. These goals range from basic survival needs, like drinking water, to more complex human needs, like living a good life. To achieve goals, we have to take action. To choose the right action to take, we need to perform cognition. We have to process information about our environment, and translate that information into the right actions to take. To choose the right actions, we need to have an accurate model of reality. This is obvious, as our actions affect reality, and our goals always end in reality. A flawed or incomplete model will lead to flawed or mislead actions. But understanding reality is hard. It requires a variety of cognitive abilities, including reasoning, problem-solving, deduction, etc. We are not born with these skills, and we have to actively try to improve them. Thus, part of the goal of cognition itself is to acquire and refine these cognitive skills. We must continuously update our mental models and sharpen our abilities, and thus cognition is both the means and the goal. So to recap, good cognition allows us to achieve our goals effectively, and to do that we need to understand reality, and to understand reality we need to acquire cognitive skills. This is not a linear, sequential process, and each step interacts and influences each other like a system. It is also not binary, and we will never be perfect, but that is why we try. # ============= 2025-02-16: [[The Goal of Cognition 0.1]] (C)(P)