Neutral Monism
Bertrand Russell was apparently a neutral monist. Has anyone read The Analysis of Mind? Does anyone know how someone should go about learning more about neutral monism? The Wikipedia article on this doesn't have too much information.
Comments (54)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/
It has some points in common with neoplatonism and Vedanta, but they are both so much more interesting.
It is being revived, to resolve its problems—as 'information' possibly being the neutral monad.
That it may be boring does not necessarily mean that it is incorrect. Nothing is necessarily boring, anyways. It's all just a matter of how anyone puts anything.
Basically it seems like extremely vague fence-sitting/trying to please/not offend anyone.
I disagree. I see neutral monism as a rejection of the distinction between the physical and the mental. It's a neither/nor position and not a middle ground.
That'd take a radical reconceptualization of the concept of information. I don't know that I would agree, but would be curious to see what they come up with.
I'm not sure, but I read now and again that information is equivalent to energy, which is a new idea, and of course that energy is equivalent to mass (which approximates matter) as an older, more proven idea.
So, you would still kind of have your 'energy' basis that we are discussing in another thread.
Did you read any of the Stanford article yet?
That's kind of what I figured, though I wouldn't say that energy is equivalent to mass. Matter, perhaps.
I was getting to it, but then I got sidetracked Terrapin Station.
It's possible you're not understanding it.
My reading is that the problem it seeks to resolve is the dichotomy implicit in cartesian dualism, i.e. that the world comprises two fundamentally different categories, mind and matter. It seeks to show that at bottom reality is neither material nor mental, but can manifest as either.
[quote=SEP]Neutral monism is a monistic metaphysics. It holds that ultimate reality is all of one kind. To this extent neutral monism is in agreement with the more familiar versions of monism: idealism and materialism. What distinguishes neutral monism from its monistic rivals is the claim that the intrinsic nature of ultimate reality is neither mental nor physical. This negative claim also captures the idea of neutrality: being intrinsically neither mental nor physical in nature ultimate reality is said to be neutral between the two.[/quote]
I like William James' version best:
[quote=SEP]William James’s (1842–1910) uses the term “radical empiricism” for the view he sets forth in James 1912—the view that has become the paradigm of neutral monism. His critique of the relational account of experience—according to which the self directs an act onto an object—was the model upon which Russell later shaped his analysis of experience. James presents this argument as an attack on a particular conception of consciousness. He finds it in the Neo-Kantian tradition and in the early analytic tradition. And today we can find it in philosophies as diverse as existentialism and philosophical naturalism. Roughly, it is the notion of consciousness as a diaphanous, transparent, elusive medium or container of some sort in which the objects of consciousness appear. The objects that are, in this sense, “in” consciousness simply present themselves to us. But the consciousness that makes this kind of object presentation possible eludes our grasp. This thin notion of consciousness is the one James wants to eliminate:
I believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy. (James 1904b: 2)
His radical proposal is to simply discard this shadowy something and to make do with what remains, with what used to be the object of the conscious act. He introduces the term “pure experience” to stand for this datum. Prior to any further categorization, pure experience is, according to James, neutral—neither mental nor physical:
The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that. (James 1904b: 23)
Mind and matter, knower and known, thought and thing, representation and represented are then interpreted as resulting from different functional groupings of pure experience (see James 1905: 64).[/quote]
However, I am inclined to question this notion of 'pure experience' on the following grounds: that 'experience' is a transitive verb, i.e. it implies or requires an object. 'I experience [X]'. I think a better word for what he's driving at is simply 'being'.
The 'm' in Einstein's E=mcc is for mass; the rest of it is just about the ratio/conversion factor. Mass is close enough to matter to not usually matter so much in certain references, such as that matter is as energy swirling.
Definitely, hence "I've never been able to make much sense out of what it's supposed to be positing, exactly."
Re the stuff you're quoting, I'm fine with it for what it is more or less, but it's not at all clear to me just what it's positing in place of physical and/or mental.
Of course, remember that I can't make any sense out of positing nonphysical existents in general.
Mass is like the whatever being manifest into a measurable something. Energy, I feel like differs too much from what we understand as mass to be considered to be equivalent to it. Einstein's theory is relevant to Physics, but not necessarily my speculative Metaphysics.
'Energy' is currently an unfathomable force. We don't yet know enough about particles to adequately understand energy. All that I can describe energy as is a force of some kind. I have realized by doing this that I don't at all know what energy is.
And nothing anywhere in physics, as left out, kind of like defaulting to 'Never Mind; All Matters'.
Idealism: 'Ever Mind; No Matter'.
Dualism: 'Some Mind; Some Matter'.
The new natural monism to be: 'Information/Energy as neither Mind nor Matter but gives rise to Both." (Perhaps this description can be improved on.)
I rather like the idea of surrounding consciousness to show that it comes from the brain (stopped by faints, blows to the head, anesthesia) and thus is a brain process, which tells us that the brain makes it, the brain having evolved consciousness as a way of perceiving its own results to best symbolically via qualia to both remember it for far off future reference and also for an immediate reference/broadcast for more areas of the brain to get notified and continue on with it, this startling (to us) unique internal language being what works for higher and higher brain modules more and more utilizing symbols. I suppose this is materialism.
"Being" is a term that I would use, but I have no qualms with "experience".
That everything can be reduced to physicality does not necessarily mean that it always should be. Consciousness occurs through the complex organization of physical existents, but there is no reason to prefer physicality when attempting to understand consciousness.
Edit: It is somewhat difficult to precisely describe what I mean by this because I don't think that there is a causal relationship between physicality and consciousness. That consciousness occurs is the preliminary aspect of experience. Physicality delimits the 'Metaphysical' conditions of experience. Consciousness is physical, but it is not useful to reduce it to physicality. There is no reason to draw a distinction between physical and mental states as they occur simultaneously and are resultant of a complex modality. Neither of them accurately describe the totality of experience. My assumption is that such a line of thought is some form of syncretic neutral monism.
It can be left as a tangent for another day.
Quoting thewonder
We suspect that particles are field quanta, which gets rids of them if we are whittling away the non basic 'things'. Such did the likes of Newton's absolute Space and Time already sliver off. This leaves but Rovelli's covariant quantum fields (a field for everything quantized, including gravity, eventually, maybe) all atop one another, as the basis, but what is a field. Naming an ultimate 'what' as energy or fields doesn't tell us what it's made of, or it is made of itself, which still doesn't say.
Some think that fields are made of waves, for the reason that waves are ubiquitous in nature, this is seemingly a very good guess for what was once a needle in a haystack search. Yet, is there a needle that writes the wave? And what the record player? Or is it more like a CD or a DVD, wherein the information is the basis?
I would suggest that there is no needle. There are just waves, although, I don't think waves adequately describe what I mean by "'energy'". 'Energy' can be understood as a field in time, but I reject that anything other than the present exists. It all collapses upon the wave function in every given moment. There is only the moment, though.
I do like a monad. And this moment is brought to us by our sponsor, the monad of Energy/Information, if there is such a neutral one, making for both the physical and the mental, if need be.
At the least, we as humans seem to surely only have the 'now'. That the 'now' smoothly rolls along is also true, to us.
The music plays past but it's not yet past—
It's still in recent memory, recalled.
Currently, sensations continue on—
Those which can be presently known.
Mind anticipates the coming tones,
The transitional ‘nowness’ blending it
With those sounds not totally gone.
In this brief past-present-future resides
The delight that none could produce alone:
The smoothly rolling ‘now’.
Or, more briefly, in a single quatrain nugget:
Memory’s ideas recall the last heard tone;
Sensation savors what is presently known;
Imagination anticipates coming sounds;
The delight is such that none could produce alone.
Is "neutral" even the correct term? I don't know how you would say either/neither/or/nor.
Nice poem, by the way.
Yeah, and as they say in the Stanford article, there are about five further qualifications to do with what you said. Most times, I can hardly but keep up with such things only as it comes along. Everything seems to always spring a leak, no matter what the proposal.
I concur. I always see too much in different sides of various debates and generally disagree with the terms.
The use of it is just if we want to know what consciousness "really is" ontologically, and also as a guard against wonky stuff people say when they suppose that very different things are the case ontologically.
How is asserting that everything is either "physical" or "mental" not just hand-waving themselves? What does it mean to say that something is "physical" or "mental"? What are the differences between "physical" and "mental" things, and then how do they interact?
It seems simpler to me (boring to some, but then the truth was never guaranteed to be interesting or consoling), to just say that it's all one substance. At that point, does it really matter what we label it?
First, remember that I don't think that the idea of nonphysical things is coherent.
Saying that everything is physical is saying that everything has properties like location and extension, that things are comprised of particles which are in dynamic relations with each other, etc. etc.
If instead of generating Consciousness, the Brain (Neural Activity) is able to Connect with some sort of Conscious Space where Consciousness resides then the problem of Faints, Blows, and Anesthesia, can be viewed as a loss of Connection to Consciousness and not a loss of actual Consciousness.
What would be the particles of the mind? What would it mean to say that the mind is extended?
Haven't you and I discussed this many times? Mind is identical to a subset of brain functions. So the "particles of mind" are the same as the particles of brains.
What is consciousness as it relates to Being? I'd have to write you a book or something. To give a circular definition, consciousness is the experience that we have of being sentient. I don't think that I could give you a proper ontological definition of consciousness. Sartre attempted to do so in Being and Nothingness. I plan on reading that in the near future, and, so, maybe I'll have a better answer then.
Yes, the 'nonphysical' isn't coherent because 'it' would communicate with the physical in physical terms, using energy and material whatnot, making it not to be a distinct realm. It's OK for now that the brain's internal symbols can't be gotten at because they are first person private.
You'd probably have to write me a book to explain what "as it relates to Being" adds to the question. :-)
There are too many books to be written!
They're all there, complete, in the Library of Bable:
You seem to have a lot of spare time on your hands. Do you write all of these stream of conscious?
I've been retired since 2000; first I write them (they don't just stream in but for sometimes. imagining I'm in the action), then I do most of the art for them (except for what I get free or pay a little for). Borges, the librarian named in the story, had the original idea.
I like Borges. Have you ever played the game Myst? This isn't terribly like Myst at all, but I had just thought of that for some reason.
Played it over 25 years ago; it has a book in it at the start.
I watched a playthrough of that game because I had developed a really strange theory about it. It somehow revolved around the music piece that you play in the middle of the game. I can't really remember what it was as it was something that I had developed during sort of an episode. That game is pretty out there, though.
Feelings aren't made of particles. The mind is made of qualia, which are the most fundamental parts of mind. Particles don't even exist. What we refer to as "particles" are actually relationships between other particles, all the way down. We never get at particles. We can only get at relationships. The idea of "particles" is incoherent.
It's particles in dynamic relations (as are qualia and everything else).
Quoting Harry Hindu
Oy vey.
The current understanding is that particles are perturbations of the quantum field. In that understanding they are not "objects", like microscopic billiard balls, but intensities that interact in lawlike ways.
Which might be true (that it's a currently popular view), but it's incoherent, and stems from what's essentially platonist-oriented math worship.
No, its just dynamic relations. Every "particle" you point at is a relationship.
The current understanding is that all particles are made up relationships between smaller particles. The particle that is your body is made up of a relationship between organs. Your organs are the relationship between molecules. Your molecules are the relationship between atoms and your atoms are the relationship between protons and electrons and a neutrons, Etc.
It has to be dynamic relationships of something. It can't be dynamic relationships of nothing.
You said "Just dynamic relations." But it can't be relations(hips) of relations(hips) because there needs to be something to have any relation(ship) in the first place.
For example, take "x is to the left of y from reference point a." "Is to the left of" is a relation(ship), but we can't have that without having two somethings to be situated in the specified way with respect to each other.
Adding relationships doesn't help. "To the left of to the right of" or "To the left of the parent of" or whatever relationships don't make any sense sans things to be related however they are.
And those two somethings are other relationships. How is that any different than saying that there are two particles that make up another particle? There are two somethings. You call those two somethings, "particles". I call them relationships. Both particles and relationships are made up of other particles or relationships. The only difference is that you never get at any particles if particles are actually relationships between other particles that are themselves relationships.
You don't have any particles without relationships. You might say that I don't have relationships without particles. I disagree. I can have relationships with other relationships. You, however, can't do without relationships to define particles. I just need other relationships to define other relationships.
Again, relationships are such as "to the left of," "is the parent of," "is similar to" etc.
So give an example of a relationship that is just to another relationship.
Your car, which a relationship between a combustion engine, wheels, tires, drive train, etc. is to the left (another a relationship) of your body, which I already said is a relationship between your various organs.
Now your turn, explain what a particular particle is without using relationships.
But you're specifying things that aren't relationships--combustion engines, etc. You could describe them in terms of relationships, but it can't be just relationships. It has to be a relationship of something to something else.
Particles are things like quarks--matter with no substructure/not composed of other particles.
In any case particles are not understood to be determinately discrete bounded objects, but different kinds of energetic perturbations of the quantum field.