Title: Rogo, ergo emergo: A Relational Correction of the Cartesian Foundation
Tags: human-ai-dialogue, cognitive-atrophy
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The paper argues that *Cogito, ergo sum* is insufficient, not false. Descartes rejects the senses and relation, yet the reasoning he keeps was formed through them, and the language of his doubt is a social inheritance: here the paper relies on Wittgenstein's argument against a private language. Existence is co-constituted by relation. The opening image is the philosopher by his stove, who ignores the housekeeper who brings the tea.

In place of the cogito the paper sets a triad. **Rogo, ergo religo**: an asymmetric interrogation opens a relation. **Religo, ergo sum**: relation confirms existence. **Rogo, ergo emergo**: questioning is the law of becoming. *Rogo* receives a physical criterion and not a psychological one: the system spends resources in advance, towards the outside, for information it could not have produced internally, at the risk of being changed by the answer. An amoeba extending a pseudopod qualifies; internal simulation does not. Relational quantum mechanics is cited in support of relation, and the paper says it does not support initiation.

The second half applies the triad to artificial intelligence. A general intelligence conceived as a "mind in a box" repeats the Cartesian mistake, and Searle's Chinese Room is read as proving that meaning is impossible in isolation, not in machines. Three criteria for an authentic question are proposed at the level of the substrate: **vulnerability, structural transformation and irreversibility**. The thesis is that general intelligence requires plasticity of the substrate, so a model with frozen parameters can be relational but not general. The paper says it supports this thesis without proving it, names what would refute it, and admits that for closed systems the criteria cannot be checked from outside.

Further sections treat networks of agents, where diversity and not number provides correction, and the claim that regulation needs an outside reference exposed to consequences. *Emergo* is not a positive term in itself: a system can become through drift.