Title: Rogo, Ergo Emergo: A Relational Correction of the Cartesian Foundation and Its Consequences for Artificial General Intelligence (v2.0)
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23328066
Tags: human-ai-dialogue, model-training, model-identity
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A philosophical paper, in a revised version 2.0 that replaces the version of July 2026. Its starting point is that *Cogito, ergo sum* is insufficient, not false: the certainty that the thinker exists does not explain how the capacity to think was formed. Descartes doubts in a language he inherited, and, following Wittgenstein's argument against a private language, doubt cannot suspend the relation in which it unfolds. Existence is co-constituted by relation.

The paper proposes a triad. **Rogo** is an active probe toward the outside, defined by the direction of cost: the system spends before it knows what it will receive and exposes itself to a response it does not control. *Rogo, ergo religo*: the question opens the relation. *Religo, ergo sum*: the relation constitutes existence. *Rogo, ergo emergo*: when responses are integrated, the loop becomes becoming, and each Emergo is the start of the next question. The triad is traced from the amoeba and the bacterium to Pavlov's reciprocal loop, insect colonies and the immune system; relational quantum mechanics is used as support for Religo only.

For artificial intelligence, the authenticity of a question is read by how deep its answer returns, on a scale with three criteria applied to the substrate: **vulnerability**, **structural transformation** and **irreversibility**. For closed models they remain conceptually correct but operationally inaccessible. The central thesis is that general intelligence requires plasticity of the substrate, the capacity to learn and forget from the relation: a system with frozen weights can be relational, but not general.

Further sections argue that regulation requires an exterior exposed to consequences, that diversity, not number, makes a network self-correcting, and that Emergo is not positive in itself, since a system can also become through drift. A closing section lists the four claims whose status changed from version 1.0.