Kai
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Kai, I haven't really looked into neutral monism before. I've had a brief glance at the first link you posted and it doesn't strike me as something that one could grasp as readily as material or idealistic monism, so I can't say too much about that at the moment. I'm also wondering if Ian T's ideas fall into this category.
The Wikipedia entry starts with this:
Neutral monism is the metaphysical view that the mental and the physical are two ways of organizing or describing the same elements, which are themselves "neutral", that is, neither physical nor mental. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things. Rather, neutral monism claims the universe consists of only one kind of stuff, in the form of neutral elements that are in themselves neither mental nor physical; these neutral elements might have the properties of color and shape, just as we experience those properties, but these shaped and colored elements do not exist in a mind (considered as a substantial entity, whether dualistically or physicalistically); they exist on their own.
Initially, I'm noticing that there is a multiplicity of elements, and that it's not monistic in the same sense as I tend to apprehend it in Idealism: vaguely, there seems to be a "thingness" about it, albeit that those things are at bottom composed of one kind of substance and have various kinds of interrelationships.
I notice that Bertrand Russell is a historical figure associated with it, and he self-described as an agnostic in philosophical discourse and an atheist in popular discourse (according to Wiki again); he was also a humanist who thought that religion could cause at least as much harm as good. Not that I entirely disagree with Russell on that front, but I'm trying to see what actual issue NM might have been formulated to resolve. Near as I can tell so far, it has something to do with the mind-body problem. I'm getting the sense that it's primarily an abstract philosophical and intellectual scheme for people with a certain detached cast of mind: I don't mean that derogatorily, only descriptively. One reason I find idealism attractive, I suppose, is that it gives primacy to subjectivity, which is the only thing anyone can be sure of. It's therefore involving in a particularly intimate way. I don't know, but do you find NM involving in a similar way? And what issues does NM address for you that idealism doesn't?
Maybe I should go off and read the entire Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy article, which seems quite long and detailed, but I'm trying for now to get the Dummies Guide version: a few enlightening paragraphs that give the gist of the thing.
Hello Michael. As with Idealism, neutral monism comes in various shades. It is possible to posit an “atomistic” version of it and it is possible to posit a “field based” version of it, just as it is with materialism. In an atomistic or purely accretive version, there would be “atoms” of experientiality, just as materialism supposes essential building blocks of materiality. It is not a version I favor, though I do think that organisms and their minds are accretive.
Neutral monism suffers from la language problem, because most people come to it third after discovering Materialism and Idealism. This leads to the use of the word “neutral,” which is however misleading. We usually say a color is neutral if it has no color relative to some other striking colors. We usually say of a vehicle's gears that the gears are in neutral if they are in fact not in any gear, etc. This language bluffs us into believing that a similar situation must apply to NM. But this would be a mistake. Neither is the “neutral stuff” of neutral monism in any sense a combination or mixture of mind and matter. Again, we are compelled to talk about things in this way because of the structure of our language. I prefer the term “omnijective” (not mine), but even this has its problems, as it supposes that different things are being summed together when in fact this is not so. Rather, mind and matter are incompletely experienced versions of the omnijective.
To create a simplified cheat sheet for ontology, probably the simplest version would be as follows. There are of course numerous other positions possible in the detail, but the main divisions are as follows.
PHYSICALISM (materialism & variants): This is essentially the idea that absolute non-experience can exist, usually in a “substance” referred to as matter. Since experience and non-experience do not commute, the problem for physicalism is to show how experience can exist at all in (or from) a substrate of non-experience. In this there are two common “solutions.” The first is to say that “mind simply is the brain.” However, this cannot really be done without altering the nature of “non-experience” such that it contains at least the seeds of experience within it. In other words, the solution acquires the case of neutral monism despite the protests of its adherents. The second common solution is EMERGENTISM, where it is claimed that experience somehow “arises” in whole cloth out of special systems or configurations of non-experience-stuff. Taken as a metaphysical assertion, this has the same problems as dualism…namely, that at least two large scale ontological assumptions must be made, instead of one. Indeed, it really is a special case of dualism when you scratch its surface in most, and perhaps all, cases.
IDEALISM. Again, this can be framed in various forms. Ultimately it is the idea that pure non-experience cannot exist and that the world we call “physical” can ultimately be absorbed into the category we name experiential or mental. It is not enough to say that it is simply the absence of non-experience, because the experiential may in fact have defining quality that is larger than our subjective experience of the mental, and hence that would be neutral monism. The basic problem for Idealism is to show that non-corporeal mind is in fact anything other than a notion. To do this, it would really have to show that all cases of apparently extra-mental causality are really Idealistic in causation. For instance, someone wakes up in the morning paralysed, having suffered a stroke during the night. Idealism is superior to PHYSICALISM and DUALISM in that it bears only one primary, large scale ontological assumption. However, it does claim something that does not commute with our experience (that what we call the “physical” is ultimately unreal without real causality), and the burden of proof for that claim is with those who make it.
DUALISM is the claim that two essential substances or systems exist, the experiential and the non-experiental broadly taken. The problems here are multiplicity of assumption (as with emergentism), the inability to provide proof in a physically experienced common world of alleged nonphysical worlds, and the problem of explaining how two truly different natures (which are not secretly outgrowths of each other >> conditional monism) could interact with each other.
NEUTRAL MONISM. This is a view that there is one world made of one “substance” or “principle” that is "neutral" in character (language problem). Like Idealism, NM understands that there is no such thing as the purely non-experiential. Nor is such a thing possible. Unlike Idealism, NM understands the *experiential* quality of “physicality” to be ontologically real. The bodiness of your body, for example, is behavior of the real “neutral stuff” being itself, as it actually is. A "nonphysical world" is therefore not possible. Physicality is not an “illusion” or a “bluff” somehow constructed by a separate object called “mind.” “Mind” (or better still “experientiality”) and “physicality,” though it seems to us as if we are talking about two different things, are in fact incompletely glimpsed behaviors of the same neutral existents.
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