Abstract

Processes and Boundaries of the Mind is a wide-ranging, free-wheeling investigation that probes the foundations of contemporary thought. In the course of his exploration, Yair Neuman examines a number of fascinating dimensions on the frontiers of the human intellect: semiotics and the origin of language, ontology and epistemology, animal intelligence, phenomenology and hermeneutics, recursion and self-reference, complex systems and chaos theory, and many others. Neuman's diverse reflections come together around a centering insight into the dynamic nature of the mind. In reading this book, we discover that the mind is neither an object, nor a free-standing subject, but a fundamental process, a dynamically oscillating boundary event constituting the primary distinction from which all other distinctions arise. Distinctions do tend to harden, with the world taking on the appearance of coming ready-made, already parceled out into pre-existent, rigidly bounded categories. But Neuman demonstrates the deceptiveness of these reified appearances, and brings us back time and again to the embodied processual substrate that underlies the fixed abstractions currently dominant in our culture.