Neutral Monism

Dualism affirms thay there are two kinds of “stuff” (mind and matter) while Idealism and Physicalism affirm that there is only mind or only matter respectively.

Instead of those, Neutral Monism affirms that there There is one kind of underlying “stuff”, but that when organised one way it appears as physical but, when organised another way, it appears as mental.

Another way of putting it is that there is a single underlying “data layer” which from one perspective shows up as subjective experience and, from another, it shows up as objective physical processes.

Unlike Dualism, we have, not two things interacting, but just one thing described in two ways.

In this model, Physics can tell us in exquisite detail about the behaviour of material but is silent on the its underlying nature. Physics can tell us what an electron does in the presence of electromagnetic fields or gravity but not what an electron actually is.

This has links with Kant’s framework in which Physics gives us descriptions and models of the world as we experience it, the phenomenal world, but the world at it is, the things in themselves, the noumenal world, is unknowable.

However, whereas Kant says that the noumenal world is strictly unknowable, neutral monists say that we have at least some clues as to what the intrinsic nature of reality is because of our own experience of consciousness. We are not completely cut off from the “inside” of reality

Some workers (following Bertrand Russell) suggest that the “intrinsic nature” of physical entities might be related to experience. i.e., what physics describes externally could have an inner aspect. But that remains speculation.

Panprotopsychism

This is very similar to Panprotopsychism as described by Chalmers which is represented as:

• Physics (arguably) gives only structure and relations
• There must be some intrinsic nature underlying that structure
• Consciousness is the one case where we do seem to know intrinsic nature (from the inside)

So maybe:

The intrinsic nature of reality is proto-mental in some sense.

Property Dualism

Another framework in the same family is Property Dualism. One kind of substance (usually physical) but which have two fundamentally different kinds of properties: Physical properties and irreducibly mental properties. So we still have a sharp divide within the same thing.

Is this better than Dualism?

On the positive side, it avoids the interaction problem of how two substances, in the case of substance dualism, or the different kinds of properties of a single substance, in the case of property dualism, interact with other.

However we still need to know how “mental aspects” relate to “physical aspects” which looks like an interaction problem in different language. The explanatory gap hasn’t disappeared—it’s just been moved and renamed.

In addition, we still have the problem of how these proto-properties become actual experience or why certain structures, such as brains, yield consciousness while others do not.