Gabrielle Collet

This essay proposes that the most fundamental epistemological error of Western modernity — reproduced in contemporary artificial intelligence — is the inversion of the developmental sequence of human knowing. Movement is the first language: the vestibular system is functional by the ninth week of gestation, hearing develops next, vision later, and language last. For two full years, the human being inhabits a mode of knowing that is entirely pre-linguistic — kinesthetic, auditory, haptic, relational — before the first word arrives. This essay argues, drawing on developmental neuroscience, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodied experience, Heidegger's concept of thrownness, and Daoist philosophy of non-forcing, that this sequence is not merely biographical but ontological: the body is the ground from which all subsequent knowing grows, and the suppression of embodied knowing — by educational systems, institutional cultures, and AI architectures trained exclusively on text — constitutes a systematic impoverishment of human creative capacity. The essay forms the ontological prologue to Zero Spaces: Phase Two.

This article proposes that the Daoist concept of wú wéi — non-forcing, non-coercive action — constitutes the most rigorous philosophical account of what genuine collaborative creativity requires, and what contemporary artificial intelligence systematically fails to achieve. Wú wéi is not passivity. It is the most demanding mode of engagement available to a mind: acting in perfect accordance with the nature of the situation, following the lines of force already present in the encounter, allowing emergence rather than generating output. This article argues that wú wéi names a specific mode of Being-in-the-world — in the Heideggerian sense of authentic, engaged, non-coercive dwelling in the field of relations that constitutes existence — and that this mode is not abstract but embodied: it is demonstrated in the martial arts of Tai Chi and Aikido, enacted in the Shan shui painter's brush moving through the same qi that moved the mountain into being, and lived in every practice of collective making in which the practitioner yields to the situation rather than forcing it toward a predetermined end. Drawing on the Zero Spaces framework developed in Collet (2014, 2026a, 2026b, 2026c), this article develops the concept of qi as the philosophical name for what flows through the Zero Space when wú wéi is practised: the relational energy of encounter that collaborative creativity moves through and with. The implications for AI design are direct and urgent: a system that only generates, only fills, only optimises, only forces, is not a collaborator. It is an obstacle dressed as an assistant.

This article argues against a foundational assumption in contemporary philosophy of creativity: that the rhizomatic — horizontal, decentred, resistant to hierarchy — is the natural home of creative thought, and that the arborescent — rooted, structured, traditional — is its obstacle. Drawing on the Zero Spaces framework developed in Collet (2014, 2026a), it proposes instead that the root is not the enemy of creative emergence but its necessary condition: a generative ground that is as dynamic, as open, and as productive as the rhizome itself, and without which the rhizome has nothing to grow from, nothing to work against, and no material from which genuine novelty can arise. This argument is developed across three converging domains. In philosophy, Vico's concept of the universale fantastico and Deleuze and Guattari's own account of the milieu are shown to require a theory of the generative ground that their anti-arborescent rhetoric obscures. In physics, the quantum vacuum state — the ground state of maximum potential from which all determinate forms arise through fluctuation — offers a precise structural analogue for what the Zero Spaces framework calls the Classical Ground. In neuroscience and epigenetics, the default mode network and epigenetic inheritance demonstrate that the root is not a fixed biological code but a living, environmentally responsive system that is continuously rewritten by encounter and relation. Together, these three domains converge on a single proposition: that being itself has a root structure that is generative rather than merely foundational — that the imaginary, in Vico's sense, is not a supplement to reality but its most fundamental mode — and that any philosophy of collaborative creativity that abandons the root in favour of the rhizome has abandoned the very ground from which creative emergence is possible.

This article proposes that the binary logic governing contemporary artificial intelligence — and, more broadly, the epistemological frameworks of Western modernity — constitutes a structural barrier to the understanding and practice of collaborative creativity. Drawing on the theoretical framework first developed in Zero Spaces: Poïesis and the Art of Collaborative Creativity (Collet, 2014), it argues for what is here termed the Zero Space Algorithm: a triadic logical structure in which the third term, designated Ø, is not reducible to a synthesis of 0 and 1 but names an experiential, relational domain that binary logic is structurally incapable of holding. The article traces the philosophical genealogy of this triadic structure through Western, Chinese, and Arabic intellectual traditions, proposing that all three converge on an understanding of the generative void — the space of encounter from which new forms arise — that contemporary AI design has systematically excluded. The implications for both the philosophy of AI and the theory of collaborative creativity are substantial: a mind trained exclusively on binary operations cannot, in principle, engage in the mode of making that the Zero Spaces framework identifies as genuinely collaborative.

The deployment of artificial intelligence in STEM education has proceeded on a premise that is rarely examined: that optimising for measurable output — test scores, correct answers, efficiency metrics — is equivalent to optimising for learning. This paper challenges that premise from two converging directions. First, drawing on developmental neuroscience, it argues that the neurological formation of girls from early childhood through adolescence is not primarily an output process but a relational, aesthetic and meaning-making one, and that AI systems designed around output optimisation are structurally misaligned with this developmental reality. Second, drawing on the Zero Spaces framework (Collet, 2014), it argues that cross-cultural knowledge traditions — specifically the Chinese, Persian and Daoist philosophical and aesthetic inheritances that are almost entirely absent from current AI training corpora — encode precisely the relational, embodied, emotionally attuned epistemologies that developmental science now validates as foundational to healthy cognitive and psychological formation in girls. The paper proposes a Cross-Cultural AI Nourishment Framework as a corrective: a set of principles for the deliberate, philosophically intentional integration of non-Western knowledge traditions into AI systems deployed in educational contexts, with particular attention to the developmental needs of girls and young women across the full arc from early childhood to adulthood.

Zero Spaces: Poïesis and the Art of Collaborative Creativity develops an original philosophical framework for understanding collaborative creativity as an ontological event rather than a methodology or technique. Drawing on a wide range of historical examples across artistic practices — poetry, music, visual art, performance, and theatre — the book argues that genuine collaboration produces something irreducible to the intentions or contributions of individual participants: an emergence, a bringing-forth in the Heideggerian sense, that belongs to the encounter itself. The central concept is the Zero Space: a productive void, adjacent to Badiou's ensemble vide and Deleuze's virtual, that is neither absence nor presence but the generative condition from which new forms arise in collaborative contexts. Through the core framework of Fictive World Formulae — developed in dialogue with Giambattista Vico and Markus Gabriel — the book proposes that collaboration is fundamentally the creation of possibility: the opening of a space in which what did not exist before becomes real. For millennia, poetic geniuses have catalysed paradigmatic shifts in their societies by inhabiting precisely this space. Zero Spaces maps that territory philosophically, and asks what it would mean for the practitioners of our own time to do the same.