Relation to the world· Mind and consciousness
Dual-aspect monism
Axis: The enigma of consciousness — Is lived experience something more than the structure and functioning of the brain?
Lived experience is not one more ingredient in the world, but the inside of what physics describes from without: a single reality, two ways of reaching it, from within through experience, from without through measurement. The argument turns on this: physics never says what matter is, only what it does; it leaves a blank, and our own brain is the only piece of matter we know from the inside. How far down that inside goes is then the question. takes it all the way to the simplest constituents, of which our consciousness would be the most elaborate composition; others lodge there only a precursor of experience, or refuse to fix any threshold. What separates this pole from property dualism is that it adds nothing to the physical world, it reinterprets its fabric; and from physicalism, that it refuses to reduce that fabric to structure and function.
Philosophers 4
Strawsonexplicit
Strawson starts from a certainty he judges firmer than any theory: experience exists, it is what we are most sure of. He then refuses brute emergence: that matter utterly devoid of inwardness should produce lived experience by sheer complexification strikes him as not mysterious, but unintelligible. If one also holds that everything is physical, only one way out remains: the physical already contains, at its fundamental level, something experiential. He therefore presents his as a real physicalism, not as adding mind to otherwise inert matter.
"Realistic Monism — Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism" (2006)
Russellexplicit
Russell refuses both inherited camps: neither matter nor mind is fundamental, both are built out of one and the same neutral stuff, made of events that can be grouped by the laws of physics or by those of psychology. To this he adds a remark that has since prospered: physics gives us only the structure of things, never their intrinsic nature, and the one portion of the world we know otherwise than by its structure is our own experience, which is precisely what goes on in a brain. The family of positions that lodge experience in that vacant place has since been called , at the cost of a slippage: Russell, who adopted neutral monism in 1921 after long opposing it, holds the stuff to be neutral, that is, neither mental nor physical, where several of his heirs people it with the experiential properties he refused.
The Analysis of Mind (1921) · The Analysis of Matter (1927)
Spinozaexplicit
Mind and body are not two things in relation, but one and the same thing expressed under two attributes, the order of ideas following exactly that of things. The human mind is the idea of the body, neither produced by it nor able to act upon it, which dissolves the Cartesian question of their interaction instead of answering it. Spinoza adds that all individuals are animate in varying degrees, thought being no privilege of brains: this is the historical matrix of dual-aspect monism, and the acknowledged ancestor of contemporary .
Ethics, II, props. 7 and 13 (scholium) · Ethics, III, prop. 2
Show inferred positions (1)
Schopenhauerinferable
A double thesis: the intellect is a function of the brain, a secondary, late, and fatigable phenomenon, which has overtones; but the ground of all things, from the mineral to man, is . Less a in the strict sense than a doctrine of the universal objectification of the Will: it is not mind that is everywhere, but blind willing.
On the Will in Nature
Argument
- Physics describes matter solely by its structure, that is, by relations and effects: a mass is what resists acceleration, a charge what attracts and repels. Each term refers to another, never to what the thing is in itself.
- But relations do not stand on their own: something must sustain them, an intrinsic nature that physics leaves blank, not through oversight but by method, since what it measures is behaviour.
- Yet there is one thing in the world we do not know through its relations: our own experience, given to us directly, and which happens to be what a piece of matter, our brain, does. It is the only place where we hold a datum that is not relational.
- To make experience arise instead from a matter containing no trace of it would require an without precedent: elsewhere what emerges follows from the properties of the parts, whereas here an inside would have to be drawn from a pure outside.
Therefore So the intrinsic nature of matter is, at least in part, experiential: consciousness does not appear in the universe, it is composed within it, and ours is its most elaborate form.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position
- The argument claims to be more economical than emergence: rather than having experience born from what has none, it assumes it already there, in miniature, in the elements we are made of.
- But an experience is not an ingredient that adds up: it is always someone's experience, a subject's, a point of view on something. A hundred juxtaposed points of view make a hundred points of view, not one larger point of view.
- One would then have to explain how micro-subjects merge into a single subject that finds in itself no trace of theirs: my consciousness does not present itself as a crowd whose voices I hear.
- That passage from many to one is as unexplained as the passage from the non-experienced to the experienced one wanted to avoid. The argument charges its rivals with a miracle, and installs another in its place.
Therefore So lacks the advantage it claims: it replaces an unexplained emergence with an equally unexplained composition, at the price of an inwardness lent to all matter.
See the page- Descriptive Thought experimentWhat it is like
There is something it is like to be me, and nothing of the sort, presumably, for a stone. But is that "something" one more reality in the world, which physical description lets slip, or only a limit of ours, unable as we are to occupy another's point of view?
a being's point of view - DescriptiveWhere does consciousness begin?
Does a dog suffer as I do? And a fish, an oyster, an embryo, a plant, a thermostat? Between what undergoes something and what undergoes nothing, is there a sharp threshold, a continuous slope, or is the question ill-posed? Whoever refuses to extend experience to all matter owes a criterion, and quantifying it is one way of paying that debt.
the distribution of consciousness in nature - DescriptiveWhat physics leaves blank
Physics describes matter by what it does: a mass resists, a charge attracts. Each term refers to another and never to what the thing is in itself. Does that blank await an answer, or is the question of the world's fabric a false need?
the fabric of the material world - DescriptiveConsciousnesses that add up?
If a spark of experience already inhabits matter, how do billions of micro-experiences make a single subject, my one consciousness, rather than a crowd?
the passage from many to one - DescriptiveWhat holds experience together
At every moment I see, hear and think at once, yet all of it comes to me as a single experience. What holds it together? When the bridge between the two hemispheres is severed, one and the same brain seems to host two streams of experience that ignore each other.
the unity of the field of consciousness