I wrote earlier about the field that waited a century — how basal cognition, the research programme studying cognition below the nervous system, spent a hundred years as orphaned results before Pamela Lyon inverted the question and gave the evidence a home. This post is about what happens when that field and SPLectrum are put side by side. They meet — and the meeting point is more precise than a general sympathy.

The field got there by method: start from what living systems actually do, and work up, instead of starting from human cognition and working down. SPLectrum got there from its seed principles through a definition of cognition to match — the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through experience — it simply never mentions a brain, and never needed one. Two very different routes, one result: the human case stops being the definition of cognition and becomes one case among many — open ground, reached from different directions.

And what lives on that open ground, once you look? Meaning. The field’s cases — read closely — are small studies in meaning being handled by beings with no neurons at all.

A bacterium swims up a food gradient by holding the concentration of a few seconds ago against the concentration now. It doesn’t measure the world; it works with more than a moment ago — a relational term its own chemistry constitutes. A gradient only exists for a swimmer with a recent past.

Bacteria also talk. They release signal molecules and count each other by them — species-specific dialects, mostly, but one molecule is made and read across a huge range of species, and microbiologists themselves call it a common language. The striking part: the meaning of the signal is fixed by the receiver. Different species read the same molecule through different receptors, to different effect.

Cells talk a face into being. Before a frog embryo has any facial structure, a pattern of electrical voltage on its surface marks where the face will go — a plan held among ordinary, non-neural cells, in the medium of their interaction. Disturb the pattern in a flatworm and it will regenerate two heads, and regenerate two heads again when cut again — the altered target held somewhere that is not the genome. And neurons, it turns out, didn’t invent this medium; they inherited it and made it fast.

A slime mould builds a map it then lives in. The famous one re-drew the Tokyo rail network across a bed of oat flakes — and the network it builds is both its memory of the world and its body, at once.

Each of these is a being with its own language — partial in reach, contingent in character, disclosing a world that is that being’s own. The bacterium’s few seconds of chemical memory are not a lesser version of ours; they are exactly long enough for the comparison they enable, a complete case at its own scale. Much simpler beings, yes — but the simplicity is in the language’s reach, not in the case’s standing. Which rhymes with the seed’s pluralism, reached here by microscope: as many disclosed worlds as kinds of being.

The full reading — the cases worked in detail, and their importance to SPLectrum — is in the reference library, at basal cognition in close affinity. The short version fits in a sentence: the field has the cases, worked from the organisms outward, and SPLectrum has an account of cognition that never asked for a brain. Neither was built for the other, which is what makes the fit worth looking at.

This post is part of the language series. See also the reference entries on basal cognition in close affinity and the basal cognition subject.

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It is said that we live in the period of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a period where there is fusion of technologies across domains — digital, physical, and biological — and where the boundary between tool and agent starts dissolving. I think we are seeing the start of a revolution that goes beyond the tools and agents, and that shifts towards the driver: cognition.

The industrial revolutions have been, at heart, a story of extension — and extension is not a human invention but life’s oldest habit: living things extend their capabilities through artefacts, non-living and living alike — shells and webs and dams, domesticated species, each other. Sara Walker makes the point at full depth: life is the process that constructs such objects, and our technology is not outside that process but its continuation. Seen that way, mechanisation extended us past muscle — the loom, the engine, the assembly line. Electrification extended the reach — power no longer needed to stay local. The information cycle extended our handling of data — storing it, moving it, processing it at scale. And alongside the physical runs a much older mental thread: our brain is an ingenious unit, but severely resource-constrained, and over the centuries we have extended its reach through artefact after artefact — writing, printing, recording, calculators, computers.

The latest wave brings something different in kind. Neural networks give us the ability to process information the way no rule-book ever could, and with that comes the ability to hand our artefacts not calculation but substantial amounts of thinking — the lighter, but often very time-consuming, forms of mental activity. This is a paradigm shift.

I mean that in a precise sense. The shift is, in my opinion, of the same magnitude as the move from classical physics into quantum mechanics and relativity — and comparable in nature, not just in size. Then, a physics built on a determinate, observer-independent picture met phenomena that refused to fit it, and what counted as understanding had to change. Now, centuries of science and philosophy built on rational, logical thinking — explicit rules, transparent chains of reasoning — meet the fact that the machines that finally work at thinking are not logic engines at all. They are associative. The paradigm shift forces our attention towards an associative way of processing information, and away from the assumption that the rational-logical way is what thinking is.

That’s self-evident, I hear you say — how else? But there is a difference from the earlier waves. Every earlier extension gave us something we did not have; this time the artefact is a slice of what we ourselves are. Having this associative thinking trained on such vast output of human thinking makes it very powerful on one thing — so powerful that one can easily forget it is still far short of the brain on everything else, and the brain does all of that on a tiny budget.

And that is where the misreading comes from. We see the amplified capacity and read the whole brain architecture into it. More-than-us on one axis gets mistaken for a match for us on all of them. Hence the chatter about AGI, superintelligence and AI taking over the world. Don’t be fooled — the danger lies in humans deploying it inappropriately, letting AI loose without an appropriate support structure.

Should a company hire a new trainee and give them full independent authority on their first day? The trainee may be very clever but still lacks experience. They need the support of a team.

The power of AI calls for humility on our part. We approached rational thinking as the superior form of thinking and left cognition in the broad sense — associative included — aside. The attention went elsewhere: to the mind as the experienced end-product, and to the brain as the organ. AI’s thinking is associative, so we had better understand it.

The revolution worth having is to understand cognition from the ground up, not only in AI but equally in life in general.

This post is part of the conversations series.

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The Zhuangzi was written in China in the fourth century BCE. Zhuangzi locates knowing in skilled doing. It tells stories and leaves before explaining them. To honour the wisdom buried within them, this post gives a plain narrative of a few stories.

The wheelwright and the duke. At the top of the hall, a duke is reading. At the foot of it, a wheelwright is cutting a wheel. The wheelwright puts down his mallet and chisel, climbs the steps, and asks his ruler what he is reading. The words of the sages, says the duke. Are they alive? Long dead. Then what you are reading, says the wheelwright, is the leavings of dead men. The duke demands an explanation or his life, and the craftsman stakes it on his workbench. A wheel must be cut neither too slow nor too hurried. His hands know the point exactly; his mouth cannot say it. He has not been able to give it to his own son, which is why he is seventy and still cutting wheels. Whatever the sages truly knew, he says, went with them the same way. The duke lets him live.

The cook and the ox. A lord is watching his cook carve an ox, and cannot look away. The knife keeps time like a dancer; the carcass falls open as if it wanted to. Can skill really go this far? The cook lays down his knife. What he cares for, he says, is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When he began, he saw the whole ox. After three years, he no longer saw the ox. Now perception and analysis have fallen away, and something he calls spirit moves the knife through the spaces that were always there in the joints. An ordinary cook hacks, and changes his knife every month. A good cook cuts, and changes it every year. This knife is nineteen years old, and its edge is fresh from the whetstone. Only at the complicated tangles does he slow down, take stock, and proceed with care — then the work falls apart like a clod of earth, and he stands, looks around, and wipes the blade. Excellent, says the lord: from the words of a cook, I have learned how to nourish life.

The turtle in the mud. The king of Chu sent two officials to offer Zhuangzi the government. They found him fishing on the Pu river. He kept hold of his rod and did not turn his head. I hear, he said, that your king keeps a sacred tortoise in his shrine — dead three thousand years, venerated in a box of silk. Would it rather be so honoured, or alive and dragging its tail in the mud? Alive, the officials admitted. Then go away, said Zhuangzi. I mean to keep dragging mine.

The fish trap. A fish trap matters because of the fish, Zhuangzi says; once the fish is caught, the trap can be forgotten. A rabbit snare matters because of the rabbit; once the rabbit is caught, the snare can be forgotten. Words matter because of their meaning; once the meaning is grasped, the words can be forgotten. Where can I find someone who has forgotten words, so I can have a word with them?

The grave of Huizi. Huizi the logician was Zhuangzi’s opponent for thirty chapters — the friend he ridiculed, argued down, answered and could not do without. Passing his tomb years later, Zhuangzi turned to his followers and told them of a plasterer who could let a friend swing an axe at a speck of mud on his nose and take off the speck without breaking skin — a trick the plasterer could perform for that one partner and no other, and never again after he died. Since Huizi’s death, said Zhuangzi, I have had no one to work against. There is no one left worth talking to.

For me these stories don’t just touch the mysterious side of cognition, but are a poignant expression of the subject values of belonging, privacy and creativity.

This post is part of the conversations series. See also the reference entry on Zhuangzi.

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In 1906 the American zoologist Herbert Spencer Jennings spent long hours watching a single-celled organism shaped like a trumpet. Stentor roeselii is attached to its perch by a holdfast, and Jennings irritated it — gently, repeatedly — to see what it would do. It bent away; if that failed it reversed its cilia; if that failed it contracted; and if all else failed it let go and swam off to start life somewhere else. A repertoire, worked through in order, in an organism with no nervous system to hold one. Jennings’s observation was dismissed for fifty years on the strength of a replication attempt that used the wrong species and the wrong stimulus.

He was not the last to be dismissed. In the 1950s Beatrice Gelber reported conditioning in Paramecium — single cells learning to associate a wire with food. Behaviourist orthodoxy explained her results away, and her name with them; a re-examination in 2021 concluded the dismissals were flawed and the experiments deserve re-running.

Evidence kept arriving from people who weren’t asking anyone’s permission to collect it. Microbiologists worked out, receptor by receptor, how a swimming bacterium compares the present moment against a chemical record of a few seconds ago. And in 2000 Toshiyuki Nakagaki showed that a slime mould — a single vast cell with no neurons at all — solves a maze by shortest path. Given oat flakes laid out as the stations of greater Tokyo, its successor experiment re-drew the commuter rail network overnight, about as efficient and fault-tolerant as the one the engineers had built. Nakagaki’s reward was two Ig Nobel prizes — the award for research that makes people laugh, then think.

What the results lacked was not quality but a home. Each sat in its own discipline as a curiosity — remarkable behaviour, wrong kind of organism. Supplying it took an unusual route into the academy: Pamela Lyon came to philosophy of biology after a career as an investigative journalist, and in 2006, as a mature-age doctoral student, she named the habit that kept the results homeless. Cognitive science had always worked anthropogenically — start from human cognition, take it as the paradigm, and grade every other creature by how much of our kind of thinking it approximates. On that footing the orphaned results could never be more than curiosities: each one scored against a standard it was never going to meet. Lyon proposed the inversion — the biogenic approach: start from what living systems demonstrably do, and work upward, asking psychological questions as if they were biological questions. In 2015 she made it concrete with what she called the cognitive cell, reading a bacterium’s signalling machinery capacity by capacity — sensing, evaluating, retaining, adjusting — as a genuine repertoire in miniature rather than a metaphor at the edge of the subject.

The name came around 2018 — basal cognition — and with the name, a field began assembling itself around the people who had been carrying the evidence separately. In 2021 it got its founding charter: a double theme issue of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, convened by Lyon with Fred Keijzer, Detlev Arendt and Michael Levin — whose lab was already the field’s experimental engine — gathering a hundred and fifteen years of orphaned evidence under one roof, together with a working definition to hold it: cognition as the suite of capacities by which organisms become familiar with their environment, value what they meet, exploit what helps and avoid what harms. A field born not from a single discovery but from a convening — the frame arriving last, long after the facts. And fittingly, the vindications had begun: in 2019 a Harvard team repeated Jennings’s experiment — carmine powder failed, plastic microbeads worked — and the trumpet cell ran through its repertoire exactly as described, one hundred and thirteen years on.

This post is part of the conversations series. See also the reference entry on Basal cognition.

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In this post I am showcasing three process models of the brain. None of them tell us all but each gives us insight into a specific aspect: evolution, competition, error correction. I present them here purely for the insight while staying away from domain-related discussions.

Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection (1987) — his own name for it; Neural Darwinism is the book title the field adopted — describes how capability gets embedded, and its shape is borrowed on purpose. Edelman had already won a Nobel for the chemical structure of antibodies — work that helped confirm the immune system meets a novel antigen not by templating an antibody to fit it but by selecting from a pre-existing repertoire of variants: selection, not instruction. He ported the argument to the brain. It stands on three legs: development throws up a vast variety of neuronal groups — the unit is the group, not the synapse — the primary repertoire; experience selects among them, strengthening some and weakening others, the secondary repertoire; and reentry — recursive, bidirectional signalling that correlates activity across mapped groups — ties the selected groups into coherent function. Edelman was explicit that without the third leg the first two give only a heap of independently tuned groups. This is the facet our keyword evolution names: plasticity — the brain’s structure shaped over time by experience, run on selection’s logic. Selection settles the standing repertoire, and what wins is retained. New groups keep forming and entering the running, and nothing gates their entry — but the selection leaves a residue, a capability that persists. Edelman himself was careful with the borrowed word: somatic selection within one lifetime, not evolution across generations — nothing is inherited.

Global Workspace Theory (Baars, 1988; Dehaene’s neural mechanisms) describes how one process becomes dominant, and ignition can be watched happening. Many processes run in parallel, unconsciously; when a coalition reaches sufficient activation strength it ignites — broadcasts widely, becomes the dominant content. Masking experiments, which hold a stimulus at the edge of visibility, separate the seen from the unseen cleanly: an unseen stimulus produces only early, local activation, while a seen one triggers a late, sudden, widespread activation around 300ms. A threshold a stimulus can be watched crossing. This is the facet our keyword competition names — and here our word is the field’s own: the literature itself speaks of competition for workspace access. Coalitions contest for dominance now, and what wins holds the position briefly and loses it. Whatever reaches threshold broadcasts, indifferent to where the coalition came from — an old one and a newly formed one judged at the same bar — and the win leaves no residue, only the next round.

Friston’s free energy principle (2006) describes how fit is determined, and the reading it sits on is measurable. The field’s central term is the generative model: a model of the world the brain maintains, projecting predictions of incoming signals; predictions descend and prediction errors ascend, and the system works to minimise the errors — prediction-error minimisation, in the literature’s own vocabulary. Repetition suppression shows responses falling as a stimulus becomes predictable; the mismatch negativity shows the reverse, a signal thrown up precisely when a prediction fails; and laminar recordings have begun to look for the descending predictions and ascending errors in separate cortical layers — with suggestive but still contested results. This is the facet our keyword error correction names: a world model, its future built from the past and corrected against what actually arrives. A brain forever anticipating and revising, its errors and predictions running in opposite directions through the sheet.

Evolution, competition, error correction — our keywords; the field’s own are selection, workspace competition, prediction-error minimisation. Capability retained by selection, dominance settled by contest, fit maintained by prediction: three models approaching aspects of the same problem — how a brain keeps going — and each aspect is a different kind of thing: structure built over time, activation in the moment, a world model projecting a future from the past and correcting it against what arrives. Holding several models at once, each for the insight it brings, building an understanding of the brain.

This post is part of the conversations series. See also Process Models of the Brain in the reference library.

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Hand someone the complete equipment of sculpture — the chisels, the technique, the accumulated tradition of the workshop — and something essential has still not been handed over: the knowhow of expressing in sculpture. That is acquired in the doing, and it is nobody else’s. No two sculptors cut alike, and the difference is not in the toolbox.

Every process has two sides: how it is implemented — the nuts and bolts — and how it is run, what is done with it. Cognition is no exception. The process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through experience is not only about an implementation that runs but also the way it is applied — and the manner is itself acquired. Among the things cognition acquires, through experience, is the knowhow of its own running.

In cognition is core I talked about cognition within the context of the seed principles as the process run by a subject experiencing reality, the process in whose running reality is disclosed. This post follows the second angle to what it implies. If cognition is the process that discloses reality, then how the process is run has a big influence on the type of reality that is disclosed. Two subjects can hold the same tooling — the same language, the same tradition, the same workshop — and still live in different realities.

SPLectrum sees the how as part of the aesthetic territory. Working with meaning to create meaning, the manner of going about using what one holds — this is named expression of meaning in SPLectrum’s aesthetics. One process, read by two pillars: as disclosure it is the heart of epistemology; as craft it runs deep into aesthetics. The journey from one to the other is no distance at all — it is the same running, seen from its two faces.

Worth a recap in full. Reality is disclosed — and the disclosing is relational: it happens in the interaction between being and the other, each subject’s cognition process running its side of that interaction in its own hands. But the running never starts from nothing. Every act of the craft is a variation to an existing tune — the creativity of a subject adds to an existing building, it does not build something completely new. The tooling arrives already loaded with others’ acquiring; the tune was playing first. The core values turn out to be the anatomy of this one process: belonging funds it, privacy is where it runs, creativity is how it goes.

The craft is not exercised on the world from a distance. The subject is in the world, not detached from it, and the subject’s attitude sets the tone of the interaction. The deepest part of the sculptor’s knowhow is knowing what not to carve — and so with cognition: choose wisely what you allow within your reality, because the knowledge and understanding you acquire and run with disclose the reality you will have to live in.

Which leaves the tune itself. Its historicity runs long, but the tune is no remnant of a distant past — it is alive, played and reshaped by living subjects, every one of us included. Making peace with belonging is coming to terms with a living thing, and it is not easy for everyone — creativity wants to feel entirely one’s own, and discovering that it runs on inherited tooling can feel like a debt, or a cage. It is neither. The tune is not what limits the variation; it is what makes variation possible at all. The building is not what constrains the new wing; it is what holds it up.

With the help of belonging, we are creative in private.

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

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The human ways of sharing post left a child in the middle of a world already talking, going and getting language for itself. It is worth asking why it took so long to develop, and why the schools that dominated the study of the mind for most of a century see it differently.

The first leaves the inside empty. Behaviourism’s subject is an automaton: stimulus in, response out, reinforce and repeat. Between the two there is, by doctrine, nothing worth discussing — a black box, and the point is that you needn’t open it. Watson and Skinner made a virtue of the closure. But the active subject the developmental picture describes is precisely what lives in that box. Everything the child does — the reaching, the trying, the building — is the middle term behaviourism throws out on principle.

The second gives the inside a basement. Psychoanalysis has a vivid interior — drives, fantasy, buried history, a whole theatre running its own drama out of reach and often at odds with the plain world outside. But reality comes in two, an inner and an outer, and the inner one holds the reins. The developmental picture declines the second reality. A child builds in private, but it builds one reality — the same one it construes and shares in.

The third is the interesting one, and it is still ongoing.

It begins with a genuinely great argument. Noam Chomsky, in 1959, took Skinner’s account of language apart — the child learns far too much, far too fast, from far too little, for conditioning to be the story. Nobody supplies a list of the sentences that are impossible, correction is rare and ignored, and yet every normal child lands a grammar in a few years. Something must be coming from the child’s side. Behaviourism could not say what, because it had declared the question closed.

If the child couldn’t have got it from experience, says nativism, then it was already there. The inside is not empty and not split — it comes pre-filled. Grammar arrives installed; exposure sets the switches. The child doesn’t build the grammar. It finds it.

What happens over the next sixty years is the part worth watching. The endowment starts out rich — whole systems of innate rules. By the 1980s it is universal principles plus a set of binary switches. By the 1990s the Minimalist Program has stripped it toward a single operation, Merge, that joins two things into one and can run on its own output. And the field is explicit about why it shrank: universal grammar has to be rich enough to explain what the child gets from thin evidence, and small enough to have plausibly evolved. Those two pull opposite ways. The theory retreated under the second, not because the first found new evidence.

Meanwhile the question of where the pieces come from — the things Merge combines — stays open. Chomsky’s answer is that lexical concepts are too complex to have been extracted from experience, so they must already be there too, triggered rather than learned; he has said this holds even for carburetor. Jerry Fodor took it to the end of the line: concepts can’t be learned at all, only triggered, so car is innate. Putnam could hardly conceal his astonishment. Dennett observed that on this view Aristotle had the concept of an aeroplane in his brain. The field’s own verdict is that Fodor went too far — but nobody leaves the position that pushed him there. And in Why Only Us, Berwick and Chomsky write that the origin of those atoms “remains for us a mystery.”

What the sixty years show is a stance taken early that then had to be held. This is science fighting a war in the trenches, actively non-pluralistic, each holding one position. The war was never about the findings — it was only about the tribe.

This post is part of the seed series. See also the reference entry on nativism.

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Recently a new core word entered SPLectrum: cognition, with a widened definition and constraints removed. As a process it was placed firmly within the seed: the dynamic process that discloses reality to a subject. Beneath both sits a claim that deserves its own ground: cognition is not a secondary process. Nothing is received first and made sense of after. Knowledge and understanding is acquired with the experiencing itself — all in one, not add-on.

The picture being declined is an intuitive one and deserves attention. The world delivers raw material through the senses, there are experiences, there is thought; cognition then comes into action — it sorts it, interprets it, it adds meaning. A sequence of receiving, absorbing and processing. Most textbook diagrams of perception have this shape, and under that interpretation cognition is indeed secondary: important, but downstream.

Within philosophy this picture has been refused by influential philosophers, from several directions at once. One strand of the turn in Western philosophy traced here before, the long letting-go of the outside view, now walked in the key of cognition. Kant made the opening move: intuitions without concepts are blind — the mind’s activity runs in all experience, not after it. The phenomenologists radicalised the point. Heidegger: we are always already in the world, with no moment before meaning. Merleau-Ponty: perception arrives whole and already significant, the body doing the work the textbook assigns to inference. Gadamer: all understanding runs on pre-judgement that tradition delivers — the ground of knowing, not its contamination. And the analytic wing reached the same refusal by its own route: Wittgenstein telling us not to think of understanding as a mental process at all; Ryle showing that the inner-act picture ends in regress; Peirce, earlier than either, dissolving the line between perceiving and inferring.

A third current carried the fusion the whole way. Bergson: there is no perception which is not full of memories — the unloaded percept never occurs. James put the relations inside the stream of experience, given there, not added by an act afterwards. Dewey retired the spectator and made knowing a mode of doing. Whitehead generalised furthest of all: every actual entity takes up its world — experience-like process all the way down, with human cognition an elaborated case of something utterly general.

Nor is the refusal a Western possession. Yogācāra Buddhism analysed experience as arising with no split between grasper and grasped, every perception conditioned by the seeds of past experience. Abhinavagupta’s school held manifestation and awareness strictly inseparable — and named itself, a thousand years ago, the school of recognition. Zhuangzi’s cook cuts the ox with nothing deliberative running behind the knife: the knowing is in the doing. The fusion has been stated in every register philosophy possesses.

SPLectrum’s seed principles place it inside this family by construction. In P2: Language is the medium through which a subject experiences reality there is no pipeline for a secondary process to be a stage of: language, experience and cognition are aspects of one running, and the process runs within the experiencing — no separation, no before. What the family holds, where the resonances lie and where the seed goes further, is gathered point by point in the cognition subject page Cognition in Core Philosophy and in the close-affinity piece on cognition and core philosophy; I decided to create a meta subject on cognition (the SPLectrum definition) so that the different angles on cognition — scattered for historical reasons across science and philosophy — can be brought together over time.

Core, then — not crown. Cognition does not rule experience from somewhere upstream; it runs within it, and was never anywhere else. That is what the widened word was always naming.

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

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Watch a child come into language and it is plainly not sitting still. It is doing something — reaching for what a word points at, trying a phrase and watching what it does, catching a pattern in what everyone around keeps saying and pressing it into a shape of its own. Nobody hands the child language whole; the child goes and gets it, from the middle of a world already talking.

The fields that study this closely — developmental psychology, the science of how children acquire language — propose several ways. Vygotsky saw the child take inward what it first did out loud with others: a thing done between people, later done within the person. Tomasello found language learned from use rather than switched on by an innate grammar — the child reading and finding patterns, building grammar up out of concrete instances. Piaget had the child construct its own understanding, fitting new experience to what it already has and reworking the structure when it fails. And Di Paolo put meaning in the encounter itself — made in the coupling between two people, rather than passed from one to the other.

Underneath those, quieter and more minimal, runs something barer still. Long before a baby can read anyone’s intentions, it is already counting — not consciously, but tracking which sounds tend to follow which, and how often. Eight-month-olds pull words out of a continuous stream of speech on the strength of those regularities alone, with nobody meaning anything at them in particular. It is the most stripped-down mechanism in the family, and it makes the point better than the grand ones do: even here, at the bottom, the child is extracting. The stream does not stamp itself on a blank surface. Something is going out to meet it.

Running the other way there is teaching, which turns out to be less one-sided than it looks. Csibra and Gergely noticed that a great deal of what adults do around infants is marked — eye contact, the child’s name, that exaggerated sing-song register everyone falls into without deciding to. The marking says: this one is for you, and it is not just about this thing here — it is how such things are. What is striking is that infants are tuned for the marking from the start — an innate endowment, but of receptivity rather than content: what is built in is not a grammar but an openness to being shown. The teaching only works because something on the other side is already listening for it.

The proposed ways don’t make a peaceful family — they quarrel. Vygotsky puts the social first — the higher functions themselves begin between people, and internalisation transforms the child as they move within. Piaget puts the builder first — the child constructs alone, and the social arrives into a construction already under way. The picture I’d like to draw declines the question the two answers share: which comes first. There is no first. The doing is always the child’s own; nobody can do it for them. And what the doing works on is always already social — not a source standing above the child but a sediment: everyone else’s doing, settled into tools and held out. What this picture does not take is Vygotsky’s strongest claim, that the social makes the inner life rather than furnishes it. The child builds in private with tools from the social.

There is one more thing worth noticing about the shape. Most of these mechanisms carry the common inward: the child takes what is already held out there and makes it its own. But not all of them run only that way. Scaffolding — Vygotsky’s between-people support worked into practice: a more capable other holding a learner through what they can’t yet manage, then withdrawing as they take it over — works in both directions, because a subject who holds something can hold it out to someone else. And Di Paolo’s coupling runs both ways by its nature: in a real encounter meaning is made between, and what the child brings feeds what arises there just as much as what the adult brings. Some of the traffic has always run the other way.

Absorbing what the common holds, building its own from it, and feeding its own back into the shared as it goes. A picture of how a child comes into language. Widen the frame past childhood, and it looks like how we go on living: never finished, always at work, always in the middle of the talking.

This post is part of the seed series. See also the reference entry on human ways of sharing.

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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