Source: Cognitive Morphodynamics Dynamical Morphological Models of Constituency in Perception and Syntax (In collaboration with René Doursat) by Jean Petitot


It is very important to stress this last point. One of the main reasons that symbolic cognitivism called for a rejection of dynamical conceptions stems from a misunderstanding of the epistemology of emergence. When a system possesses many levels of organization, the higher “macro” level is causally reducible to the lower ones, yet at the same time its structures can be largely independent from the underlying “micro” dynamics. It benefits from a certain objective autonomy. As John Searle emphasized, only if we identify a phenomenon with its causal genesis—in other words, if we surreptitiously move from a justified causal reductionism to a dogmatic and unjustified ontological reductionism— that we are led to deny the autonomy and objective reality of the higher levels of organization.

So, the phenomenological world PhW is the result of several independent processes:

(i) on the side of the external world, the emergence of a macro phenophysical morphological level outside of the underlying micro-physical level, which can be adequately called “geno-physical”;
(ii) on the side of the cognitive subject, the processing of this morphological information by low-level, modular, bottom-up and data-driven routines;
(iii) again on the side of the cognitive subject, the emergence of a symbolic conceptual structure outside of an underlying subsymbolic dynamical level;
(iv) the projection of this “computational mind” onto the pheno-physical world, which produces the projected world PrW.

The relation between the symbolic and physical levels avoids the ontological gap encountered by almost all cognitive theories. Indeed, the morphological level constitutes a mean term between the physical and the symbolic ones: it is of physical origin (emergent) but without being material; it is formal but without being symbolic; it is topologically and geometrically formal and not logically formal. As David Marr [224] has noted, the morphological information passes through transduction. It is encoded and carried by light and sound signals and decoded-recoded by transducers. But during the transduction it remains in large part isomorphic to itself. Qualitative discontinuities are in some sense “contagious” and can be transferred from substrata to substrata.

Hence what we call the double organization (cognitive-projective and phenophysical) of the phenomenal world.

The physicalist prejudice can now be formulated as an eliminativist thesis:

there does not exist any pheno-physical level. For classical cognitivism the consequences are considerable. Most of the theoretical difficulties it encounters come from the fact that it seeks to derive the morphological level from a symbolic conception of syntax and semantic, while this is clearly impossible. But consequences are also rather important for subsymbolic cognitivism. The most immediate obviously concerns the projectivist thesis PhW ≡ PrW.Aswehave just seen, the phenomenological world PhW is both projected and emergent.

Thus there is not any real ontological gap between PrW and RW. The diagram proposed above in Section 3.1 must be revised in the following way (see Figure 5).