What physics leaves blank
On the axis: The enigma of consciousness · the fabric of the material world
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?
Justification
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)
Justification
The thesis is posed as a limit rather than a tribute: what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know — which does not mean that science answers everything, but that no other route yields knowledge. Russell immediately sets aside a whole domain: questions of value, which are neither true nor false and on which science has nothing to say, and this marks him off from a complete scientism. Religion is ruled out not because it consoles badly, but because it lays claim to knowledge without the means to it.
Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.Religion and Science (1935)
Religion and Science (1935), ch. IX "Science and Ethics" · The Impact of Science on Society (1952)
Justification
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)
Anchors: Russell · Eddington · Strawson
leads to: Place of science · Nature of reality