The Continuum and the Cut

The question of how a cognitive system can describe a world to which it irreducibly belongs is not new. Long before neuroscience addressed this question in relation to consciousness, embodiment, and self-reference, the Western literary tradition of the Machine of the World staged it through the conceptual transition from “World”, a closed totality represented from an external standpoint, to “Universe”, a self-referential totality that must include the act of naming and representing it. This passage articulates an epistemological trap that a neurohumanist perspective drawing on neuroscience, complexity theory, and the humanities, is uniquely positioned to confront.

Much of what modern thought treated as fixed ontological division, including mind and matter, nature and culture, normal and pathological, may bear the trace of how human cognition cuts and stabilizes a continuous world. Under adaptive pressure, the brain evolved discrete, action-oriented heuristics, which language reinforces through oppositions and stable categories. Indispensable to intelligibility, these heuristics carry ethical and political consequences when provisional cuts harden into classificatory absolutes. They regulate credibility, recognition, and admissibility.

This is where the problem becomes one of epistemic justice. Reading these registers together widens the field of who is heard as a knower, treats figurative thought as cognitively serious, and resists the conversion of classification into ontology. The presentation proposes this zone of translation between comparative literature and neuroscience as a working program: literary forms are read as models of self-reference, while cognitive neuroscience clarifies the mechanisms, limits, and evidentiary constraints of such models.