A new view of mind is in the air. Teed Rockwell has sensed it and articulated it beautifully in this book. Using a powerful combination of Dewey's pragmatism and dynamical systems theory, he proposes a bold alternative to Cartesian materialism that deserves careful scrutiny.
J. A. Scott Kelso, Glenwood and Martha Creech Chair in Science and Director, Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University
Well researched and well written, this is an excellent introduction to the nascent field of nonlinear neurodynamics. Rockwell has some excellent passages on causality and supervenience, and he is to be congratulated for having extricated himself from the swamps of GOFAI, materialism, and functionalism.
Walter J. Freeman, University of California, Berkeley, author of How Brains Make Up Their Minds
Where does the mind end and the world begin? Although the view that the mind is confined to the brain isn't dead yet, Rockwell offers a Deweyan nail for the Cartesian coffin with his answer that the boundary between mind and world is a flexible one. Drawing on embodied and dynamical systems approaches to cognitive science, he proposes an intriguing alternative to the separation of mind and world, which underlies the Cartesian materialism of traditional cognitive science and the philosophical puzzles it spawns.
Colin Allen, Professor, Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Program in Cognitive Science, Indiana University
This book is an essential read for those interested in the nature of mind; for those of us already sympathetic to the project, the book enriches the view with historical antecedents from some unlikely places and offers a progressive scientific program for how to explore the new view of mind empirically.
Journal of Philosophy of Science
If everything else is governed by dynamics, why not mind? Or is the science of mind outside the natural sciences? In recent times, notions of self-organizing, dynamical systems have begun to permeate the social, behavioral, cognitive and brain sciences. With a few notable exceptions, however, dynamical concepts (which embrace nonlinearity, emergence, interactions and context) remain to be explored. This book, full of scientific wisdom, wit, and understanding, is a pleasure to read. Ward brings the full armamentarium of concepts, methods, and modeling tools of dynamical systems—old and new—to bear on a wide variety of psychological phenomena. By filling dynamics with content from specific fields of cognitive research, he points the way to a far richer cognitive science in which conceptual content, dynamical modeling, and experiments mutually complement each other. This is a ground-breaking book that bridges the cognitive and the natural sciences. And it's two-way traffic. I suspect, were they around after 300 years, that David Hume and Isaac Newton might just smile.
J. A. Scott Kelso, Glenwood and Martha Creech Chair in Science and Director, Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University
