A Mind Seeks Itself, Part 2: Mental Monism and Neutral Monism

Mental Monism
The monistic unity of reality which is sought through the assertion of mental monism is just this: the universe and its contents are merely a function of a mind. The mind creates physical reality just by observing it. The resulting conundrum was addressed by Einstein’s incredulous observation: Do you mean that the moon does not exist except when we look at it?

Apparently Einstein was unaware of the famous limerick that made the rounds concerning Berkeley’s assertion of Mental Monism:

There once was a man who said, “God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.”

An answering limerick went thus:

Dear Sir, Your astonishment’s odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by Yours Faithfully, God.

Indeed, mental monism leads directly away from materialism and Atheism. And there are empirical data points that seemingly point that way too, specifically within the metaphysician’s friend, Quantum theory.

There are quantum experiments underway in Europe that purport to be investigating the idea that all physical existence, including our perceived “macro-existence”, is actually caused by a collapse of a probabilistic equation, caused in turn by the interference of a mind.

And Stephen Hawking has even proposed that the universe came into being due to the collapse of a similar equation, if not the same one – again requiring the interference of a mind, although that point was not in Hawking’s hypothesis. [Note 1].

This is all interesting and even somewhat subject to experimental empiricism. But there is another competing theory that is also very interesting: neutral monism.


Neutral Monism

The idea that both the non-material mind and the material universe might be separately derived from a single precursor is called Neutral Monism. I was first exposed to this in Bertrand Russell’s “Fifteen Lectures on the Mind”, where he claimed that the performance of the human mind and the resulting activity of the human body at the mind’s direction are not describable using determinate laws of physics. The mind does not make the same choices today that it made under the same conditions yesterday, unlike the performance of falling masses or colliding balls.

Russell said,

“If as we maintain, mind and matter are neither of them the real stuff of reality, but clearly different groupings of an underlying material, then, clearly, the question whether, in regard to a given phenomenon, we are to seek a physical or a mental cause, is merely one to be decided by trial.”
[…]

“I receive a letter inviting me to dinner: the letter is a physical fact, but my apprehension of its meaning is mental. Here we have an effect of the matter on the mind. In consequence of my apprehension of the meaning of the letter, I go to the right place at the right time; here we have an effect of mind on matter. I shall try to persuade you, in the course of these lectures, that matter is not so material and mind is not so mental as is generally supposed. When we are speaking of matter, it will seem as if we are inclining to idealism; when we are speaking of mind, it will seem as if we were inclining to materialism. Neither is the truth. Our world is to be constructed out of what the American realists call “neutral” entities, which have neither the hardness and indestructibility of matter, nor the reference to objects which is supposed to characterize the mind.

“There is, it is true, one objection which might be felt, not indeed to the action of matter on mind, but to the action of mind on matter. The laws of physics it may be urged, are apparently adequate to explain everything tha happens to matter, even when it is matter in a man’s brain. This, however is only a hypothesis, not an established theory. There is no cogent empirical reason for supposing that the laws determining the motions of living bodies are exactly the same as those that apply to dead matter. Sometimes, of course, they are clearly the same. When a man falls from a precipice or slips on a piece of orange peel, his body behaves as if it were devoid of life. These are the occasions that make Bergson laugh. But when a man’s bodily movements are what we call “voluntary”, they are, at any rate prima facie, very different in their laws from the movements of what is devoid of life. I do not wish to say dogmatically that the difference is irreducible; I think it is highly probable that it is not. I say only that the study of the behavior of living bodies, in the present state of knowledge, is distinct from physics.”
Russell, Fifteen Lectures on the Analysis of the Mind; p 26, 27.

The only two places that I have found that I disagree with Russell’s concept of neutral monism is his use of the word “material” for whatever it is that underlies both matter and mind, and the idea of “underlying” rather than being a superset or all inclusive category (top down, rather than bottom up).

If matter and the mind obtain their characteristics from a single superset able to bestow those characteristics, then that superset contains those characteristics also, possibly including the elusive will, consciousness, and intentionality that we exhibit without actually “having”. This common overarching level of reality would be the real, or actual, reality and it could infuse our perceived reality with the appearances of certain characteristics which cannot be explained within our perceived reality, but which could be explained if we understood the higher reality.

I am not able to discern any incompatibilities or incoherence between neutral monism and either laws of physics as taken from empiricism’s voluntary materialism, or with basic Deism – or Theism for that matter. Does this make empiricism congruent with Deism? Since empiricism is hardly ever totally congruent with either itself or with the actualities of the material universe, the answer necessarily is “no”. But are they contradictory or even mutually exclusive? Also: no.

Given that this concept, neutral monism, has been around for a long time, why is it that materialist monists remain so radically materialist and feverishly anti-accommodationalist, refusing to allow any credibility to anything that is not empirically, experimentally validatable? Could it be that it exposes a crack, not in empiricism, but in Atheism? After all, what is it that we can know, and how is it that we can know it? There is a vast difference between that which is allowed by materialist monism, and that of neutral monism.

“I do assume that science is the only valid way of acquiring knowledge but that's a testable assumption—at least in theory. All one has to do to refute that argument is demonstrate the existence of valid forms of knowledge that cannot possibly be derived from the scientific approach AND ARE COMPATIBLE WITH SCIENCE AS A WAY OF KNOWING. The last part is important. Acquiring knowledge by revelation is another way of knowing and if all of that knowledge was perfectly compatible with science then science and religion would be compatible. If the knowledge acquired by listening to imaginary voices in your head conflicts with the scientific approach then religion and science are not compatible. ”
[Emphasis included in the original].

These comments are from Laurence Moran, Professor of Biochemistry, Univ of Toronto, who is engaged in the great Accommodationism dispute with other Atheists. Accommodationism is the idea that empiricism can be thought to be compatible with certain religious ideas, although not those that are experimentally testable and which fail those tests.

Moran thinks that all other ways of knowing are testable, presumably using empirical experiments which are the only way of knowing. He is convinced that, if such testing were in fact done, all other ways of knowing would be proven faulty under the supervisory scrutiny of empiricism. [Note 2]

Now if knowledge is, itself, purely material in its constitution as it must be in a purely material universe, then we should be able to find chunks of knowledge lying around, awaiting discovery. However, as my 6th grade teacher said, if knowledge came in pills, I’d give you one and send you out to play.

Nor does knowledge come inexorably from purely sensory inputs. For example, I can read a page word for word and not gain any knowledge or even memory of having read it. Knowledge is a product of comprehension and memory, and perhaps other mental manipulations (differentiation, comparison and judgment) that help determine coherence. All these must occur after information is apprehended. But all this is not the real issue.

This internal Atheist Accommodationism schism is merely an indication of the larger issue: Anti-accommodationists believe fervently that materialist monism is an exclusionary limitation on reality, a limitation that is accepted as “gospel” with no attending support data, no verification. Materialist monism, aka Philosophical Materialism, is a closed environment, a sealed room, due not to evidence garnered in its favor, but due to the voluntary exclusion (denial) of everything outside the environment. This closed environment becomes a sacred tenet, believed without evidence, defended vigorously. The sealed room becomes the temple of Philosophical Materialism.

The simple act of extending the “unity of reality” to a mutual entity between mind and matter, as does neutral monism, seems to eliminate much of the basis for contention in this matter. Yet it seems to me that the continued heated defense of material monism might be based on a desire for its exclusionary properties as well as any intellectual basis. Because material monism excludes any possibility of a deity, it elevates the holder of that opinion to an exclusive group, one that deems itself elite in its intellectual capacity which is supposedly increased by sealing the room and denying that there is any outside environment at all, and joining the exclusive group inside the sealed room. Materialist monism does not increase knowledge; it decreases knowledge by excluding all non-empirical sources.

The debate between monisms will not likely go away any time soon, because it is not an empirical subject – it is philosophical, even religious. To hold to any philosophy, including empiricism, with dogmatic tenacity on the one hand, and denial of the existence of demonstrable contradictions on the other hand, is indiscernible from dogmatic religious faith. If it could be resolved empirically, experimentally, it would be, and quickly; but it can’t be and won’t be.



Note 1: "I thought I had left the existence of a Supreme Being completely open in my article. It would be perfectly consistent with all we know to say that there was a Being who was responsible for the laws of physics. However, I think it would be misleading to call such a Being "God", because this term is normally understood to have personal connotations which are not present in the law of physics."
Stephen Hawking

Hawking does not say that physics excludes “God”; he says that proof or disproof of a personal God is not included in the “law of physics”.

Note 2: It is well known that empiricism cannot even verify itself; that inductive science doesn’t produce completely reliable Laws; that deduction from these Laws suffers these accumulated potential errors. It is known that empiricism is based on axioms that cannot be analyzed empirically, but are “known” valid, intuitively. Intuition sometimes is based on the idea that, no, I cannot prove the truth of that axiom, but what would the universe be like if it were false?