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The seed and Cognition

This page focuses on P2 — the medium, the subject, experience — and names the process at work within it.

P2 — Language is the medium through which a subject experiences reality.

Heidegger’s observation stands at the entrance: we are always already in the world. There is no moment before immersion — no subject that first exists and then acquires a meaningful world. The observation states a fact and leaves a question standing: how?

P2’s gloss carries the beginning of the answer. Experience requires accumulation; a subject’s reality is the totality of what has been retained; knowledge is what the subject comes to recognise within that accumulation. Retaining, accumulating, recognising — none of this happens by itself; a process is at work. So the principle can carry its naming: language is the medium through which a subject experiences reality — and it happens with a process called cognition. The definition: cognition is the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through experience — held wide, not confined to minds. Each subject runs its own process, a specific way of going about the acquiring; the brain is the most familiar case, not the only one.

The process is within, not behind. A subject does not first experience reality and then do something with what arrived: the experiencing is the process running. Cognition works inside the medium — it extracts from language and it feeds language — and there is no separation between being in language, experiencing reality, and running the process. That is the answer to the question at the entrance: how is the world always already meaningful? Because the making-sense is always already running — there was no first delivery of neutral input, and the medium was never empty.

Nor does the running start from nothing. A subject always belongs, and belonging delivers language tooling that already carries knowledge and understanding — the sediment of other subjects’ cognition, shared and held in common. What any subject runs with is largely others’ already-done: the always-already is funded twice, by a process that never wasn’t running and by tooling that never arrived empty.

While the process runs, reality is disclosed to the subject. Disclosure is one of the things the running does — a happening of the process, not its title.

How the making-sense runs in any particular subject — in brains, in cell chemistry, in machines that learn, in whatever else holds the position — is contested territory with many accounts and no owner; the seed does not pick among them. That there is some process is all P2 requires.

See The seed and Historicity for the accumulation the process works in — retention, memory, the span. See The seed and Human Reality for the shared side — what sharing does with what cognition deposits.