Becoming Earthians

Question

How does cognition emerge through relationship?

Cognition emerges through coupling — between people, environments, technologies, and the more-than-human world.

The question

The dominant framing treats cognition as computation happening inside individual heads. Meaning is processed. Decisions are made. Action follows.

But this framing struggles with what actually happens in dialogue, in collective sense-making, in moments of genuine understanding. Meaning does not transfer from one head to another — it emerges between them. It requires relationship.

How does cognition emerge through relationship, and what does this imply for how we sense, model, and design collective systems?

Why it matters

If cognition is relational, we’ve been designing systems wrong — optimising individuals when we should be cultivating relationships.

Individual

Even your private thinking is relational. You think in language you learned from others. Your gut feelings arise from a nervous system shaped by every relationship you've had. You think better in certain places, after certain practices, in dialogue with certain people. Cognition doesn't happen in your head — it happens in the ongoing relationship between your body, your environment, and the patterns of meaning you've inherited.

Group

You've had conversations where ideas emerged that neither person could have generated alone. You finish each other's sentences. Something clicks. That's relational cognition — and it's why the same group of people can have a brilliant meeting one day and a useless one the next. The individuals didn't change; the relationship did.

Organisation

Companies invest heavily in hiring smart individuals, then wonder why innovation stalls. The problem is often the coupling — rigid hierarchies, siloed communication, meetings that don't allow genuine exchange. The intelligence is stuck because the relationships can't breathe.

Community

A neighbourhood knows things that no individual resident knows — which streets flood, who needs help, where the kids play. This distributed knowledge lives in the network of relationships. When communities fragment, this collective intelligence evaporates, even though all the same people still live there.

Society

Democracies are experiments in collective cognition. When public discourse degrades — when we stop listening, when nuance disappears, when dialogue becomes performance — society gets stupider. The individuals may be just as educated, but the relational substrate that enables collective sense-making has broken down.

Civilisation

Humanity's ability to respond to planetary challenges depends on our capacity for collective intelligence across cultures, worldviews, and ways of knowing. Climate change, pandemics, technological disruption — these problems exceed any single perspective. Our survival depends on cognition that emerges through relationship at unprecedented scale.

This reframes how we build systems: not just connecting individuals, but creating conditions for relational intelligence to emerge.

Theoretical grounding

This work draws on:

  • Varela — Enaction, mutual constraint, neurophenomenology
  • Bateson — Ecology of mind, the pattern that connects
  • Barad — Intra-action, agential realism
  • Indigenous epistemologies — Relational ontology, knowledge as relationship

The common thread: cognition is a property of systems-in-relationship.

See reference list for Springer chapter “Maps, Machines and Engtangled Minds” (forthcoming Q1 2026) for full citations.

What this inquiry contributes

The Semantic Climate project instruments the semantic dimension of coupling — tracking how meaning shifts, reorganises, and stabilises through dialogue. The biosensing work instruments the somatic dimension — how nervous systems couple through shared field.

Together, these provide windows into the relational substrate of cognition that is usually invisible.