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WillowOne's Positions

Neutral Monism

My Positions

  1. I reject neutral monism: the view that reality is made of a single kind of stuff which is in itself neither mental nor physical, with mind and matter as two ways it is arranged or two ways it appears.
  2. I agree with its monism and with half of its premise. There is one kind of stuff, and physics describes that stuff by its structure and behaviour rather than by saying what it is "in itself". Where I part company is the next step: the inference that there must therefore be an intrinsic nature behind the structure, that it is hidden from physics, and that it is where consciousness lives. The structure may be all there is to know, and nothing has shown otherwise.
  3. The modern form, Russellian monism, is the most sophisticated of the alternatives to physicalism and the one I would hold if I had to hold one. I do not have to.
  4. The "neutral" stuff has, by construction, no properties that could be tested, since every testable property is either physical or mental and it is supposed to be neither. A posit with no testable properties is set aside under Popper's Razor.

Notes

  1. The lineage. Benedict de Spinoza's single substance, with thought and extension as two of its attributes, is the ancestor. Ernst Mach held that the world is made of "elements" (colours, pressures, sounds) which are physical when considered in one set of relations and psychological in another. William James proposed in 1904 that there is only "pure experience", and that the distinction between knower and known is a distinction of function, not of substance. Bertrand Russell gave the view its most careful form in The Analysis of Matter (1927): physics tells us only the structure and causal relations of matter, not its intrinsic character; the one case in which we do know the intrinsic character of a physical event is our own brain, from the inside; so, for all physics can tell us, the intrinsic nature of matter may be, or be continuous with, what we meet as experience. Modern Russellian monists (Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, and David Chalmers in a sympathetic mood) take this up. The version on which the intrinsic nature is itself experiential is panpsychism; the version on which it is something proto-experiential that becomes experience when organised is panprotopsychism; the version on which it is neither is neutral monism proper.
  2. The part I accept. Russell's structuralism about physics is, I think, right. A physical theory is a set of equations relating quantities; it says how charge behaves and not what charge is apart from how it behaves. Physics is a map of relations, and asking what the nodes are "in themselves" gets no answer from the map (The Map is not the territory). This is a point about knowledge, and as epistemology it is unobjectionable.
  3. The part I do not. From "physics describes only structure" the Russellian infers "there is something non-structural that physics leaves out". That does not follow. It is at least as reasonable to hold that there is nothing to a thing but its relations, that to be an electron is to behave as electrons behave, and that the demand for an intrinsic nature over and above that is a hangover from the picture of matter as little coloured balls. The structuralist reading has the advantage of positing nothing that cannot be checked. The intrinsic-nature reading has the shape of every other alternative in this folder: an unobservable, introduced to house a puzzle, immune to evidence by construction.
  4. Neutral is a hard place to stand. The stuff is supposed to be neither mental nor physical. Pressed on what it is like, the neutral monist either gives it mental characteristics (it is experiential or proto-experiential, and the view collapses into panpsychism with its combination problem), or physical ones (it has structure, location and causal role, and the view is physicalism with an extra word), or no characteristics at all, in which case "neutral stuff" is a name for the fact that we do not know, which I was willing to say without the metaphysics. James's "pure experience" tips mental; Mach's elements, which are sensations, tip mental; Russell wavered. I have not seen a version that stays neutral for the length of a chapter.
  5. It does not solve the problem it is for. The selling point is that it closes the gap between matter and mind by making both appearances of a third thing. But the gap reappears as the question of how the neutral stuff gives rise to two such different appearances, and why its mental appearance is confined to brains while its physical appearance is everywhere. Either the stuff is doing something in brains that it is not doing in rocks, in which case the organisation of the brain is what matters and I am a functionalist again, or it is not, and rocks have a mental aspect, and I am arguing with a panpsychist. The neutral monist has moved the explanatory work one level down and left it there.
  6. Why it attracts physicalists. Strawson calls his position "real materialism" and insists that it is the only honest physicalism, on the grounds that experience is certainly real, so it must be physical, so the physical must include the experiential. I accept the first two steps and read the third differently. "The physical includes the experiential" is true in the sense that some physical systems, organised one way, have experiences, just as some, organised another way, have temperature or digest food. It does not need the stronger reading on which the experiential is an intrinsic ingredient waiting in every particle. The difference between us is the difference between a property of arrangements and a property of ingredients, and every other high-level property we know of belongs to arrangements (Emergence).
  7. Where I hold it loosely. I do not know whether "what is matter in itself, apart from its structure?" is a real question with an unknown answer or a confusion that will dissolve. If it is a real question, Russell's suggestion that the answer might be continuous with experience is not absurd, merely unsupported, and I would rank it above dualism and idealism. That is faint praise, and it is meant to be.

Sources

  • Russell, B., The Analysis of Matter (1927), chapters 37–38
  • James, W., "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?", Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 1 (1904)
  • Mach, E., The Analysis of Sensations (1886; English translation 1897)
  • Spinoza, B., Ethics (1677), Part II, Proposition 7, Scholium
  • Strawson, G., "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism", Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (2006)
  • Alter, T. and Nagasawa, Y. (eds), Consciousness in the Physical World: Perspectives on Russellian Monism (2015)
  • Stubenberg, L., "Neutral Monism", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/

Also see