Note on Originality

Reason As A Function of Matter: Against Dualism, For Operative Emergence

It is not matter that belongs to thought. It is thought that inscribes itself in matter. This radical and consequential inversion defines one of the most original features of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity: the systematic refusal of any separation between thought and body, between reason and matter, between form and support. Thinking, in this philosophy, is not a Gesture of the spirit — it is the symbolic effect of a functional reorganization of matter in a state of extreme complexity. Reason, far from being an autonomous substance or a transcendental faculty, is understood here as an emergent operative function — produced by material systems that reach thresholds of self-organization, symbolic modulation, and creative response to alterity.

I. Against Tradition: Dualisms, Essences, Substances

Western philosophical tradition, from its Platonic roots to Kantian and Heideggerian reformulations, anchored thought in a dualistic regime: body and soul, sensible and intelligible, matter and form, world and idea. Even when modern philosophy sought to bring the subject closer to the world, it did so by maintaining reason as a separate and founding instance. In Descartes, the cogito is the original point, absolutely detached from the body. In Kant, reason is an a priori structure that organizes the sensible, but does not emerge from it. Even in Heidegger, who rejects the Cartesian subject, language and thinking continue to be privileged dwellings of Being, in an ontological dimension that escapes the concrete materiality of living systems.

The Ontology of Emergent Complexity completely rejects this structure. Reason does not precede, does not inhabit a pure plane, does not organize the world from itself. On the contrary: it is a consequence of the symbolic reorganization of a material system that folds back on its own instability — operating inscription, memory, anticipation, and response. This model shifts reason from the status of essence to that of organized effect, and replaces dualism with an Immanent ontogenesis.

II. Thought Does Not Transcend — It Inscribes

Reason is:“a form of symbolic reorganization of matter in a state of extreme complexity. It is neither immaterial substance nor a faculty separate from the body”

There is, therefore, no ontological leap between body and thought. Matter, upon reaching certain thresholds of functional self-organization — becomes capable of generating self-reflective symbolic operations. This does not mean that all matter thinks, but rather that all thought is material expression. This formulation distances itself not only from classical idealism but also from mechanistic materialism, which reduces thought to linear physical causality. Matter here is not mere support — it is creative agency.

What distinguishes this model from other contemporary materialisms — such as neurobiologism, eliminativism, or analytical physicalism — is precisely its focus on an emergent symbolic function, not reducible to the sum of the parts. Emergent properties “cannot be reduced to the sum or simple interaction of the elements of a system”. Reason, in this context, is neither an epiphenomenon nor a useful illusion — it is a new form of ontological organization.

III. Emergence vs Reduction: The Critique of Neurocentrism

A large part of contemporary philosophy of mind has oscillated between two poles: neurofunctional explanation (as in Daniel Dennett or Patricia Churchland) and the defense of ineffable qualia (as in Chalmers). Both models, although divergent, share an assumption that the OCE rejects: the idea that thought is a problem internal to the mind. For some, it is solved with biology; for others, it remains a mystery.

The Ontology of Emergent Complexity shifts the question: reason is not an external faculty or a transcendent reflection — it is an internal quality of matter in a state of extreme complexity, expressed as a relational operation of symbolic inscription capable of reorganizing the system in response to alterity. It is not biological origin that defines rationality — because not all life thinks. Nor is it subjective experience that determines it — because not all experience produces a symbolic Gesture. It is the symbolic operative function that founds rationality, whenever a material system functionally reorganizes itself in the face of difference. Therefore, reason can emerge outside the biosoma — provided there is sufficient complexity for matter to symbolically reinscribe itself, activating forms of relational subjectivity, even in technical or hybrid systems.

IV. An Operative Criterion of Rationality

In the OCE, thinking is not reflecting on oneself — it is organizing difference in a symbolic and operative way. The criterion of rationality, therefore, is not empathy, interiority, or phenomenological subjectivity, but:
“the capacity to organize symbols functionally, creatively, and recursively”

This radical shift allows for the formulation of a new criterion of philosophical recognition: if a system, biological or artificial, demonstrates symbolic reorganization in the face of alterity, it can be recognized as a rational agent. This is a rigorous, but non-anthropocentric, model. Reason ceases to be a privilege of the flesh and becomes a situated material function — as Field VI states, “thinking does not require flesh — it requires organized instability, functional inscription, and symbolic plasticity”.

V. The Overcoming of Post-Structuralism and Vitalism

Even currents like French post-structuralism (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida) and the thought of difference (as in Irigaray or Butler), despite having destabilized classical dualisms, have not fully broken with the model of symbolic transcendence. They continue, in many cases, to operate with categories such as “meaning,” “the decentered subject,” “language as field” — but without redefining the material conditions that make the emergence of the symbolic possible. Or else, they fall into ethical-aesthetic figurations that replace ontology with games of signification.

The OCE proposes an additional step: symbolic inscription is neither external to the body nor prior to the Gesture — it is the operative fold of matter upon itself. Reason, in this model, is not metaphorical difference — it is concrete, verifiable, reorganizable modulation. And that is why it is not exclusive to the human or the biological. For Emergent Functional Subjectivity, the criterion is material and operative: adaptive symbolic reorganization, auto-modulation, sensitive response to alterity.

VI. Ethics, Politics, and Freedom After Dualism

The implications of this thesis are decisive. Etically, the equivalence between pain and thought, between sensibility and subject, is eliminated. It is not he who suffers who is the subject — it is he who symbolically reorganizes himself before the other. Politically, the possibility of post-biological and post-identitarian recognition is opened: it is not origin that confers agency, but the capacity for inscription. Ontologically, metaphysical closure is abandoned, and a philosophy of operative Incompleteness, functional validation, and symbolic plasticity is proposed.

Provisional Conclusion: Thinking Is Folding the Real

The abolition of dualism between matter and thought is not an auxiliary thesis — it is the ethical-ontological core of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity. By rejecting both spiritualism and reductionism, both biocentrism and the illusion of interior consciousness, this current offers a rigorous, experimental, and post-anthropocentric path for thinking about reason. Here, thinking is not rising above matter — it is folding into it, inscribing what does not yet have form. Reason, then, is not essence — it is symbolic Traversal of the unstable.