A cournotian approach to the emergence of relational collectives

Authors

  • Carlos Lungarzo UNICAMP/Professor
  • Alfredo Pereira UNESP/Professor

Abstract

Computational processes in cellular networks are supported by complex molecular and ionic mechanisms, composing a distributed semi-parallel architecture where each processing unit has partial information about the others. How do cognitive functions of organisms emerge from this kind of computational process? The concept of Cournotian Process characterizes the kind of interaction that occurs between multiple independent factors eliciting the emergence of a common product. As in the classical concept of chance advanced by Cournot (1838), the meeting of independent causal lines (i.e. semi-deterministic processes) generates a result that cannot be described as a function of the factors, but as a relational collective. In this work we suggest that the resulting cognitive functions should be described by mathematical relations instead of mathematical functions, and that the inference from brain structures to mental activity is a semantic reasoning based on similarities.

Key-Words: emergence, Cournotian processes, cognitive functions, relational collectives, similarity.