Further Thoughts on the Paper by Tani “ Self - Organization and Compositionality in Cognitive Brains ”

The symbol grounding problem as understood today can be traced back at least to Cartesian dualism and medieval times. René Descartes postulated that the mind is an immaterial thinking thing essentially distinct from the non-thinking material body, only then to face the 'problem of interactionism,' i.e. explaining how an immaterial mind can cause anything in a material body, and vice versa. Today's symbol grounding problem addresses the same concern, asking how symbols understood as arbitrary shapes or tokens defined in non-metric space can interact densely with sensory-motor reality defined in an effectively physical and material metric space. In the paper entitled " Self-organization and compositionality in cognitive brains: a neuro-robotic study " [1], Jun Tani attempts to constructively resolve this long-standing problem of mind and body. The paper details experimental trials, inspired by Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of embodiment, in which Tani has engineered self-organizing non-linear dynamic systems into robotic platforms in order to test the conjecture that neuro-dynamic structures self-organize via accumulated learning of the continuous flow of sensory-motor experience. This learning grounds higher-level cognition in perceptual reality without suffering the disjunction between lower-and higher-level operations found in hybrid models employing symbolic compositional operations. Instead, iterative interactions between top-down subjective intentional processes (acting on the objective world) and the bottom-up recognition of perceptual reality result in the modification of top-down intention by circular causality. As such, Tani's models demonstrate what Merleau-Ponty metaphorically described as the reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one (the subject) and the other (the object) through which those two become inseparable entities [2]. This sketch might not be easily appreciated by proponents of cognitivism such as that laid out by Chomsky in response to Skinner's behaviorism, i.e. that symbolic