Cognition as a Regime of Visibility

This working paper proposes a minimal framework for treating cognition as a regime of visibility: a structured space in which information becomes salient, shared, suppressed, or forgotten across agents and collectives. I introduce “Cognitive Universe” as a domain distinguished from the physical by its governing operations on visibility rather than matter-energy constraints. The central claim is that many apparently distinct cognitive forces (memory, attention, narrative, norm enforcement, institutional secrecy, propaganda) can be re-described as transformations of visibility and invisibility across scales. I then test the framework against typical counterexamples (private thought, tacit knowledge, distributed institutions, and misrecognition), and sketch criteria under which the proposal would be either redundant, vacuous, or genuinely explanatory. The aim is not to defend a final system but to invite adversarial reading: does the framework compress real variety, or merely rename it? A closing coda argues that attention is not a competing faculty but the operational face of informational selection, illustrated by the rise of attention-based architectures.