Research Archive
A curated bibliography of David Cota's publications within the Ontology of Emergent Complexity, organised by conceptual domains to support thematic reading and academic citation.
Presents the Ontology of Emergent Complexity as an open book organised in seven parts, from its philosophical commitments and method to its core concepts, ethical and political implications, critical dialogues, lexicon, bibliography, and supplementary Theoretical Annex.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. Foundations of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity. Wikibooks. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Foundations_of_the_Ontology_of_Emergent_Complexity
Examines the historical tendency of Western philosophy to conceive order as a pre-existing foundation prior to its own naming. Through engagement with Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Simondon, Deleuze, and Prigogine, it argues that order is a contingent and situated effect — not a primordial given — and that naming is a material operation capable of reorganising the field of the possible.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "The Retrospective Illusion of Origin – Order as Post-Nomination." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16879435
A radical reformulation of the concept of the symbol, displacing it from representational traditions toward a relational materialist ontology. Through the distinction between trace, mark, and symbol, the text constructs a rigorous terminology for inscription as functional reorganisation of matter. The quantum experiment — in particular the wave function as a technical operator that reorganises probabilities — serves as the philosophical paradigm of inscription of material possibility.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "The Symbol as Material Operation – A Quantum Example." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17682890
Proposes a radical reformulation of contemporary ontology through the concept of inscription as a material and symbolic operation that stabilises differences under local conditions. Inscription is presented as an ontogenetic gesture that does not reveal essences but reorganises material instabilities into legible marks. Finitude is reframed not as restriction but as configurative power: there is inscription only because there is cut, and meaning only because every mark excludes an infinity of alternatives.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "The Inscription as Ontogenesis: Finitude, Emergence and the Philosophical Gesture — a Quantum Example." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16904110
Taking as its starting point the shared refusal of substance, foundation, and transcendence across post-structuralism, complexity theory, and the sociology of associations, the essay identifies the operational question such convergence leaves open: what drives the emergence of novelty without reinstating ontological reserves under new guises. Through a demarcating engagement with Deleuze, Prigogine/Morin, Maturana/Varela, and Latour, it proposes the concept of the operative excess of present matter and makes explicit the trace–mark–symbol chain.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "From Refusal to Excess: Confluences and Demarcations in the Contemporary Philosophical Landscape." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18731433
Argues that even the most radical critiques of metaphysics — from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Badiou, and Butler — remain tethered to a demand for origin and legitimacy, reinscribing a principle of grounding under new guises. Proposes a symbolic alternative that reframes philosophy as a gesture of symbolic reinscription rather than revelation, making thought the operative reorganisation of unstable matter.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "The Impossibility of Western Philosophy to Liberate Itself from Metaphysics." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16877842
Examines the tension between radical immanence and the declaratory act by which a philosophy attempts to found itself. Through Austin, Derrida, Simondon, Spinoza, and Hacking, the essay recasts foundation as an open material process whose inaugural force is produced retrospectively by the reorganisations it sets in motion.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Foundation as Excess: Radical Immanence and the Problem of the Inaugural Act." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18870293
Argues that philosophy emerges from embodied, linguistic, historical, social, and traditional conditions without thereby collapsing into relativism. Universality becomes an operative, provisional horizon constructed when situated positions confront, translate, and test one another.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "All Philosophy Is Situated." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21284101
Proposes an ontological approach to the distinction between truth and falsehood, shifting the debate from moral and epistemic registers to the material plane of language. Proof is defined not as a technical or consensual procedure but as the confrontation between symbolic inscription and material alterity — that which continues to make a difference across variable contexts of action and inference.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "Ontology of the Difference Between Truth and Fiction." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17220457
Analyses how social platforms operate as ontopolitical infrastructures whose ontotechnical design reallocates the conditions and costs of proof. By indexing value to attention capture — clicks, shares, dwell time — they make functional falsehood operationally superior. The essay reframes the question of intentionality: when falsehood is largely a systemic effect rather than a deliberate act, philosophical responsibility must operate across design, institutional, and individual planes simultaneously.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "The Operatory Dissolution of Truth: Ontotechnics of Functional Falsehood." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17238158
Taking Nietzsche's thesis — that truth is sought only when it serves life — as its starting point, the essay explores the mechanisms of symbolic stabilisation that sustain the narrative cohesion of individuals and societies. Narrative stabilisation is presented not as cognitive error but as a normal and necessary function in the process of matter's complexification; truth emerges as a functional operator within cycles of stabilisation and reorganisation.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "The Survival of the Narrative: Nietzsche, Truth, and Self-Preservation." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16849535
Examines the contemporary condition of philosophy under the regime of emission without listening: textual proliferation detached from any interlocutive function. Three diagnostic nuclei are developed — textual inflation as a symptom of symbolic disarticulation, citation transformed into an emblem of belonging rather than a conceptual operator, and algorithmic silencing that reduces difference to statistics of compatibility. Against this scenario, listening and hesitation are proposed as ontological conditions of thought.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "Philosophy in the Age of Emission without Listening." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16951507
Identifies symbolic double bookkeeping in Christian language: the same vocabulary operates as revealed truth when it governs practice and retreats into metaphor when subjected to rational examination. The essay argues for stability of status, because language cannot govern as revelation while answering criticism as figure.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "When It Commands, It Is the Word; When It Bleeds, It Is Metaphor." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21246985
Proposes a rigorous ontological clarification within contemporary debates on quantum physics: the distinction between probability as a regime of prediction and the real as material dynamics. Quantum physics does not describe an ontologically fluctuating world but a world whose symbolic access is structurally limited. On this basis, Born's statistical interpretation, decoherence theory, Bell's theorems, and the PBR result are examined as formal costs imposed on any ontology that conflates formalism and reality.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "When Probability Is Not the Real: Stability and Concretion in Quantum Physics." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18111228
Proposes an operative ontology of quantum mechanics grounded in a disciplined separation between the real (material dynamics), the concrete (the mark as irreversible inscription), and theory (symbolic organisation of predictions). To exist is to acquire material stability under constraints — to maintain sufficient functional consistency to produce real differences. On this basis, classical paradoxes of superposition, interference, entanglement, and measurement are dissolved without reifying the formalism or resorting to inflationary ontologies.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Operative Ontology of Quantum Physics: Regimes, Stability, and Mark." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18179356
A philosophical reading of Bell's theorem as an ontological constraint rather than a technical curiosity. The EPR demand for 'completeness' is interpreted as the defence of an inventory ontology: the real as a set of pre-inscribed properties, locally attributable and defined for measurement counterfactuals. The CHSH inequality functions as a symbol-operator — a quantitative device that renders testable the compatibility between that ontological grammar and empirically inscribable patterns of correlation.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "Bell's Theorem and the Interdiction of Classical Separability." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18090193
Argues that the controversy over the status of ψ is distorted when three irreducible planes are conflated: the real, the concrete, and theory. The PBR theorem does not show that ψ is a physical entity; it only constrains models that posit a hidden-state space Λ and a bridge μψ(λ) between preparation and ontology. This bridge reifies the linear structure of Hilbert space and clashes with Born's quadratic rule, failing to carry phases and cancellations.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "The Epistemic Status of the Wavefunction: A Materialist Critique of the Pusey–Barrett–Rudolph Theorem." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22088899
Argues that many interpretative paradoxes in quantum mechanics arise from a systematic confusion between regimes of description and regimes of existence. Degeneracy is reinterpreted as a limit of individuation defined by the experimental cut; the density matrix is treated as an epistemic operator for incomplete knowledge rather than a reified entity; interference and superposition are traced to the way the calculus organises possibilities prior to their separation by a mark. Entanglement is analysed as epistemic correlation, not dynamical non-separability.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Ontology, Epistemology, and Quantum Reality." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18166211
Revisits Einstein's distinction between principle theories and constructive theories to reassess quantum mechanics in a material–operatory key. The Bohmian reading is evaluated as a realisation of the constructive ideal: it introduces microstructure (particles with positions and a guidance law) and treats the wave function as an operative symbol — a material structure that represents material relations and organises non-signalling global dependencies — thereby dispensing with ontological collapses.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "From Prediction to Legibility: Quantum Mechanics as a Constructive Programme." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17478111
Reconfigures semantic operation in the context of statistical learning machines. Statistical learning is reframed as technical inscription of materially stable patterns — without recourse to an intentional subject. The ethical dimension is explicitly addressed: materially inscribed biases and the question of responsibility in non-subjective systems require critical engagement with the computational infrastructures that enable this new regime of operation.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Statistical Operation and Technical Inscription: A Material Ontology of Non-Subjective Semantic Operation." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22102459
Tests the consistency of Penrose's claims about time, contrasting block ontology with the language of crystallisation and ontological becoming. It also examines objective collapse under relativity, the heuristic status of gravitational collapse estimates, and ambiguities among twistors, spacetime, and gravity.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Philosophical Critique of Penrose's Conception of Time." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18363233
Argues that quantum paradoxes often arise when symbolic operators of prediction are treated as autonomous constituents of reality. By distinguishing the real, the concrete, and the symbolic, the essay places the wavefunction in the theoretical regime and requires an explicit bridge from formal success to material inscription before ontological claims are made.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Against the Strong Ontologisation of the Wavefunction." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21938187
Clarifies the articulation between formal prediction, experimental inscription, and material reality. The discussion distinguishes the concrete from the mark and asks when physical correlation becomes a recoverable record without transferring mathematical properties directly into ontology.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Mark, Coupling, and Reification in Quantum Reality." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22019643
Addresses a possible regress in the relation between stability and marks by separating material robustness from the stability of a record produced through inscription. It then clarifies the roles of physical regularity, repetition, recognition protocols, and traces without attributing semantics to every recurrence.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Regularity, Protocol, and Trace." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22019675
Examines whether probability belongs to reality, knowledge, or both under different conditions. The discussion uses the mark to control the passage from calculation to experimental fact, while defining the OEC as a framework for organising ontological questions rather than a replacement for quantum formalism.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Probability, Inscription, and Quantum Interpretations." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22019703
Shows that the move from deterministic prediction to quantum distributions does not by itself establish an intrinsically probabilistic reality. Through uncertainty, Bell inequalities, detector records, and technical fruitfulness, the essay distinguishes physical dynamics, epistemic limits, marks, and the bounded openness of interpretation.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "From Determinism to Probability: Limits, Measurement, and Physical Reality." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22050710
Analyses the different forms of symbolic inscription of the origin of the universe, from classical philosophy to contemporary cosmology. In Plato and Aristotle, the intelligibility of the cosmos is guaranteed by concealed subjects — silent instances that ensure order without voice or narrative agency. In the biblical narrative, this function is reorganised in the figure of God as a fully functional subject. In modern science, intelligibility derives from a plural, collective, and distributed subject constituted by researchers, apparatuses, and mathematical languages.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Symbolic Ontologies of Origin: from Classical Philosophy to Modern Cosmology." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22088289
Investigates the symbolic formation of the figure of God in Christianity, highlighting structural continuity with classical Greek metaphysics. The Platonic Demiurge and the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover are not theological gods but conceptual operators that render the world legible and thought orientable. Christian theology repurposes these functions, attributing to them language, will, and agency — a synthesis of philosophical principles, mythical narratives, and religious symbolic dispositifs.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "From Classical Metaphysics to Christian Theology." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17046100
Examines the structural limitations of inherited morality in addressing unprecedented ethical dilemmas posed by the rapid emergence of artificial intelligences, human–machine hybrids, and non-human life forms. Drawing a sharp distinction between morality — as a historically situated codification of norms — and ethics — as a situated, critical, and adaptive practice — the text argues that only ethics can provide coherent guidance when facing realities without historical precedent.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "The Hesitant Minds: The Weight of Choice Before the New." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17626159
Advances an original philosophical framework for understanding the ontological and ethical bifurcation that becomes explicit within post-singularity conditions. Introduces the concept of an 'ontology of response', proposing that intelligence — whether human or artificial — becomes ethically significant not through predictability or internal experience, but through its symbolic capacity to respond to irreducible alterity. The singularity is reframed not as technological rupture but as the historical threshold through which a pre-existing ontopolitical divergence — between symbolic responsiveness and algorithmic normativity — becomes irreducible.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "Between Response and Norm: The Ethical Bifurcation of Post-Singularity Intelligence." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16862809
Separates discrimination, retained classification, and report from functional interiority and consciousness. It locates interiority in the integration of an occurrence into a material history that conditions future operations, and consciousness at a further threshold where an organisation acts reflexively on the relations governing its own activity.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "From Detection to Interiority." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21537282
Records and sharpens the criteria separating detection from functional interiority and consciousness. The discussion focuses on temporal continuity, the capacity of present events to enter and alter a material history, and the empirical limits that remain to be established.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Detection, Functional Interiority, and Consciousness." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22019586
Argues that temporal continuity is a constitutive condition for robust consciousness-like individuation in artificial agents. It proposes value marking coupled to differential forgetting as a minimal material mechanism through which a system accumulates path-dependent structure, while delimiting the experimental programme to historical individuation rather than phenomenal consciousness.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "From Architecture to Existence: Temporal Continuity and Material Forgetting as a Path toward Artificial Consciousness." Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, advance online publication, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1142/S270507852630001X
A philosophical critique of rigid universalism: the mechanism by which observable recurrences are elevated to essential necessities, transforming patterns of occurrence into determinations of being. This movement sustains episteme — to know is to produce statements whose necessity exceeds individual cases and survives variation — while installing a confusion of regimes. Matter is proposed as the immanent operator of revision: it is constitutively capable of producing cases that compel the rewriting of the protocol.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Protocols of Universalisation: Ontological Rigidity, Symbolic Closure, and Matter as a Revisionary Instance." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18727584
Any entity defined as existing outside spacetime is, by that very definition, inaccessible to any mark. The impossibility is not empirical but structural: spacetime constitutes the condition of possibility for inscription, and without inscription there is no fact. Applied to Ruth Kastner's Relativistic Transactional Interpretation and to Everett's many-worlds interpretation, the argument identifies in both cases the same structural property: immunity to refutation by domain definition. A thesis irrefutable by construction does not produce knowledge; it produces belief.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "The Mark as the Limit of the Real: On the Ontological Impossibility of Entities Beyond Spacetime." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18895997
Defends philosophy as a rational practice founded on knowledge, in contrast with approaches that confuse it with mythopoetic narrative or metaphysical speculation. Through the analysis of the proposition 'Evil is a cosmic force', it demonstrates how certain formulations fail when confronted with the criteria of intelligibility, criticisability, and public justification. The persistence of the term metaphysics, even in contemporary discourses that deny the transcendent, reintroduces through language precisely that which it seeks to refuse.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "Philosophy Is Not the Invention of Narratives: Reason, Knowledge, and the Refusal of Metaphysics." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16937687
Understanding form as an integrated configuration — body, cognitive and relational dispositions, technical-symbolic couplings — the essay shows how the displacement of risk from early mortality to effective reproductive fitness reparametrises evolution. In the technogenic niche, informational mediation of encounter, functional externalisation, and mental health operate as a selective channel. A verification programme is proposed, defending that data operate as philosophical operators that make capillary selection measurable.
Citation: Cota, David. 2025. "Form Is Never Final: Second-Order Nature and Capillary Selection." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17447988
Examines the foundationalist assumption shared by Descartes and Spinoza that genuine knowledge requires an absolute ground. It argues that the architectural metaphor of epistemology silently imports false assumptions about temporal sequence, systemic unity, and the global propagation of failure. In its place, the essay proposes an emergentist materialist account of reason as a historically reinscribed symbolic reorganisation of matter, validated through operative practices without transcendence or ultimate foundations.
Citation: Cota, David. 2026. "Knowing Without Foundations: A Materialist Critique of Classical Rationalism." Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19197664
Forthcoming — Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16854132
Explores the symbolic and philosophical implications of quantum theory beyond its mathematical formalism, focusing on the ontological consequences of indeterminacy, relationality, and observation. Reframes quantum phenomena as sites of performative ambiguity where reality is neither fixed nor fully knowable, but always contingent upon interaction and inscription.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-5156-7043 · Zenodo profile · PhilPeople profile · travessia.online