A yellow bearded iris in bloom against soft green

Recently a new core word was added to SPLectrum: cognition. And it got its SPLectrum-specific definition: Cognition is the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through experience. It is still very much in line with the Oxford definition. The difference is the removal of an unnecessary constraint and some redundancy — resulting — in SPLectrum’s eyes — in a much cleaner definition.

Cognition happens within the context of language and is the dynamic process that creates meaning from meaning. Although the definition states that knowledge and understanding are acquired through experience (of reality) it glosses over the fact that the experience already contains knowledge and understanding in order to be meaningful. It is a process that is always already booted up.

This is a point that has been discussed extensively by philosophers, from Kant to the present day. I want to highlight a few here, one from outside, standing back and looking at what experience contains — Bergson — and one from inside the running — Heidegger.

Bergson wrote in Matter and Memory that there is no perception which is not full of memories. Whatever experience we may have, it is always already populated with historicity. Whatever experience there may be, it always already contains meaning expressed in language. The experience of the world today is coloured by the experiences of the world in the past — inherently subjective with regards to the individual or its community. The world does not reach a subject empty and get filled in afterwards; it reaches the subject already thick with meaning. This is the view from outside: I stand back, observe experience, and look at the tools that are in play.

Heidegger’s take is deceptively simple, but in my opinion more compelling. We are always already in the world. We find ourselves always submerged in and in active interaction with the world. Wherever you catch yourself, the world is already meaningful — and the catching happens in meaning too. We are always already in the process of being in the world. By always already being in the process, in a context with meaning, it follows that the process of cognition is always already running. There is no separation of being in the world and experiencing and running the process of cognition. And I think Wittgenstein alluded to the same when he said in the Philosophical Investigations: “Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all.”

From this it follows that as far as the SPLectrum seed principles go, cognition is the dynamic process behind P2: Language is the medium through which a subject experiences reality. Cognition is the process through which reality discloses itself. Our experience of reality depends on our cognition, it is shaped by it. It depends on the specifics of the process, on the meaning already in use to further acquire knowledge and understanding. That is the tight coupling of cognition with the seed.

How the cognition process actually runs — in brains, in cell chemistry, in machines that learn, in individuals, in whatever else — is more than one field of its own, crowded with models and quarrels. Most of that belongs on SPLectrum’s reality side, not with the seed principles — and philosophy and science both have a lot to say about why any model should or should not be picked.

This post is part of the seed series. See also The seed and Cognition.

Photo: Volodymyr Tokar / Unsplash