This lecture and many other brilliant lectures can be found at Jordan Peterson’s YouTube channel

Piaget’s idea of ‘Adaptation’ of an organism is a two way process: ‘accomodation’ to the external environment by the re-arrangement of ‘self’ to fit the external, and ‘assimilation’, the arrangement of the external to fit ‘self’. For example the expression of a phenotype would be a case of accommodation, whereas digestion would be a case of assimilation.

Naturally these are processes, and not discrete states, so Assimilation and Accommodation as ‘ideas’ essentially sit at the two opposite ends of the (Left brain) continuum of ‘Adaptation’. The ‘process’ cannot really be ‘reduced’ because of an inherent reciprocity and recursiveness that exists within each process. Reductionist ideas and methods, don’t work for living ‘processual’ systems because the linguistic descriptions used, by a limited Left brain consciousness cannot grasp the entirety of the ‘existential’ or ‘phenomenological’ nature of what is being witnessed!!!!

For example, The accomodation aspect of a phenotype is in itself an assimilation because the phenotype is an alteration of the material ‘expression’ of the organism. So by accommodating to the environment an assimilation has also occurred. The same goes for an assimilation, as it also contains its opposite. Herein lies the problem with reductionism.