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Panpsychism and Mental Monism: Comparison and Evaluation
Peter B. Lloyd
School of Computing, University of Kent, Canterbury, England
peter@peterblloyd.com
Abstract
In the contemporary debate on the Cartesian mind-body problem, the theories of
panpsychism and mental monism are receiving growing attention as candidate
accounts of the conscious mind. Panpsychism asserts that consciousness pervades a
spatially extended physical universe, while mental monism asserts that consciousness
exists in a purely mental domain, and denies the reality of physical substance and
space. In this paper, I compare the two theories and evaluate whether each is true.
They seem fundamentally contradictory, but I propose that they are closer than they
seem. I argue that their apparent difference rests on a category-mistake (in Ryle’s
term), a misplaced reification of the physical. My claim is that physics is topic neutral
(in Foster’s use of the term) and that consequently situating consciousness in a purely
notional physical universe adds nothing to our concept of reality beyond what mental
monism gives us. I argue that: First, when we see physics correctly through the lens
of topic neutrality, the physical part of panpsychism disappears and the theory
reduces to mental monism. Second, that mental monism is true as a general thesis.
That is, reality ultimately consists of nothing but conscious minds. Third, that
panpsychism is false and that a Berkeleyan flavor of mental monism resolves the
Cartesian mind-body problem, which in recent years has received attention in the
form of Chalmers’ Hard Problem. Besides providing a resolution of this
philosophical problem, mental monism also potentially offers a platform on which to
build a naturalistic account of psi phenomena.
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Contents
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 3
2. Comparison: Panpsychism v Mental Monism ......................................................................................... 6
2.1 Topic Neutrality .............................................................................................................................. 6
2.2 Private-Language Argument ........................................................................................................... 7
2.3 Topic Neutrality of Physics ............................................................................................................. 9
2.4 A Normalized Formulation of Panpsychism ................................................................................. 10
2.5 Generalized Panpsychism ............................................................................................................. 13
2.6 Non-individuation of subjects in mental monism ......................................................................... 14
2.7 A Naïve Formulation of Mental Monism ...................................................................................... 16
2.8 A Normalized Formulation of Mental Monism............................................................................. 18
3. Evaluation 1: Mental Monism is True ................................................................................................... 19
3.1 First limb: Consciousness is not Grounded in Physics .................................................................. 21
3.2 Constructs: A Prerequisite for the Second limb ............................................................................ 23
3.3 Second Limb: A Mind-Independent World is not Referenceable ................................................. 26
3.4 Conclusion for Evaluation 1: Mental Monism is True .................................................................. 29
3.5 Corollary 1: Mental Monism Entails the Metamind ...................................................................... 29
3.6 Corollary 2: Personal Minds are Subsets of the Mental Universe ................................................. 30
3.7 Corollary 3: Physical Events Cannot Cause Mental Events ......................................................... 32
3.8 Corollary 4: The Brain is a Virtual Interface................................................................................. 33
4. Evaluation 2: Panpsychism is False ...................................................................................................... 33
4.1 Argument from Relativity I: Consciousness is Not Spatiotemporal ............................................. 34
4.2 Argument from Relativity II: Physical v Mental Simultaneity and Sequence .............................. 36
4.3 Corollary 1: Non-Simultaneity v Non-Unified Metamind ............................................................ 38
4.4 Corollary 2: Hypothesis of Universal Mental Time ...................................................................... 38
4.5 Argument from Excision ............................................................................................................... 41
4.6 Spatially Separable Panpsychism is Untenable ............................................................................. 4 3
5. General Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 44
6. Postrequisite: Hierarchical Language-Games ....................................................................................... 44
7. Discussion: Potential Applications ........................................................................................................ 48
8. References Cited .................................................................................................................................... 49
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1. Introduction
The discoveries of physics over the past three centuries should have inoculated us
against the notion that common sense is a sure-fire guide to understanding reality.
We should have learned this from Galileo’s two cannonballs (light and heavy falling
together), or from Eddington’s two tables (one a solid slab of wood, the other a
vibrant cloud of microphysical particles), or from Einstein’s relativity, or from
quantum mechanics. Common sense tells me that I am a conscious mind resting
inside a lump of matter organized as a brain, and that the wooden chair I am sitting
on, despite being made of similar molecules, cannot conceivably be conscious.
Careful reflection on the inadequacy of this common-sense picture, aided by a survey
of the recent literature of consciousness studies (e.g. Chalmers 1996), should disabuse
us of the naïve notion that reality is anything like this. In fact, whatever the correct
picture turns out to be, we can safely assume it will fly in the face of common sense.
Therefore, we should park our common sense and assess theories of consciousness
on a careful logical examination of their merits. Let us pay no heed to the fact that
panpsychism and mental monism obviously breach naïve common sense.
There has been a resurgence of interest in panpsychism, and even in subjective
idealism (e.g. Blamauer 2011, Bruntrup & Jaskolla 2017, Goldschmidt & Pearce
2017, Chalmers 2017b), despite the entrenched disdain for both in mainstream
science and philosophy. I will examine the relationship between these two theories,
and assess their validity, but I will not examine physical monism here, as the literature
already contains many critiques of it. In contrast, the comparative critique of
panpsychism and mental monism has received little attention, and is timely in view
of the resurgence of both theories.
Besides endeavoring to resolve the long-standing Cartesian mind-body problem,
mental monism or panpsychism may offer a platform for a naturalistic account of psi
phenomena (e.g. Lloyd 1999b, Kastrup 2014). There is, however, much work needed
to get from philosophy to psi, and a consideration of this is reserved for a follow-up
paper. Here, I examine only the philosophical foundations.
The starting point for both schools of thought is that conscious experience is a
bona fide component of the real world, but the next point—where they diverge—is
how they integrate consciousness with the everyday world. Panpsychism takes for
granted a mash-up of physics and naïve realism. It takes physical space and substance
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as real existents within which consciousness can exist. Conscious experience, on this
view, is somehow spatially located, co-extensively with physical stuff. To account
for how conscious experience is packaged into these lumps of matter, the topic
neutrality of physics is wheeled in, like a Trojan horse, to allow conscious experience
to penetrate physical substance. Panpsychism’s story is that physics provides a
detailed account of the extrinsic relations between physical things, but says zilch
about any intrinsic qualities of physical stuff. Conscious awareness, on the other
hand, is replete with intrinsic qualities but is silent on the location of those qualia in
physical space. So, the theory marries the two up: consciousness fills out the physical
stuff with intrinsic qualities, and conversely physics gives conscious experience a
spatial home to sit in. What this account lacks, however, is the full unfolding of the
ramifications of the topic neutrality of physics. The trouble is this: if physics is
nothing but an assemblage of extrinsic relations, then the physical world is a castle
in the air: it melts into nothing. Extrinsic relations need something real to relate, for
otherwise they are purely notional. Thus, physics cannot provide the grounded home
that consciousness is supposed to be looking for. The brain, instead of being a solid
computing machine for the conscious mind to inhabit as if it were software enthroned
in hardware, is itself just vaporware, less concrete than the mind itself. Panpsychism
is playing bait and switch: it holds up the physical world as a home for consciousness,
but then allows consciousness into the physical world only by evacuating that world
of a substantive core. If physics consists in nothing but extrinsic relations between
things whose intrinsic nature is conscious, then—if we may call a spade a spade—
that is a species of mental monism. What we are really saying is that (a) reality is
wholly constituted by conscious minds (that’s the mental monism bit), and that (b)
those conscious minds and their parts are structured in such a way that they can be
described by the extrinsic relations of physics (that’s the window-dressing of
panpsychism).
That, in a hand-waving precis, is the burden of this paper’s first part. In what
follows, I shall unpack these ideas more rigorously. In the second part I shall argue
that, on the one hand, consciousness is not reducible to physics and, on the other
hand, a mind-independent reality is not something we could ever know or make
reference to, and hence the only reality that we can coherently assert the existence of
is a purely mental one. In the third part, I shall argue that a unified stream of
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consciousness cannot be tied in with a spatially distributed physical system, therefore
no form of panpsychism can hold. This leads to the conclusion that a Berkeleyan form
of mental monism, rather than a panpsychist form, is correct.
Idealism has several varieties (e.g. subjective v absolute idealism, micro- v
macro- v cosmo-idealism). Chalmers (2018) offers a broad taxonomy of idealism, but
acknowledges that the neat categories are not watertight (“Berkeley looks like a
macro-idealist, at least before God enters his picture”) and he classifies Advaita
Vedanta as cosmic idealism, even though it asserts that Brahman is non-different
from each person’s Atman, so Chalmers has to call it a macro/cosmic idealism, rather
like the later Berkeleyan leanings. The present paper attempts no such overview, but
addresses certain theories that are of interest, namely Berkeleyan subjective idealism
and Śankaran Advaita Vedanta, which turn out to be conceptually related despite
being historically and culturally remote.
Panpsychists’ ambivalence towards idealism is illustrated by two interviews with
Galen Strawson, a leading proponent of panpsychism. Strawson (2015) said, “This
view [panpsychism] has absolutely nothing to do with Berkeley’s idealism. The
buildings are out there. … The building is not in any sense an idea in someone’s mind
as in Berkeley’s scheme,” but in Strawson (2018) we hear an opposite view – Q: “The
pure panpsychism, the strong form, does that move in the direction of so-called
idealism?” Strawson: “I have trouble with the word ‘idealism’ as I prefer to say it is
a form of ‘mentalism’, but as the word ‘idealism’ is used, broadly speaking, yes it
does.” I submit that the source of this ambivalence is that, despite the contrary
appearance, panpsychism logically entails mental monism. Chalmers also notes the
ambivalence between Strawsonian panpsychism and idealism: “Strawson (2006)
looks like a micro-idealist but has more sympathy with cosmic idealism.”
Finally, a caveat. In discussing these topics, we are no longer in the salubrious
aisles of the market place of ideas: we are in the badlands of philosophy. The
enterprise of physical science despises panpsychism as a throwback to pre-modern
animism, and is unimpressed by Chalmers’ (2015) warning that “there is good reason
to think that any view of consciousness must embrace some counterintuitive
conclusions.” However outré panpsychism may be, though, my observation since
Lloyd (1999a,b) has been that almost everybody despises that dread philosophy that
dare not speak its name: Berkeleyan subjective idealism—notwithstanding a few
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recent positive signs, such as Chalmers’ (2018) small mercy on subjective idealism,
that “there is a non-negligible probability that it is true.”
Terminology. Mental monism is the theory that reality consists of minds only. It
has historically been called ‘idealism’, ‘subjective idealism’, and ‘mentalism’, and I
will use those terms interchangeably when citing other authors. There is sometimes
a debate about whether a microscopic particle’s putative consciousness constitutes a
‘mind’ as it is so simple and cannot plausibly be expected to think. This is a sterile
debate over how we wish to define our terms. For the purposes of this paper, I shall
use ‘mind’ to denote any 2-tuple <C,S> where C is a time-varying system of
phenomenal content and S is a fixed subject. The ‘subject’ is the agent of the acts of
experience and volition; the ‘phenomenal content’ comprises the objects of those
acts. These terms may be employed differently elsewhere, but this is how I will use
them here. A ‘system of phenomenal content’, C, is a 3-tuple <E,V,A> comprising
sets of experiences E, volitions V, and relations between them, A—for example,
shifting attention leftwards from a red patch, and finding a blue patch. Experiences
comprise qualitative content, whose minimal discernible elements are ‘qualia’. This
definition places no limit on scale: a ‘mind’ might be so tight as to contain a single,
unchanging quale (micro-panpsychism), or it might encompass the whole of reality
(cosmo-panpsychism).
2. Comparison: Panpsychism v Mental Monism
I will examine the relationship between panpsychism and mental monism in two
theses: (a) The topic neutrality of physics entails that in panpsychism minds are not
really ‘in’ space. My approach here will be to reduce both panpsychism and mental
monism to ‘normalized’ formulations, which reveal their similarities more clearly.
(b) In mental monism, the non-individuation of subjects entails that the mental
counterpart of each object can be construed as a mind. This, I argue, reveals a
structural conformity between panpsychism and mental monism. I will conclude that
panpsychism is a special case of mental monism.
2.1 Topic Neutrality
Topic neutrality is a key to this approach to the mind-body problem. Chalmers (2013,
§3) attributes the insight of physics’ topic neutrality to Russell (1927), defining it
thus: “physics reveals the relational structure of matter but not its intrinsic nature.”
Ryle (1954) introduced the term ‘topic neutral’ but misapplied it by saying that
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propositions about consciousness are topic neutral, on grounds akin to Wittgenstein’s
claim that consciousness is, in effect, ineffable (1953, §243). Thirty years later, Foster
(1982) got it right, stating that physics must be topic neutral, not propositions about
consciousness.
Since the grounds for Ryle’s ‘inverted’ topic neutrality are essentially those
articulated most clearly by Wittgenstein, we will look at his philosophy.
Wittgenstein (1953, §243) introduced the concept (but not the term) of ‘effective
ineffability’ with his thought-experiment of the beetle in the box, which marked his
notorious private-language argument against the possibility of saying anything
meaningful about conscious experience. Essentially this is the conundrum that since
I can’t know what you actually see when you look at something red (maybe red looks
blue to you), so Wittgenstein says that “red” and “blue” cannot refer to anything; and
more generally that all the terms that seem to denote conscious experience can’t
actually refer to anything at all.
It is crucial to get topic neutrality the right way round, and to do that we must first
defeat Wittgenstein’s private-language argument, before analysing mental monism
and panpsychism.
2.2 Private-Language Argument
Outside the philosophical community, Wittgenstein’s conclusion against private
languages seems egregiously counter-intuitive, but among philosophers it still
commands much support. He illustrated it with his beetle-in-the-box thought-
experiment, which is easy to grasp, but so opaque that its shadow still darkens the
study of consciousness today.
Its experimental set-up gives each person a small box with an indeterminate
object, the ‘beetle’, inside it. Wittgenstein rigs his thought-experiment to lead us by
the nose to nod enthusiastically that the beetle cannot be referred to in any language
because it is knowable only by its owner, and effectively ineffable. His constraint is
(CB): “No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a
beetle is only by looking at his beetle” (§293). Under this constraint, Wittgenstein
argues we cannot agree on any terms referring to parts or properties of a beetle
because that would require shared observations in which to ground consensual
definitions, but constraint CB prevents shared observations. Without agreed terms, we
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can communicate nothing about a beetle-in-the-box. Likewise, CM says that nobody
can see inside your mind, hence we can communicate nothing about a mind-in-the-
brain.
This argument is both stronger and weaker than Wittgenstein requires, for it
undermines not just private language but all language. For example, if a beetle crawls
across the pavement, I can shout, “That beetle is green!” and thereby communicate
about the beetle. The logic of Wittgenstein’s argument, however, casts doubt on
whether people see the same beetle (maybe a Cartesian demon feeds false images
into each person’s mind), and whether other people hear my words (the demon makes
them hear something else), and hence implies that public language is impossible just
as private language is. This nihilistic conclusion—that we should stop pretending to
communicate—reveals that Wittgenstein’s private-language argument is stronger
than he wants.
As long as there are no Cartesian demons at play, linguistic communication can
work, and this is enough to defeat Wittgenstein’s argument that such communication
can never function. Furthermore, the actual existence of a Cartesian demon is such a
wildly implausible hypothesis as to be dismissed as a practical possibility. Indeed the
vast weight of circumstantial evidence indicates that public and private
communication both work and that our universe is at least largely free of Cartesian
demons. In addition, the uniformity of human sense organs suggests a uniformity of
perception. Hence, when I say “I see red,” I almost certainly know what I mean, and
you probably do too. At most, Wittgenstein could argue that we risk mistakes in
private languages; but we also risk mistakes in public languages. In other words:
communication is fallible. Thus, Wittgenstein’s private-language argument proves to
be weaker than he wants.
Therefore, statements about experiences (such as, “I see red”) are not an anemic
formal system, as Wittgenstein implied, but a full-blooded, albeit fallible, means of
communication. This knocks out Ryle’s topsy-turvy idea of topic-neutrality. Having
thus established the meaningfulness of stating that we have unmediated acquaintance
with the phenomenal content of our conscious minds, whereas we never have such
acquaintance with physical things, now we may address the correctness of that
statement. Thus, we return—from our Wittgensteinian detour— to the question of
whether physics is topic neutral.
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2.3 Topic Neutrality of Physics
As I mentioned above, the notion of topic neutrality stems from the ideas of intrinsic
and extrinsic properties. By the ‘extrinsic properties’ of a physical thing we mean
those that it possesses by virtue of its relations to other physical things. An obvious
example is velocity: a body can travel at x ms-1 only in relation to some other body.
Every other physical property—mass, energy, charge, field strength, and so on—is
extrinsic in the same sense. A gravitational field is defined entirely by its effect on
massive bodies: there is nothing else to the field over and above its extrinsic relation
to other physical things. If you were to imagine a purely intrinsic physical property,
call it ‘hylasity’, then it would ipso facto not interact with other physical things, since
a disposition to act upon other physical things would, by definition, be an extrinsic
relation. Pure hylasity would have leave no physical trace and could never be
measured. It would be indistinguishable from a fiction. That is why all the properties
that physics actually does handle are extrinsic relations, as it is only through extrinsic
interactions that observation becomes a possibility, and physics constitutionally has
nothing to say about things it cannot observe.
Physics is built from formulae stating the structure and dynamics of entities that
are defined analytically through the structure and dynamics of smaller entities, and
ultimately in undefined fundamentals (such as mass and charge). Physics formulae
have no terms for the intrinsic quality, the ‘quiddity’, of these entities, nor any
theoretical apparatus for handling qualitative properties, nor any third-person
experimental procedures for measuring them. Therefore, physics is wholly about
extrinsics and is silent about any putative intrinsics, which is to say it is topic neutral.
Consciousness, in contrast, is constituted by an assemblage of intrinsic qualities, and
propositions about consciousness are manifestly not topic neutral. Several
philosophers have made this point in consciousness studies, for example Rosenberg
(2004).
Physicists mostly hold a pre-philosophical view of the ‘quiddity’ of physical
entities, and have a vague notion that they are studying a mind-independent reality.
They insist that they are measuring ‘real’ things in the laboratory, and that therefore
physics cannot be just a closed, formal system. Take any physics textbook, though,
and peruse its equations: you will find no term for quiddity, because physics has no
need of it. Physics as it is practiced—as opposed to how it is fantasized—is topic
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neutral.
Some philosophers have tried to insert wiggle room between the qualityless world
of physics and the qualityful world of the mind. Thus, ‘panprotopsychism’ says that
physical things have ‘protophenomenal’ properties that are not phenomenal but give
rise to the phenomenal (Chalmers 2013, §1). Similarly, ‘neutral monism’ claims that
basic things possess proto-physical and proto-phenomenal properties that yield
physical and phenomenal properties, respectively. Any such proto-phenomenal
properties are irrelevant to the present philosophical discussion. Either we have direct
acquaintance with them (that is to say, they are included in the phenomenal content
of our conscious minds), or not. In the latter case, all terms are analytical and
ultimately resolve into undefined fundamental properties such as mass, charge, and
whatever novel proto-phenomenal properties are conjured up. This paper’s reasoning
treats any topic-neutral thing in the same way, and would therefore also apply to
proto-phenomenal things. For clarity, I shall consider only physical things below
under the rubric of the topic neutral. In the unlikely event of anyone actually
discovering protophenomenal things in the future, the same arguments would apply.
2.4 A Normalized Formulation of Panpsychism
Panpsychism’s core idea, that reality is made up of basic units having a phenomenal
interior and a physical exterior, can be articulated in two ways that ultimately convey
the same sense.
Chalmers (2015) laid down a common formulation: “Panpsychism [is] the view
that fundamental physical entities have conscious experiences.”1 Nagasawa and
Wager (2016) similarly wrote that the physical world “is mentally—and in particular
‘phenomenally’—propertied.” This presumes that physical entities are real things
that can possess qualitative mental properties. It can be contrasted with the thesis that
Chalmers calls micro-idealism, which presumes that minds are real things that can
possess micro-physical properties. Thus:
(Pφ) (Micro-)panpsychism: The basic units of reality are fundamental physical
entities, and some or all of these possess ‘elemental’ minds (not composed of smaller
minds).
(Pψ) Micro-idealism: The basic units of reality are elemental minds, and some
of these possess the extrinsic relations of fundamental physical entities.
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To express the basic intuition without saying whether the physical or mental units
are fundamental, we can use this:
(Pυ) Neutral panpsychism:
There is a one-to-one mapping between fundamental physical entities and
elemental minds.
The physical properties of those physical entities are constituted by
extrinsic relations between such entities.
The intrinsic properties of minds are phenomenal mental qualities.
This captures the substantive intention of panpsychism but remains neutral about
the ontology, presuming primacy of neither physical nor mental things. Most
panpsychists have no preference for Pφ or Pψ, and so Pυ adequately expresses their
opinion. For example, the Wikipedia entry on panpsychism uses Pφ and Pψ
interchangeably: “In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that consciousness, mind,
or soul (psyche) is a universal and primordial feature of all things. Panpsychists see
themselves as minds in a world of mind.”
On the other hand, some philosophers specifically advocate Pφ, and insist that the
basic units of reality are situated in physical space, and hence that conscious minds
are likewise situated in space (e.g. Strawson 2013).
Here, I shall argue that mental locality is impossible. In summary, the argument
is as follows. As minds do not partake of the extrinsic relations that make up physics,
they cannot share the kind of spatial relations that physical bodies have. On the other
hand, as physics is topic-neutral, the only space that it knows about is the one
comprising those extrinsic spatial relations. There is no substantive space described
by physics, over and above those relations. Therefore, there is simply no physical
space that minds are capable of inhabiting.
That consciousness is non-spatial has been somewhat neglected in the literature,
as McGinn (1995) observed: “Even those who recognize that consciousness poses
problems for materialism in virtue of its phenomenal character seldom acknowledge
that its non-spatiality is also a major stumbling-block for materialism—despite the
fact that Descartes took it (and not qualia) to be critical.” McGinn offers a blanket of
intuitions against the spatiality of consciousness, but it seems to me that the crucial
argument is the non-co-location of conscious experience with spatial properties.
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The physical properties of an object are co-located in space by virtue of being
third-person-observable in the same place. Those properties are found to affect
observational instruments (be they sensory organs or artificial devices) in, or on, the
space that is occupied by the object.
For example, consider a doughnut. A third-person observer can measure the shape
and size of the doughnut, its mass, charge, color, texture, chemical composition, and
such-like—all of which are co-located in the same bounded volume of space. Its
temperature is found by sticking a thermometer in it; its weight by placing it on a
weighing scale; its volume by dropping it in a graduated jug of water. The
phenomenal content of the doughnut, on the other hand, cannot be measured by a
third-person observer. Neither by sensory organs nor by devices can an observer
discover the supposed conscious quiddity of the doughnut. Therefore, there is no
operational procedure for finding the phenomenal content in the same volume of
space as the familiar physical properties. Ergo the mental quiddity has no spatial
location.
Phenomenal contents’ being associated with a spatially located entity does not
entail the phenomenal contents’ being so located themselves. To be spatially located
is to be discoverable in a volume of space by a third-person observation. That cannot
be done with someone else’s mind, for e.g. any experience you have whilst surgically
inspecting my brain is in your mind, not in mine. Thus, the supposed position of a
mind is unobservable because the mind cannot partake of physical processes.
Assertions that your mind is ‘in’ your head, or is hovering six inches above it, or is
even on the Moon, are therefore equally untestable, unfalsifiable, and frankly
meaningless.
Wittgenstein (1958, pp 7-8) and Ayer (1963, p 103) dismissed the meaningfulness
of literally ascribing a spatial position to a mental experience, and Wittgenstein noted
that any ascription would be a figurative usage (as, for example, one can have a pain
‘in’ a phantom limb in the sense that it is projected into the body image of the limb).
The spatial relation between physical entities is one more extrinsic relation. Just
as particles might have different electrical charges, different masses, different kinetic
energies, so they also have different spatial coordinates and velocities in relation to
each other, and to other physical particles. To ascribe any of these physical
observables to a mind that is associated with that particle is to commit a category-
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mistake: a mind is not something that can have a charge, or a mass, or a spatial
location or velocity.
For this reason, I reject Strawson’s insistence on Pφ. Excluding mental
localization from Pφ makes Pφ versus Pψ a distinction without a difference, so I take
Pυ as expressing what we mean by panpsychism.
Now, Chalmers (2018, p 5) defines micro-idealism as “the thesis that concrete
reality is wholly grounded in micro-level mentality: that is, in mentality associated
with fundamental microscopic entities (such as quarks and photons)”2, and then
asserts that “micro-idealism entails panpsychism”. There is, however, an ambiguity
in this languaging of physics-oriented forms of idealism: for example, the phrase
“mentality associated with fundamental microscopic entities” could be read as
idealism or as panpsychism. Saying that elemental mentality is ‘associated’ with
microphysical entities does not entail that those mental states are states of the
microphysical entities. Micro-Berkeleyanism is a counter-example, in which God’s
mind contains an ‘archetype’ for each microphysical entity, and God uses the states
of the assembled archetypes to render the perceptions to human subjects. (Berkeley
asserts a comprehensive system of archetypes that correspond to physical things, but
does not say whether they are micro or macro.)
Micro-idealism, therefore, is conceptually distinct from panpsychism, but the
difference is superficial, not substantial. I shall argue below that panpsychism entails
idealism, and in fact that micro-panpsychism and micro-idealism are equivalent (and,
later, that they are both wrong).
2.5 Generalized Panpsychism
Panpsychism’s literature lacks a principled account of ‘fundamental physical entities’
that might define these ‘ultimates’ as Rosenberg (2004) and Goff (2009) called them.
Do they include molecules, atoms, elementary particles, fields, or volumes of space?
As a proton comprises three quarks, does it have a mind of its own, or do the
individual quarks have minds? If an electron jumps to a lower orbit and emits a
photon, was the electron in two minds before the jump—that of a low-energy electron
and a photon—or is the photon’s mind created in the moment of emission? If an
elementary particle is in a superposition of two states, what is the ontological status
of the associated phenomenal content? – does that particle’s mind also go into
superposition, as Lockwood (1989) suggested? If two electrons become entangled
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and travel apart, do they have one mind or two? In an atom, does a cloud of
indistinguishable electrons have one mind in total, or one mind per electron? Could
big things have elemental minds? Macromolecules, microtubules, cells, organs, or
organisms—in the absence of a principled account, it is anyone’s guess. Chalmers
(2018) raises the question of whether the concept of fundamental physical entities is
valid anyway, in which case the bottom falls out of the micro-panpsychist worldview.
In view of this uncertainty, we might consider what I shall label ‘generalized
neutral panpsychism’ (GPυ):
There is a one-to-one mapping between some physical entities, not
necessarily fundamental, and elemental minds.
The physical properties of those physical entities are constituted by
extrinsic relations between such entities.
The intrinsic properties of those minds are phenomenal mental qualities.
As we shall see, however, nothing is gained by this move, as the reasoning still
applies to any kind of panpsychism.
2.6 Non-individuation of subjects in mental monism
There are strong arguments, from Hume onwards, against the existence of the subject.
Nevertheless, as Chalmers (2017a) wrote, “Wholesale eliminativism about subjects
is not easy to stomach, especially for someone who is serious about phenomenal
properties. These properties are defined as those characterizing what it is like to be a
subject.” I will make the working assumption that a subject exists. Nothing hangs on
this, though. If it turns out that this is a mistake and there is no subject, my main
conclusions are unaffected. The following will show that there is at most one subject,
which is all we need here.
Our naïve presumption is that each mind has its own distinct subject. Certainly,
Berkeley, in his earlier writings (1710, 1713), presumed this. Śankara (8th Century),
in contrast, asserted an inter-mental unity of subject. As we shall now argue, that
unity of subject follows logically from mental monism (see Lloyd 1999b §2.13.3).
Physicalism individuates subjects in two ways. First, each subject is deemed to
be embodied in a brain, and inherits the spatiality of the brain. Hence one person’s
subject must be different from another’s, because their subjects are in different places.
Second, the subject is interlinked with the mind, and hence that mind’s memories,
15
because the subject and the mind are supposed to reduce to the brain.
Mental monism, however, sees space as part of the virtual world that the
community of minds constructs. The mind and its subject are therefore not located in
space; ergo in mental monism subjects cannot be individuated by location. Minds,
and hence subjects, exist in a non-spatial domain.
Likewise, in mental monism, the mind and its subject are not reducible to, or
emergent from, the brain. Therefore, the relationship between the subject and the
phenomenal content can derive only from the actual mental attributes of those two
things, not from a physical substrate. Although Kastrup (2017) suggests that
experiences are states of the subject, our observation is that experiences are contained
in the set of phenomenal contents, while the subject itself plays only the role of that
which witnesses the phenomenal content. Therefore the subject has no specific
attributes by which it can be individuated from other subjects. This leads us to the
counter-intuitive conclusion that subjects are not individuated, and that the subject is
numerically identical in all minds.
The subject is sometimes said to ‘have’ experiences, as if the experiences were
transient attributes of the subject, rather as size, shape, luminosity, and hue are
attributes that a patch of color ‘has’ in the visual field. That is, however, disanalogous.
A color patch’ attributes are co-located in the visual field: its size, shape, luminosity,
and hue visibly sit in the same place. In contrast, the subject does not lie within the
sensorium and ‘has’ no perceptible qualities.
Mental privacy also fuels the intuition that subjects are individuated. As I can
access only my own phenomenal content, not yours, my mind appears to have a
subject that experiences only my phenomenal content. It is more exact to think in
terms of co-mentality than subject privacy: the phenomenal content in my mind is
co-mental insofar as I have access to all of it. I can shift my attention within my visual
field or other part of my sensorium, and I can be aware of relations between elements
of the sensorium: for example, that I am experiencing a red square inside a blue circle
at the same time as hearing a beep. I cannot access, or be aware of relations with,
phenomenal content in your mind. So, the co-mentality consists in phenomenal
contents’ being accessible by shifts of attention. We may say that a mind is a set of
phenomenal content bound by access consciousness: (a) co-mentality is constituted
by a mind’s access to the contents of a sensorium; (b) privacy is constituted by one
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mind’s not having access to another’s sensorium. On this view, the existence of co-
mentality and its complement mental privacy is consistent with inter-mental identity
of the subject.
Hence, in mental monism, there is at most one subject, common to all minds. It
coincides with Śankara’s doctrine, that the individual Atman is non-different from
the universal Brahman. We will address how the personal mind, as opposed to
subject, individuates in Corollary 2 below.
This resembles Hume’s assertion that the subject is not an apprehensible item
within the mind. Is subjectivity subjectless? When saying an experience exists, do we
convey anything more by saying that a subject experiences it? Kastrup (2017)
proposes that an experience is a state of the subject: “experience is a pattern of
excitation of TWE [that which experiences, i.e. the subject]”, but that presupposes a
mysterious dynamics of the subject, without clarifying or explaining anything.
This paper requires that there be at most one subject. Whether that universal
subject is an actual thing, or a notional artefact of the grammar of subjectivity, does
not matter here.
2.7 A Naïve Formulation of Mental Monism
Mental monism says that only minds exist. The physical world is considered to be
virtual and the persistent structure and dynamics of this virtual physical world are
attributed to a background mechanism, which must possess the nature of a conscious
mind of some sort because, by hypothesis, there is nothing else in reality besides
minds. This background mind has various historical designations (Berkeley’s ‘God,’
Śankara’s ‘Brahman’) that come with religious baggage that is not relevant here.
Therefore, I propose to refer to it as the ‘metamind.’ This model resolves the universe
into nothing but a set of minds, namely the personal minds of people and other
sentient beings, and the metamind. Intrinsic qualities are ascribed only to the
phenomenal content of minds.
(The common, but ludicrous, misapprehension that Berkeley thought that the
mundane world was nothing but an assemblage of ideas in our own minds can be
dismissed. Berkeley was perfectly clear that there was a world ‘out there’, but equally
clear that ‘out there’ meant in the mind of God (Berkeley 1713, Dialogue III, p 235).)
The internal structure and dynamics of the metamind are largely unexplored.
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Berkeley posited ‘archetypes’ within God’s mind, corresponding to bodies (Berkeley
1713, Dialogue II, p 210). His analogy was that God renders the sensory appearances
of bodies by referring to the archetypes, as a musician makes music by referring to a
musical score (Berkeley 1710, §71). As the score has no auditory similarity to the
music, so the archetypes have no sensory similarity to our perceptions. Berkeley’s
decomposition of God’s mind into archetypes is consonant with the object-oriented
computational architecture of human-made virtual-reality systems, where a
computational ‘object’ encapsulates the data and functions that are required to
implement and render the corresponding simulated object. It is a parsimonious
hypothesis that Berkeley’s archetypes are likewise encapsulated entities. It may seem
arrogant to suppose that God’s mind uses the same designs as human software
engineers, but in fact they are both addressing the same computational problem,
hence the convergent evolution of software engineer and God.
‘Monolithic mental monism’ says that the metamind is not separable into
constituents corresponding to bodies; and an ‘object-oriented mental monism’
maintains the Berkeleyan thesis that the metamind is separable into encapsulated
archetypes corresponding to observed physical entities. The latter is a more
parsimonious model and in what follows I shall consider only object-oriented mental
monism. I shall argue that panpsychism is a special case of object-oriented mental
monism, which is a special case of general mental monism.
Does the hypothesis of an object-oriented metamind clash with the
interconnectedness of all objects? Shani (2015) argued that the division of the
physical world into objects is merely nominal, because objects are not natural kinds.
For example, while my laptop is on the table, its atoms touch the table’s, and our
separation of this assemblage into two objects is just an artefact of our preferred way
of thinking. In addition, quantum physics shows us that everything in this mélange of
atoms is entangled. So, Shani argues, there aren’t really distinct physical objects and
therefore the mental world cannot naturally divide up in correspondence with objects.
To a first approximation, however, the atoms in the laptop are objectively clustered:
if I were to tip the table over, the laptop would fall one way, and the table another
way. This is why VR physics simulations model distinct objects, and why Occam’s
razor suggests that the metamind does likewise, and why the more parsimonious
hypothesis is that each observed macroscopic object has a corresponding archetype.
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Of course, this hand-waving argument proves nothing on its own, but it does suggest
that object-oriented mental monism is more plausible than the monolithic flavor.
To clarify the relationship between panpsychism and mental monism, we will cast
mental monism from the naïve formulation into the normalized form. To do this,
however, we need to review the concept of a ‘subject’ within mental monism.
2.8 A Normalized Formulation of Mental Monism
Each of Berkeley’s archetypes contains the information that the metamind requires
to render the corresponding object in the observational experience of personal minds
who witness the object. We do not know, we cannot tell what form that information
takes, except that it must take some form of conscious experience, as that is the only
contents that exists according to mental monism. So, when a tree has fallen in the
forest and nobody hears it, the archetype of that tree contains the metamental thought
that the tree has fallen and, when a person walks into the forest and looks at that spot,
the archetype of the tree will be rendered in that person’s mind as a fallen trunk lying
on the ground.
That archetypal content is experienced by the subject of the metamind. It is not a
problem for us that the same subject experiences each archetype because, as we have
seen above, there is at most one subject in all minds. Therefore each archetype, A,
can be regarded as a miniature mind, comprising phenomenal contents CA,
experienced by the common subject S. Each tuple <CA,S> is an ‘object-mind’, a mind
that is associated with an observable physical object (but not, of course, literally
‘inside’ that object). Object-minds do not necessarily exhaust the metamind, which
may also contain disembodied minds besides the ones embodied in brains or
associated with inanimate objects. Now, we can formulate mental monism’s position
thus:
There is a one-to-one mapping between observable physical entities and
object-minds.
The physical properties (of physical entities) are constituted by extrinsic
relations between physical entities.
The intrinsic properties (of object-minds) are phenomenal mental
qualities.
Using these normalized formulations of the theories, we can more readily compare
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them, thus:
There is a one-to-one mapping of:
o (in microphysical panpsychism) fundamental physical entities and
elemental minds;
o (in generalized panpsychism) some physical entities and elemental
minds;
o (in object-oriented mental monism) physical entities and object-
minds.
The physical properties (of each physical entity) are constituted by
extrinsic relations between those entities.
The intrinsic properties (of each mind) are phenomenal mental qualities.
We see that: microphysical panpsychism is a special case of generalized
panpsychism, which is a special case of object-oriented mental monism, which is a
special case of general mental monism. (We also see that micro-panpsychism and
micro-idealism are equivalent.)
3. Evaluation 1: Mental Monism is True
In the previous section (Comparison) I argued that panpsychism is a special case of
mental monism; in this section (Evaluation 1), I shall argue that mental monism is
true; in the next (Evaluation 2), I shall argue that panpsychism is false; and I conclude
that reality is a non-panpsychist form of mental monism.
I shall evaluate mental monism in two limbs: First, that consciousness is grounded
in physics: my approach will be a version of Berkeley’s semantic argument. Second,
that a mind-independent world can be referenced.
Anti-physicalism has an extensive literature, a survey of which is outside the
scope of this paper. One of the most widely used of contemporary arguments is
Chalmers’ (2015) use of conceivability to attack the notion that consciousness is
grounded in physics (which he defined thus: “truths about consciousness are
grounded in physical truths if all truths in the first set obtain wholly in virtue of truths
in the second set obtaining”). His conceivability argument has less power than
Berkeley’s semantic argument, which attains the same conclusion more robustly.
(Chalmers mentions in passing the knowledge argument and the structure and
dynamics argument, which are cousins of the semantic argument.)
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The conceivability argument says that we can conceive of a universe that is
physically identical to our own, but contains no consciousness. People in this
hypothetical universe behave as we do, but they are so-called ‘philosophical
zombies’. If we can conceive a world that is physically identical to ours, but devoid
of consciousness, then we can infer that consciousness is not a necessary concomitant
of the physical workings of the brain, and so consciousness is not grounded in
physics. The argument’s weakness is its assumption that we know enough about a
complete physics to tell whether a zombie universe is genuinely conceivable. In
particular, its premise requires that zombies have the same debates about
consciousness that we have. They, too, ask what it is like to be a bat, and struggle to
understand how conscious minds emerge from insentient matter. If, however, zombie
philosophers were to discover, and assert, that there is nothing it is like to be a zombie,
then Chalmers’ argument collapses. Conversely, if zombies do debate consciousness,
then our own such debates are a sham as they too stem from neural activity only, not
consciousness. Either way, the conceivability argument fails.
Berkeley’s semantic argument (Berkeley 1713, Dialogue III, p 222), articulated
in a modern form (Lloyd 1999a, 2006), captures this intuition more rigorously, and
is roughly equivalent to Foster’s (1982) argument against physicalism. The argument
presented here follows Berkeley’s central thinking on the matter, which is different
from his so-called ‘Master Argument’ (a phrase invented by Gallois (1974)). What is
sometimes referred to as his ‘semantic argument’ is the only argument in his books
that works, and he attaches a central importance to it. I shall outline my Berkeleyan
semantic argument here, and expand it below.
All physical terms are defined analytically in terms of undefined fundamentals,
whereas all mental terms are rooted in private ostensive definition. Therefore physical
terms and mental terms form disjoint sets, and so physical propositions and mental
propositions are disjoint, hence no mental fact can be grounded in physical facts. This
delivers the first limb of mental monism. The second limb stems from the fact that
we have direct experience of mental content but not of mind-independent physical
systems. This enables us to establish reference to mental entities but prevents us from
making reference to those physical things. Any assertion that a mind-independent
world exists is therefore an incoherent attempt to refer to what is unreferenceable, or
what Berkeley termed an “unknown somewhat” (1710, §80; 1713, p 482). Therefore,
21
the whole of physical discourse has the character of a text that refers to nothing
outside itself, that is to say, it is a fiction, albeit a convenient one. I will unpack that
terse summary below.
As Pearce (2014) observes, this linguistic interpretation of Berkeley differs from
the standard scholastic readings—the subjunctive and ideational interpretations—
both of which are trivially defeated. Pearce shows that the linguistic interpretation is
both a better fit to Berkeley’s writings, and philosophically more robust.
3.1 First limb: Consciousness is not Grounded in Physics
As we have noted earlier, the terms of physical discourse are defined analytically in
terms of fundamental unknowns. For example, an electron is an entity with a
designated mass, electric charge, spin, and so on. But the question of what mass is
lies outside the discourse of physics. The equations of physics include mass as a term
but the actual nature of it—what mass really is—cannot be expressed in the language
of physics.
Consequently, all propositions in the discourse of physics are expressed wholly
in these physical terms. From any set of propositions in that discourse, further
propositions can be inferred by propositional logic and predicate logic, but all such
derived propositions will also be expressed in terms from the lexicon of physics. That
is, the discourse that expresses itself in physical terms is closed under logical
inference.
To be sure, new terms are continually being devised within physics, but these are
either defined analytically in existing terms, or denote new fundamental quantities,
which are undefined except for their possession by fundamental entities and their
dynamic relations to the rest of physics For example, the quark flavors of upness,
downness, and strangeness (discovered in 1964), charm (1970), and topness and
bottomness (1973)—these were novel physical properties that were defined in terms
of behavior observed in other, already defined properties. No physicist is ever going
to introduce a property such as hylasity that has no observable effect on other physical
things.
In contrast, the discourse of consciousness gives meaning to its basic terms by
private ostensive definition; and it builds up further terms analytically from them.
That is to say, one mentally attends to some element of experience, and assigns a
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designation to it. For example, ‘phenomenal redness’ (or, simply, ‘redness’) can be
defined only by having an experience of that phenomenal content, and accepting that
label for it. An individual with congenital color blindness who cannot see red can
never know the meaning of the term ‘red’. This is so, even if that individual knows
about the physics of red light, and the physiology and psychology of its perception.
By the way, an example of a built-up term would be ‘yellow-colored, lemon-tasting
circle’, which is formed analytically from yellowness, lemonness, and circularity.
The discourse of the mental expresses all of its propositions wholly in these terms.
From any set of propositions in that discourse, we can infer further propositions by
logic, but all such derived propositions will also be articulated in expressions from
the repertoire of mental terms.
Thus we find ourselves possessed of two corpora of propositions and hence of
facts: the disjoint sets of physical propositions and mental propositions, and hence
the disjoint sets of physical facts and mental facts. Since the corpus of physical
propositions is closed under rules of inference, no mental proposition can be entailed
by any assemblage of physical propositions. Ergo mental facts are additional to the
set of all physical facts. To put it bluntly, consciousness is non-physical.
Certainly, one could posit a psychophysical bridging proposition. For example,
that a person experiences pain if and only if a certain C-fibre in her brain fires. But
any such psychophysical proposition lies outside the corpus of physical facts, and
therefore cannot follow from physics. (Conversely, it is also outside the corpus of
mental facts, and cannot follow from mental facts alone.) Hence it cannot defeat the
conclusion that consciousness is non-physical.
Furthermore, a bridging rule is an add-on to our picture of the world, lacking a
principled theoretical base from which to expand into a deeper account of relations
between mind and brain.
It tells us nothing about how the psychophysical relationship changes with
modification of its correlates. If the neural activity alters—if there is a change in the
firing rate or the duration, or the firing of other neurons, or the existence of particular
synapses—then no principles predict the effect on the mental experience. Conversely,
if we consider a different mental experience, no principle predicts what the
correlating neural activity would be. Furthermore, it relies on the verbal reporting of
23
a human, which has several challenges.
Throughout the history of science, our understanding progressed when we
acquired deeper theories that provided a principled explanation of observations. A
catalogue of psychophysical correlations, although useful, would fall short of a
satisfying explanatory account. This warrants us in seeking an analytical theory,
grounded in new principles rather than ad hoc correlations.
3.2 Constructs: A Prerequisite for the Second limb
In order to formulate the second limb of the argument for mental monism, we will
need to use the idea of a sensory construct. To motivate this, however, I shall first
touch briefly on the social construct as an illustration, as it is more familiar (e.g.
Searle 1995). Consider, for example, chess. The coordinates of the board map onto
the squares of, say, a flat wooden block; the pieces—the King, Queen, Knights, and
so on—map onto moveable pieces of wood; the ‘move’ functions map onto particular
movements of the pieces across the board, and predicates such as ‘is a valid move’
and ‘is in checkmate’ map onto particular movements and configurations.
Any usable construct needs both a formal system of entities and relations between
them (for example, the board and pieces of chess), and a binding (for example, an
agreement that this piece of wood ‘is’ a White Knight, and that one a Black Queen,
and so on). To be sure, we may study a formal system without a binding. We might
want to study chess strategies in abstracto. Likewise, in pure mathematics, we study
axiomatic systems without semantically binding them to a model. To use a formal
system as a construct, however, we have to bind its terms.
As we lack commonly agreed terminology for some of these issues, I will propose
some notation. I shall define a construct as a system of predicate logic C that includes
a set of constant terms TC, functions FC, and predicates PC. A semantic binding is a
mapping of constants TC into a set of substrate elements P, functions FC into relations
between elements of P, and predicates PC to facts about the substrate.
It is obvious that the entities of a construct have no independent existence: they
have a purely notional existence that is exhausted by their defining propositions.
The constructs of interest to us in this paper are ‘sensory constructs’, and in
particular ‘physical constructs’, rather than social ones. Sensory constructs include
the world depicted in a dream, or in a virtual-reality computer simulation, or by our
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ordinary waking experiences—which we conventionally refer to as the physical
world. Given the discourse of physics, a ‘physical construct’ is defined by a subset
of the constant terms in that discourse, together with functions and predicates of the
discourse. Those constant terms denote the entities in the construct. Thus, a construct
might correspond to a part of, or the whole of, the physical universe. A phenomenal
semantic binding maps the entities of a physical construct into the mental world.
We may distinguish two kinds of phenomenal binding, which I will call
‘representational’ and ‘embodying’. To motivate this distinction, consider two
examples.
When I look at my laptop, I have visual images to which the physical
laptop maps, varying in shape as I look from different angles. This I am
calling the representational binding: a set of sensory images is
semantically bound to an object in the physical construct and serves to
represent the object. When I dream during sleep, I behold images that do
not have that binding. If I dream of my laptop, I might have the same
images as when I look at the real thing, but they are not representationally
bound to the physical laptop, but rather to a ‘dream laptop’ in the dream
construct, an ephemeral and unstable simulacrum of the physical
construct.
Second, one special object has a dual relationships to the contents of my
mind. Namely, my brain. If I open up my skull, and peer at the grey matter,
I have a series of visual images that have a representational binding to the
brain. My sensory impressions represent the brain in the same way that
other impressions represent my laptop. In addition, the contents of my
mind have a more intimate connection with the internal structure and
electrochemical dynamics of the brain: I shall call this the ‘embodying
binding’. My physical body is my mind’s ‘avatar’ in the physical
construct. If I had no embodying binding, then I could have no avatar, and
I would be just a disembodied observer.
Although the physical construct is virtual, we can talk as if it were real, because
it is grounded in our phenomenal experience. There is a fact of the matter whether I
am sitting on this physical chair, just because we construe this as expressing
experiential facts. In contrast, a fiction such as Sherlock Holmes is not grounded and
25
it makes no sense to talk as if it were real.
Kastrup (2018), following Shani’s (2015) terminology, partitions mental contents
into ‘revealed’ experiences, which are perceptions of the outside domain, and
‘concealed’ experiences, which are private, interior experiences. There are, however,
counter-examples to this strict disjunction: open-eye hallucinations (from
psychotropic chemicals or during sleep paralysis) may integrate hallucinated objects
into a real scene, or may distort a real scene in an hallucinatory manner. Another
example would be a phantom limb, generated by the mind but projected into physical
space. Therefore, I treat the mental contents as a whole, and allow experiences to
have distinct, possibly multiple, bindings.
Formally, then: an embodying binding maps constant terms of the physical
construct into the set of phenomenal contents of the mind; and maps the functions
into mental operations; and the predicates into facts of those phenomenal contents.
The intention is that this binding defines a correlative relationship between the mind
and its avatar within the physical construct. In contrast, a representational binding
maps constant terms in the physical construct into the power set of the set of
phenomenal contents (that is, it maps a constant term to multiple instances of sets of
phenomenal content). The intention is that these terms correspond to observable
bodies in the physical domain, and each of the target sets of phenomenal content
corresponds to one perception of that body.
The only difference between the physical construct and the physical universe is
that the former is explicitly defined as a fiction that can function as a model of the
patterns observed in the mental world, while the latter has emerged out of history
tethered to the metaphysical belief that it is somehow a mind-independent reality. As
far as the practice of physical science is concerned, it makes no difference whether
we use the physical construct or the physical universe. The additional baggage that
physicalism attaches to physics—namely the claim that physics concerns a mind-
independent reality—is thus otiose: it reduces to a purely metaphysical appendix, the
question of whose existence does not admit of a falsifiable answer and therefore lies
outside the precinct of science.
Let us say that a construct is ‘grounded’ if it has a semantic binding to a substrate
that is known. The physical construct is grounded because it has bindings to the
mental world, which is known by direct acquaintance.
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Is the converse also possible? To be sure, we could, in principle, define a ‘mental
construct’, which would be a predicate logic whose constants represent elements of
the phenomenal content of the mental world. And we could propose a binding of the
mental construct in the physical world. But any such construct could not be grounded
because we have no direct acquaintance with the physical world. There is thus a
profound asymmetry: within the realm of the conscious mind, we can form a
grounded physical construct that has all the extrinsic structure and dynamics of
physics; but within the physical realm we cannot form a grounded mental construct.
Thus we are led to an internally consistent explanatory framework for the mind-
body problem: (a) minds are the only reality, and (b) what we take to be a physical
universe is actually a physical construct, which is an ontologically and epistemically
grounded virtual world that enables us to model our experiences.
The fact that we can formulate this framework does not mean it is true. For, one
could still argue that (as a metaphysical hypothesis) there might actually be a physical
universe that may or may not have any effect on our phenomenal content. A common
motivation for this is the observation that much of our phenomenal content is not
under our personal control and appears to be governed by an unobservable
mechanism. Why couldn’t that unobservable mechanism just be the physical
universe? This leads us to the final step of the argument for mental monism.
3.3 Second Limb: A Mind-Independent World is not Referenceable
With the concept of a ‘construct’, we can now articulate the second limb of
Berkeley’s semantic argument. Pearce (2014) presents similar reasoning, but using
the less specific terminology of ‘quasi-entities’ for the contents of what I call the
physical construct.
The argument centers on the act of referring. We can grasp this concept from
straightforward cases of reference in computer science. A computer program has an
address of a memory location, and uses the address as a reference by storing data into,
and retrieving data from, that location. Thus, the act of reference is an act of reaching
out to something by a determinate means. In like manner I can refer to parts of my
sensory field. For example, I can refer to the blue strip above the text I am writing in
my visual image of my computer screen. I can also refer to elements of a construct,
provided that it has a grounded binding. For example, I can refer to the chess pieces
in a game I am playing. Although the King is an abstraction with no independent
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existence, I can refer to it, insofar as my reference is construed via the binding onto,
say, the particular wooden pieces on a wooden board in front of me. If I assert that
my King has taken my opponent’s Queen, then my notional reference is to the abstract
entities in the game construct of chess: but the substantive reference—the ‘cash
value’ of this statement—is to be found in the physical binding: I mean that my King
piece of wood has moved into the little square where my opponent’s Queen piece of
wood previously stood, and the latter piece has been taken off the board. The effective
meaning of the statement is the state of affairs on the physical board. And the
reference to the physical pieces and board in turn resolve into references to my
perceptions of them.
Likewise I can refer to elements in a physical construct. If I say I am sitting on a
chair, then the notional reference is to my physical body and the physical chair (in
the construct), but the substantive reference is construed, via the phenomenal
semantic binding, as being to my phenomenal content. It means that I can see and
feel my body on the chair. An objection is that this conflates epistemology with
ontology. In fact, the physical construct is “grounded ontologically and not just
epistemically” in the phenomenal world (Robinson 2009, §10.2.3). This echoes
Berkeley’s strategy to “collapse the truth conditions for a claim into the evidence for
the claim” Pearce (2014, 9.3.1).
For illustration, Chalmers (2003) and Lloyd (2003a) both argued that, in the
Wachowskis’ (1999) film The Matrix (as in traditional brain-in-a-vat thought-
experiments), statements that notionally refer to an external physical world are
effectively referring to a simulated world implemented in a computational rather than
physical substrate. My present argument extends that line of thinking to show that
notional physical references are effectively referring to the construct, and hence
substantively referring to the phenomenal world that supports the construct.
It is possible to make, and understand, references to things within the physical
construct, because the phenomenal semantic binding gives us a determinate means of
making the references operational, of giving them meaning. In contrast, an attempt
to refer to a supposed mind-independent physical universe is a dangling reference.
The mind-independent physical world is, by definition, not part of our direct
experience. And, by the hypothesis that it is not a construct bound to the phenomenal
world, but is rather something independent of the phenomenal world, we are left with
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no determinate means of operationalising the reference.
Thus we simply cannot refer to a mind-independent physical universe. The only
physical domain that we can refer to is the physical construct, via its phenomenal
semantic binding. In all practical matters, both in everyday life and in the physical
sciences, when people refer to physical things, they are actually referring to the
physical construct. The only people who pretend to be referring to a mind-
independent physical universe are philosophers, who attempt—and fail—to refer to
something for which there is no mechanism of reference.
This is deeply counter-intuitive. We have an almost unconquerable intuition that
the physical domain to which we refer—which is actually the construct—somehow
possesses a mind-independent reality. Maybe this is because we conflate the physical
construct with whatever external reality is driving our experiences of the natural
world. That is, however, a conflation that we must dissolve.
Pearce (2014) uses the terminology of ‘quasi-referring’ to physical ‘quasi-
entities’, whereas here I prefer to say that we refer to entities in the physical construct
but with the proviso that this is an indirect reference via a semantic grounding; but
we agree that there can be no reference to a mind-independent domain. This
terminology fits better with the linguistic practices around artificial virtual reality and
enables us to import the conceptual framework of virtuality into the Berkeleyan
philosophy.
Chalmers (2018, personal communication) offered the following objection. If
physical terms are topic-neutral, why can’t they just ‘pick out’ whatever is ‘playing’
those roles, even if they are parts of a mind-independent world? Let us see how this
works in chess. As ‘White Knight’ is a term in the topic-neutral formal system of
chess, it can pick out a piece of wood that is playing the role of the White Knight.
But a piece of wood plays the role of a White Knight only by being assigned that role
in a semantic binding. Being the player of a role of a topic-neutral formal system is
not a natural kind. A Martian anthropologist who scoops up samples of human
artefacts cannot determine that this piece of wood is a White Knight and another is
the Bishop, and another is just a paperweight. The Martian would have to observe the
language-game played by humans and discover that they have defined a semantic
binding from the game of chess into those objects. In like manner, being the player
of the role of an electron is not a natural kind. Given our experiences, with their
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regularities, we have collectively devised the formal system of physics, and can bind
the term denoting an electron to a particular experiential nexus. This is intelligible
because we can extrapolate from our experience to the electron’s. But a semantic
binding, or in Chalmers’ terms, a topic-neutral term’s picking out a thing that plays
that role, does not give us a mechanism for referencing an unknowable reality. We
cannot assign a semantic binding to something that we cannot, in principle, refer to.
As nobody can refer to any putative mind-independent substrate, it follows that a
topic-neutral formal system cannot pick out entities in a mind-independent substrate,
either.
3.4 Conclusion for Evaluation 1: Mental Monism is True
Bringing these two limbs of argument together, we find: first, the domain of
consciousness is not reducible to physics; second, the physical domain to which we
ordinarily refer is a construct grounded in our phenomenal content; third, any attempt
to refer to a mind-independent physical world is incoherent. We must conclude that
reality comprises only conscious minds, and that what we take to be the physical
world is a construct within this mental world.
3.5 Corollary 1: Mental Monism Entails the Metamind
Most experiences are not under our volitional control, and it is implausible to suppose
that their regularities are due to chance. What, then, could be behind it all? We can
rule out the physical construct, as it is a derivative of the mental world and therefore
cannot be the source of the observed natural order. Also, we can rule out the mind-
independent physical world as it is an incoherent notion. So the only option left on
the table is that the natural order is driven by something of the nature of a mind, which
I have referred to earlier as the ‘metamind’.
There are many misapprehensions about mental monism in common circulation.
One is that we have two rival hypotheses for the origin of the natural order that we
observe around us: either that it is caused by the physical world, or that it is caused
by the metamind. And that, whilst the latter cannot be ruled out, by far the most
economical and most explanatorily powerful hypothesis is that we are embedded in
a physical universe, which causes the observed natural order. Not so. Mental monism
is selected, not because it is simpler or because it offers greater explanatory power
(as yet), but because the rival theory is philosophically incoherent. That is to say, the
claim that the regularities of the manifest world are produced by a mind-independent
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substrate does not make sense.
Another misapprehension is that Berkeleyan idealism has “the world as
constructed from the sensory contents of individual perceivers” (Robinson 2009). In
fact, Berkeley wrote that the (virtual) physical world is constructed primarily in
God’s mind, rendered in the sensory contents of individual perceivers, and re-
constructed in the mental models of those individuals.
3.6 Corollary 2: Personal Minds are Subsets of the Mental Universe
The picture presented above is of some kind of background consciousness, the
‘metamind’, that runs the natural world. In common with ‘cosmopsychist’ theories,
this poses the decombination problem: how do our private personal minds stand in
relation to the metamind? Chalmers (2018) uses the term ‘cognitive fragmentation’
for this partitioning of the mental universe into personal minds. The question has been
addressed for centuries. The Advaita Vedanta anatomizes the individual as a series
of sheathes surrounding the Atman, which is non-different from the Brahman. This
is picturesque but has no obvious explanatory power. Likewise is Shani’s (2015)
metaphor of the personal mind as “a ‘vortex’ surging from the oceanic background”
of cosmic consciousness—a metaphor that brings a lot of baggage from fluid
dynamics without offering any account of the structure and dynamics of the
connection between personal consciousness and the metamind.
Kastrup (2018) draws an analogy from psychiatry: just as an individual may
dissociate into multiple personalities (in Dissociated Identity Disorder, DID), so the
metamind is supposed to dissociate into the personal minds of people (and, I assume,
animals and disembodied beings). This is descriptively vivid but explanatorily
unrewarding. Insofar as dissociation involves the partitioning of a larger system of
experiences into private sub-systems, each accompanied by a subjective awareness,
personal minds are indeed dissociations from the metamind. In human psychiatry,
however, this phenomenon is driven by a malfunction of the mind, often produced by
psychological trauma. How is a dissociation of the metamind produced and
maintained? The absence of explanatory power in this analogy is evident in Kastrup
& Kelly (2018), “[I]f something analogous to DID happens at a universal level, the
one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private
inner lives like yours and ours;” and, as clinical dissociation is correlated with
changes in brain function, “… We posit that this appearance is life itself:
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metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look
like.” This says nothing over and above the bare fact that organisms have private
streams of consciousness.
Instead of these metaphors, I suggest an extension of Lloyd’s (1999a) reductionist
picture of mental monism:
“In set-theoretic terms, the mental universe or ‘metaverse’ is defined as
the union of all existing minds. So, it contains the conscious minds of all
human beings and all animals in the world we see around us. It will also
contain any disembodied minds, if they exist. It also contains streams of
mental activity that govern the complete panoply of what we think of as
natural phenomena … It is a key point that the mental universe is a union
of minds, and not a set of minds. For instance, if A = {a1, a2, a3, …} and
B = {b1, b2, b3, …} are minds comprising experientia a1, a2, a3, … and
b1, b2, b3, … then the union is U = { a1, a2, a3, …, b1, b2, b3, …} whereas
the set of minds is {A, B}.” (§6.4),
“An ‘ordinary mind’ is a subset of the metamind, closed under ordinary
operations of mental access. By ‘operation’ I mean any of the actions that
a mind can carry out on its contents’ such as perceiving, thinking, recalling
memories, imagining things, focusing, paying attention, and so on. By
being ‘closed’ I mean that any operation carried out on any of the contents
yields some new contents that are still within that mind. So, whenever you
recollect a memory, or focus on some bodily sensation, you remain within
your own mind and do not slip into someone else’s mind.” (§6.5)
Within mental monism, all mechanisms must be reducible to conscious volition and
qualia. There is no non-mental substrate that can serve to explain vortices or
dissociations. A fortiori, the individuation of personal minds must be accounted for
in those terms, namely volition and qualia. (By the way, I write here of individuation
of minds, not of subjects. As we saw earlier, the agent of the mind—that is, the
subject, S—cannot be individuated; but the contents of the mind, C, obviously are.
Hence the mind as a whole, <C,S>, is individuated by virtue of the contents, C, being
individuated.) Instead of metaphors from fluid dynamics and psychiatry, analogies
from computer science seem more apt as it addresses and solves the same logical
problems that face the metamind. In a multi-user computer, the operating system
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partitions memory into private areas, and each user can access only her own section
of memory. Processes in different user areas communicate only through defined
channels. Operating systems often achieve this with autonomous software helpers, to
which software engineers refer with the evocative name of ‘daemons’.
I therefore posit a mental daemon that interfaces the personal mind and the
metamind. The daemon must have access to all of the metamind (for otherwise we
must posit another daemon to explain the first daemon’s restricted access, leading to
an infinite regress), and will deliver to the private mind only the experiences that are
derivable from the sense organs of its avatar. An empirical implication of this
hypothesis is that there could be failure modes of the daemon in which it could deliver
experiences from parts of the metamind outside its sensory scope, that is, extra-
sensory perception. I shall discuss this in a follow-up paper.
Mathews (2011) argues that individuating personal minds need not mirror the
division of the world into objects, as “the boundaries between subjects are not
nominal. The individuation of subjects, or centres of subjectivity, is objectively
determined.” Although strictly speaking the division of the physical world into
objects is nominal, nevertheless to a first approximation there are distinct objects and
so Mathews’ argument does not entail a complete decoupling of mental individuation
from object individuation. The relativistic argument below (Evaluation 2) shows that
(a) the parts of a unified mind must be decoupled from physical objects, while (b)
only whole minds can be so coupled.
3.7 Corollary 3: Physical Events Cannot Cause Mental Events
According to mental monism, the brain cannot cause anything to happen in the
conscious mind, because the brain has no real existence. This is often cited as a
knock-down objection, as brain events of several kinds—trauma, drugs, electrodes—
appear to affect the mind. This objection, however, rests on a misunderstanding of
the theory.
Mental monism has a universal set of minds U ={E0, E1, E2, …} where E0 is the
metamind and E1,… are whatever other minds exist, including people, animals,
inanimate objects, and disembodied minds. Causation operates within and between
these minds. A subset comprises minds that are rendered as observable objects, Uobs
⸦ U, with an object-mind Ei rendered as a physical entity Pj = ren(Ei). What appears
within the manifest world as causation between physical entities is actually a
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rendering of a causation within the mental world. In rough terms, the scheme is as
follows. Suppose Em is my mind, ren(Em) is my brain, ELSD is the object-mind of a
tab of LSD and ren(ELSD) is the tab of LSD itself. Ingesting the LSD allows ELSD to
act causally on Em, producing hallucinations. A third-person observer will see
ren(ELSD) entering ren(Em) and consequent changes occur in ren(Em), namely
different brain activity and reports of hallucinations.
This mode of causal connection is just what we already use in virtual-reality
systems, such as video games: we use a simulated gun to fire a simulated bullet at the
avatar of a simulated enemy, and he falls to the simulated ground. Contrary to what
we may feel in the moment, we know that the causation does not operate between the
rendered images on the computer screen. We know that the causation operates
between the object-modules of the VR software.
3.8 Corollary 4: The Brain is a Virtual Interface
So, what is the brain for? The brain is the mind’s avatar in the physical construct, and
it needs two interfaces. On the one hand, it has the sensory and motor organs plus the
brain tissue that carries out pre-conscious input processing and post-conscious output
processing. On the other hand, it has the physical correlate of consciousness, which
acts like a portal to the actual conscious mind. That is what the brain is for: an
interface mechanism between virtual transducers and actuators on the one hand and
the correlate of consciousness on the other; and this interface must operate within the
laws that rule the physical construct, hence it has to be a physical object with specific
characteristics, within the construct.
I mentioned in the previous subsection the mental daemons that restrict a personal
mind to the scope of an avatar: those daemons must exist on the mind-side only, and
provide the link between the personal mind and the physical correlate of the mind.
For, otherwise, if the daemon were on the brain side then the personal mind would
have the freedom to choose whose brain to connect to, and there would not be mental
privacy. There is therefore no corpus of brain tissue that implements the mental
daemon.
4. Evaluation 2: Panpsychism is False
I argued above (Comparison) that panpsychism is a special case of mental monism,
and that (Evaluation 1) mental monism is true, but in this section (Evaluation 2), I
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argue that panpsychism is false, and that reality must therefore be a non-panpsychist
form of mental monism.
I also argued above that mental activity cannot literally be in space, but that still
leaves open the possibility that states of elemental constituents of personal minds
might be necessarily correlated with states of physical entities. Here, however, I shall
extend the argument and show that even that cannot be so.
In the (slightly) bigger picture, even if panpsychism were true, it would not
‘explain’ the existence of personal minds, as bare panpsychism does not entail the
combination of micro-minds into macro-minds (Goff 2009). The ontogenesis of
personal minds requires some additional theory. I don’t see anything philosophically
problematic in the merging of minds to form larger minds per se, since it could be
achieved simply by taking the set-theoretic union of the contents of the merging
minds. My concern here is not with combination as such, but with the combination
of spatially separable minds into a unified mind.
I will examine three arguments concerning the question of whether mental states
can be associated with the states of separable physical entities. First (Argument from
Relativity I) is a standard argument in favor of localization, which I shall reject.
Second (Argument from Relativity II) shows that in fact relativity prohibits mental
localization. Third (Argument from Excision) is a thought-experiment that illustrates
a paradox arising from mental localization.
The starting premise of both of the two latter arguments (against localization) is
that we cannot mistake the large-scale sequence of perceptions. While two events
happening within, say, half a second might confuse us, there is some temporal
distance beyond which the sequence is unimpeachable. That interval might be an
hour, or a week, or a decade, but it is self-evident that sufficiently separated mental
events have a knowable order.
4.1 Argument from Relativity I: Consciousness is Not Spatiotemporal
Lockwood (1992) used Einstein’s (1905) special theory of relativity to argue for
localization of consciousness. Here I reject that claim, and in the next subsection
make a counter-claim, that relativity makes it impossible for consciousness to be
separable in space, and hence that the physical correlate of a mind must be a physical
simple.
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Russell (1927, p 384), Weingard (1977), and Lockwood (1984a,b; 1985; 1989,
pp 71-78) used relativity to argue that, as conscious events are in time (proposition
RT), so they must be in space (RS) since relativity melds time and space inextricably
in spacetime. The reasoning from RT to Rs is sound, but premise RT is not.
Lockwood’s defence of RT is as follows. We continually witness that the mind
perceives and causes physical events, but physical events are in physical time,
therefore mental events must be in physical time, at least to the granularity of the
physical stimulus and response. For example, if I hear a buzzer at t0 and press a button
at t1, then my perception and volition must have occurred between t0 and t1. Now, for
any brain event B that correlates with a mental event, Lockwood (1989, p 75) wrote:
“If it were now possible to find pairs of physical events standing to B as cause and
effect that were separated by ever smaller temporal intervals then it would be possible
to define the spatial location of B with any required degree of precision.”
For sure, the neural correlates of the acts of perception and volition must be
localized in spacetime. But Lockwood’s programme of narrowing down arbitrarily
the volume of spacetime within which the correlate of any mental event occurs is
unfeasible because the speed of light is so high that to localize B even within the 140
mm width of a human brain, the interval between t0 and t1 would have to be less than
10-10 s but no discernible mental events occur at that scale (even if we allow Pelczar’s
(2017) claim that mental events can be as brief as 10-4 s). Hence Lockwood’s program
cannot localize the correlates better than the crude observation that they are
somewhere in the head.
Nevertheless, we must address Lockwood’s core assertion that since mental
events can be circumscribed in an interval of time (even if no finer than half a second),
they must be circumscribed in some volume of space (albeit a large one)?
Lockwood’s argument rests on the premise that a physical event can cause a mental
one. Any intelligible notion of causation, however, entails temporality, hence
assuming that a physical event causes a mental one already presumes that
consciousness sits in physical time, which is what the argument is supposed to prove.
Hence it is circular.
As we saw in Corollary 3 above, physical events cannot cause mental ones under
the theory of mental monism. So, what is happening in the simple experiment where
I press a button whenever I hear a buzzer? According to mental monism there is a
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mental event MBuzz that is rendered in the physical world as ren(MBuzz), the physical
sound waves. But it is MBuzz that acts on my mind, not ren(MBuzz). MBuzz yields the
mental sensation of the buzzing noise, but its doing so is a cause-and-effect in the
mental domain and it has no coordinate in physical time. My volition to press the
button is again a mental event MPress, which is rendered in the physical world as
ren(MPress). Thus, in mental monist, there are two decoupled temporal sequences: on
the one hand, the mental event MBuzz causes me to hear the sound, and my volition
then performs MPress; on the other hand, within the virtual physical world, ren(MBuzz)
occurs, and then ren(MPress), which occur at specific physical times. Relativity theory
pertains to the rendered events ren(MBuzz) and ren(MPress), which must indeed occur
in spacetime; but the mental process from MBuzz to MPress subvenes on that physical
world. As ren(MBuzz) cannot cause MBuzz, the causal link that Lockwood wants to use
to tie consciousness into spacetime does not exist, and his argument fails.
The theory of relativity explicitly concerns the relationship of physical
observations in spacetime. If mental experiences were observable events in spacetime
then Lockwood would be right, but they are not third-person observable, so there can
be no operational meaning in ascribing physical time or space coordinates. Relativity
says nothing about physically unobservable things, and certainly does not require
them to be embedded in spacetime. Gibbins (1985) tried to soften the blow by writing,
“The temporal results of relativity will apply to mental events only indirectly via the
space-time events with which they are associated,” but being ‘associated’ with an
event in spacetime does not constitute actually being in spacetime. In fact, mental
events are not in physical time any more than they are in physical space.
4.2 Argument from Relativity II: Physical v Mental Simultaneity and Sequence
I argued above that mental events cannot be in spacetime under the theory of mental
monism. In this subsection I present an argument for this conclusion that does not
rely on mental monism and so defeats panpsychism more directly. In fact, relativity
offers us two anti-physicalist arguments, as follows.
(a) A mind can have distinct, absolutely simultaneous experiences but the brain
cannot, because simultaneity is relative to the observer’s frame of reference. Russell
(1926, p 130) briefly mentions this as a puzzle but draws no conclusion from it; de
Silva (1995,1996) likewise; Lee (2007) concludes that mental simultaneity is an
illusion; Pelczar (2017) concludes that consciousness cannot supervene on events in
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spacetime. These authors disregard the problem that a human mind of normal acuity
cannot tell whether two mental events are precisely simultaneous, hence there can
never be any empirical evidence for strict mental simultaneity, and the premise of the
argument fails.
(b) A mind has experiences in an absolute sequence, but the brain cannot, because
the sequence of spacelike-separated physical events is relative to the observer’s frame
of reference. Lee (2007) also mentions this. Arguing from sequence, rather than
simultaneity, is stronger as the sequence of sufficiently separated mental events is
discernible and unambiguous.
This argument, however, is flawed because events in a brain of normal size are
not spacelike separated. For example, the separation of two brain events at (x0,0,0,t0)
and (x1,0,0,t1) is spacelike if (x1-x0)2 > c2(t1-t0)2 where c is the speed of light, about
3x108 ms-1. For a brain diameter of x = 0.14 m, t cannot exceed about 10-10 s, but this
is way below the ability of any human mind to discern. Lee (2007) did not recognize
this as a problem, and Phillips (2009, p 222) rightly rejected Lee’s relativistic
argument because of it; but Phillips wrongly supposed that there could be no such
argument from the relativity of sequence. In fact, we can consider a thought-
experiment in which the brain is expanded to make its parts spacelike separated.
Panpsychism does not prescribe any maximal volume of space that must contain
the physical components whose elemental minds combine to form a personal mind.
So let us consider a human brain expanded to the size of the Earth’s orbit around the
Sun, with the same architecture as a regular brain but the axons stretched over
millions of miles. A neural pulse travelling at a hundred meters a second will take
ninety-five years to traverse the brain. Local transmissions, between, say the visual
and auditory cortex would take a few decades. Obviously this is an outlandish
thought-experiment but the logic of panpsychism and relativity must still apply.
In a brain this big, neural events are spacelike separated: it would take light
sixteen minutes to cross the diameter of the brain.
Considering the mind that is associated with this brain in accordance with
panpsychism, suppose that it experiences a bright flash and, several years later, a loud
bang. We cannot doubt the mental sequence. In relativistic physics, however, there is
no such thing as absolute sequence of spacelike-separated events.
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Given two spacelike-separated brain events B1 and B2, in some frames of
reference, B1 will precede B2; in some B1 and B2 will be simultaneous; and in some
B2 will precede B1, depending on the velocity of the observer. Yet, if the phenomenal
contents M1 and M2 that are associated with events B1 and B2 are combined into a
unified mind, then M1 and M2 will have a determinate temporal sequence. The fact
that the observers would have to be travelling at very high velocities to change the
brain events’ relative sequence is not to the point. What matters is the brute physical
fact that sequence is not absolute for spacelike-separated events, and therefore the
combination of spatially distributed elemental minds into a unified mind is untenable.
4.3 Corollary 1: Non-Simultaneity v Non-Unified Metamind
Let us step back briefly from this argument to consider the bigger picture. We have
seen that relativity theory’s prohibition of simultaneity excludes the personal mind
from being mapped to the tissues of the brain. Does it also exclude the possibility of
the universal metamind’s being mapped to physical objects (that is, having an object-
oriented architecture, as suggested earlier)? The answer is no, because the
metamind’s constituent object-minds (which map to individual physical objects) are
not collectively unified in a single stream of consciousness. Relativistic non-
simultaneity is problematic only when one tries to map a unified stream of
consciousness to separable objects. The personal mind is a unified stream of
consciousness, whereas the metamind is not; hence the personal mind cannot be
mapped onto separable objects whereas the metamind can. Nevertheless, as we shall
see below, further considerations arise if ‘telepathy’ is permitted between remote
minds.
This does not deny the core intuition—shared by panpsychists and object-oriented
mental monists alike—that we should expect the structure of the mental world to
mirror the physical world, but panpsychists and mental monists require it to be at the
micro and macro levels respectively.
4.4 Corollary 2: Hypothesis of Universal Mental Time
Relativity prohibits faster-than-light communication (Tolman 1917), but the
decoupling of mental time and physical time seems to open up the possibility of
instant communication. We need to check this potential conflict.
(a) Physically instant communication is impossible. Relativity states that if two
observers, A and B, travel in uniform motion relative to each other, then in relation
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to A’s frame of reference, time will slow down in B, and vice versa. This is well
established experimentally. Consequently, superluminal communication would lead
to contradiction. Suppose at t3, A sends an instantaneous signal to B. Because of time
dilation, it arrives at B at t2 < t
3. Upon receiving this signal, B sends an instant
message to A, saying “Don’t send the signal,” which arrives at t1. Because of time
dilation, t1 < t2 < t3. On receiving this message, A decides not to send the first signal
at t3, and we have a contradiction. (b) Mentally instant communication is permitted
by mental monism. Since minds are not in space, communication between minds is
not required to travel through any intervening space. Therefore mental monism, in
principle, permits communication between two minds in an instant of mental time.
Furthermore, mental monism, in principle, also permits disembodied minds.
Therefore even if we try to block instant communication between two embodied
minds by saying it cannot ‘travel’ faster than light between the respective avatars,
this could be circumvented by using a disembodied mind as an intermediary. (c)
Therefore, if mentally instant communication entails physically instant
communication, then mental monism cannot be true.
What exactly do we mean by ‘instant communication’ from A to B? In a physical
system, it means that PA originates a signal at time t and it arrives at PB at the time t'
that, by the Lorentz time dilation equation, exists in PB when PA is at t. In a mental
system, it is not so well defined, as we have no units or instruments for measuring
mental time. The most plausible model is one that has been in currency from James
(1890) to Hameroff and Penrose (2014), namely that consciousness comprises a
series of discrete moments of awareness. Whether we accept this discrete model, or
one in which consciousness flows continuously in time, the ‘clock’ that drives
consciousness is the succession of experiences. For an embodied mind that is
interacting with its environment, that ‘clock’ will in turn be correlated with the
succession of neural impulses entering the sensory cortex, or arising from internal
brain activity. Therefore, the physical correlate of elapsed mental time will be the
elapsed physical time within the local frame of reference of the avatar (be it a brain
or an artificial device). If, at time t, mind MA sends a mentally instantaneous signal
to MB, then it will arrive at its destination at the same local time t (not the Lorentz
dilated time t' < t). Whereas physically instantaneous communication goes backward
in time, mentally instantaneous communication does not. Hence mentally
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instantaneous communication, as permitted by mental monism, does not entail a
relativistic paradox.
To illustrate this, we can consider Einstein’s thought-experiment of two lamps at
opposite ends of a high-velocity train. One observer, Passenger, sits in the middle of
the train; and another, Stationmaster, in a station. As the train passes the station, each
lamp makes one flash. If Passenger receives both light signals at the same time, she
concludes that—in her reference frame—the lamps flashed simultaneously.
Meanwhile Stationmaster sees the rear lamp flash before the front lamp, but both
signals reach Passenger together. (Photons from the rear lamp must travel farther. In
the time it takes the photons to travel from the rear lamp to Passenger, she will have
moved forward slightly with the train.) If a third observer, Aeronaut, is travelling
faster in the same direction (in an aeroplane, say) alongside the train, then she will
observe the opposite sequence: in her reference frame, the front lamp signals first.
So far, this is standard relativity theory in the physical domain. Now let us
consider the mental domain, where mental events are not in physical spacetime, and
therefore not embedded in frames of reference. According to object-oriented mental
monism, a lamp’s flashing is a physical rendering of a state change in the
corresponding object-mind. Given that the sequence of physical flashes depends on
each observer’s frame of reference, we naturally want to ask: In what sequence do
the object-minds actuate these flashes? As the object-mind’s state change is not in
physical time, there is no fact of the matter as to which mental state changed
physically first; but we can still ask which occurred first in mental time. Imagine (for
the sake of argument) that observers can ‘telepathically’ communicate with object-
minds. Now the observers can interrogate the object-minds of the lamps and discover
which object-mind triggered a signal first. Suppose, for example, that the rear lamp’s
object-mind triggered its signal first. Now, the Aeronaut will be surprised to discover
that, although front lamp flashes first in physical time (in her reference frame), the
rear lamp’s object-mind triggered a signal first. Thus she has foreknowledge of a
future physical event, which is spooky but not paradoxical. Next, imagine (again, for
the sake of argument) that an observer can ‘telekinetically’ control the object-mind
of a lamp. Let us vary the experimental protocol: as soon as Stationmaster discovers
that the rear lamp’s object-mind has actuated its flash, he decides whether or not to
veto (telekinetically) the front lamp’s flash. This potentially creates a problem for the
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other two observers. For, Passenger should see both flashes at the same time, and
Aeronaut should already have seen the front flash first, which Stationmaster has just
cancelled telekinetically.
This paradox arises only if telepathy is physically instantaneous; but as we have
seen, it is instantaneous only mentally, not physically. To be sure, in Aeronaut’s
reference frame, the time at which the front lamp is scheduled to flash can precede
the time when Stationmaster decides whether to cancel the front flash. Aeronaut can
telepathically ask Stationmaster if he has done so, and even ask the front lamp if it
has flashed, and therefore can know whether the front lamp will flash, at a time
physically before the lamp would, but the light signal from the front lamp (travelling,
obviously, at the speed of light) will not reach Aeronaut until after that time. So if the
front lamp is vetoed, Aeronaut will not see the light, and there is no paradox, and no
violation of causality. Admittedly, in Aeroaut’s frame of reference, it seems that
Stationmaster’s mind retrocausally went back in time to cancel the front lamp’s flash,
but in Stationmaster’s own frame of reference, there is no retrocausation.
In an earlier subsection (Argument from relativity II), we saw that mental events
that are inside a unified stream of consciousness must be in absolute order (not
relative to an observer), and therefore cannot be mapped onto separable physical
events. We now see that the existence of instant communication (‘telepathy’) between
remote minds is enough to impose an absolute ordering on all mental events in the
universe. This has the weird (but not paradoxical) result that events in two remote
physical avatars could occur in any order (depending on observer) but mental events
in their corresponding minds must occur in a single, definite order. This may seem
unpalatable as it hints at a privileged frame of reference, which would go against the
spirit of relativity. Nevertheless, we should remember that the notion of no privileged
frame of reference is not an axiom, but a consequence of verificationism (since there
is no way to tell whether you are at rest or in uniform motion), and nothing proposed
here violates verificationism.
4.5 Argument from Excision
We now resume the main thread of this paper and examine the third argument about
mental location.
We may say that ‘the quickness of the neuron deceives the mind.’ Leibniz (1714,
§17) was perhaps the first to remedy this by imagining a vast thinking engine whose
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tangible components take away that deception. Davis (1974) likewise imagined a
brain-like organization in which each neuron was simulated by an office and axons
by telephone lines, while Block (1978) proposed a brain simulated by the population
of China. Lloyd (1999a, §2.4) argued that a thought-experiment that introduced
macroscopic delays in the brain led to a contradiction between the unity of
consciousness and an identity theory of mind and brain. Here, I will reframe the
argument for panpsychism.
Returning to a brain of normal size, consider two pieces of brain tissue B1 and B2
whose quiddity (according to panpsychism) is constituted by two mental experiences
M1 and M2, and suppose that M1 and M2 are co-conscious at the same time. Let’s say
M1 is seeing a flash and M2 is hearing a bang. Let us surgically pull B2 out of the
cranium, while retaining its full connectivity. Assume that all nerve fibers to B2 are
extended by, say, a metre of microscopically thin optic fiber. Keep this fragment of
brain, B2, alive and working as normal in a petri dish. Part of the person’s mind is
now in the petri dish, and the rest of it is in the person’s head. This is undoubtedly
weird, but it is not paradoxical: both brain function and subjective experience are
unchanged.
According to panpsychism, B1 and B2 by themselves constitute the bare existence
of M1 and M2 but do not constitute the co-consciousness of M1 and M2. Panpsychists
have not explained how distinct experiences such as M1 and M2 combine into a
unified mind, but as panpsychism rests on the notion of consciousness as the
interiority of the physical, the combination mechanism must be a physical process
that also has a mental consequence. So, logically, there must be a third physical event,
B0, that combines M1 and M2 by making them co-conscious. Panpsychists seem to
have no account of what B0 is, but to be plausible it must involve some causal
connection between B1 and B2. For the sake of concreteness we may imagine it
involves the transmission of some neural signals between B1 and B2. That is, M1 and
M2 are co-conscious if, and only if, B0 occurs.
Let us delay the onset of co-consciousness by inserting microdevices into the
fibres connecting B2 to B0 in the brain. These microdevices can delay signals by
anything from zero seconds to twenty-four hours. We perform a series of tests in
which we give the person the flash and bang stimuli, and on each trial we increase
the delay for B0. At a delay of zero, the situation is as normal; at a delay of, say, five
43
minutes, it is paradoxical. Say the stimuli are applied about half a second before noon,
so that at 12:00 precisely, B1 and B2 occur and hence (by panpsychism) M1 and M2
occur. But B0 occurs five minutes later, at 12:05. Hence M1 and M2 become
retrospectively co-conscious five minutes after they happened. This contradicts the
principle that the macro-ordering of mental events is indubitable.
It is impossible to imagine what this person experiences. At 12:00 she sees the
flash, but hears no bang. Meanwhile, the isolated mind of B2, sitting in the petri dish,
hears the bang. At 12:05, it retrospectively becomes the case that the bang M2 was
co-conscious with the flash M1. But the subject does not hear the bang at 12:05, for
the bang already happened at 12:00, in its own mini-mind. In fact, the subject will
not notice anything at all. Yet, according to panpsychism, M1 and M2 have become
co-conscious.
Either mental events are co-conscious when they occur, or they are not co-
conscious. Since panpsychism entails retroactive co-consciousness, it entails a
contradiction, so we must reject it.
4.6 Spatially Separable Panpsychism is Untenable
I have given two thought-experiments showing that the panpsychist premise of
associating mental states with the states of separable physical entities leads to
contradictions. Therefore, a mind’s correlate within the physical construct must be a
spatially non-separable ‘simple’, a physical entity of some sort that, if it has parts,
then those parts cannot be separated out. The nature of that simple is beyond this
paper, but quantum-mechanical correlates of consciousness, such as the state of a
microtubule, might work (e.g. Hameroff and Penrose 2014).
To avoid this problem with panpsychism, some writers have advocated
‘cosmopsychism’, associating a universal mind with the state of the whole physical
universe. For example, Mathews (2011), Jaskolla and Buck (2012), Shani (2015),
Nagasawa and Wager (2016). At first, this seems like an extrapolation of
panpsychism, but jettisoning any structural mirroring between the physical construct
and the mental world loses the core intuition of panpsychism. Cosmopsychism is
another special case of mental monism, for the same reason as panpsychism is,
namely because the mind cannot really be in space, which is part of a topic neutral
system. Cosmopsychism is not, however, equivalent to the most general form of
mental monism as the latter allows for disembodied mental entities.
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Berkeleyan idealism seems more plausible, and offers more explanatory power,
than cosmopsychism, but it remains to be seen which theory is right.
As we saw earlier, the metamental structures responsible for macroscopic bodies
are object-minds. By analogy with human minds, we might consider the plausible
supposition that the object-mind also has a unified stream of consciousness, although
we cannot tell this for sure. If so, then, despite the protestations of panpsychists that
tables and chairs do not have recognizable minds, they would in fact do so. Obviously
there is no cognitive circuitry inside items of furniture, so the table cannot think, nor
the chair speak, but it seems the table may have a rudimentary but unified conscious
mind, as does its companion chair.
5. General Conclusion
I have argued that panpsychism is a particular case of mental monism, that mental
monism in general is true, but the particular case of panpsychism is not; that reality
consists of minds, and what we take to be the physical world is a construct grounded
in the mental world; that there is at most a single common subject for all minds; that
each mind correlates with a spatially non-separable simple in the physical world; and
that the natural order is driven by a metamind, which resolves into encapsulated
object-minds that are responsible for macroscopic bodies.
6. Postrequisite: Hierarchical Language-Games
The earlier sections (Comparison to Evaluation 2) lead to the General Conclusion,
and one can accept or reject this reasoning as it stands. Even if one accepts this
reasoning as valid, however, the conclusion may seem unbelievable. Faith in the real
existence of the physical world is rooted so deeply that many people find it hard to
let go, even in the face of logic. In this final section, I will address what appears to
be a central obstacle to the credibility of mental monism. This does not add anything
to the arguments per se that lead to the general conclusion, but is a ‘postrequisite’ in
the sense that is required after the conclusion to make it credible.
Given the conclusion that only conscious minds exist, how can we speak correctly
about the everyday world? According to mental monism, the table at which I sit does
not exist. How then, can I meaningfully say I am sitting at this table, writing this
paper? Generations of critics have protested that mental monism, whilst it may be
logically irrefutable, is pragmatically untenable. This objection was anticipated by
45
Berkeley (1710, §51), who wrote that, in the ‘vulgar acceptation’, it is correct to assert
the existence of the table, whilst in the ‘learned acceptation’ it is correct to deny its
existence. Following Lloyd (2006, §1.4), I shall recast Berkeley’s differentiation of
‘acceptations’ into the modern terminology of Wittgenstein’s language-games. Flew
(1974) has also recognized in Berkeley (1732, §7) an adumbration of Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein (1953) coined the term ‘language-game’ to denote a rule-bound
pattern of social activity where utterances are integrated into a wider apparatus of
action. His motive was to jettison the naïve Lockean (1690) notion of words as labels
and the early Wittgensteinian (1922) notion of propositions as pictures, and to forge
a new theory of integrated language and behavior. In this later and more nuanced
account, Wittgenstein wrote (1953, §43), “For a large class of cases … in which we
employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use
in the language.” Thus a word is no longer considered as having a single fixed
meaning but as having different roles in different language-games. Wittgenstein
compared words to the levers of a steam engine, which look and feel the same, as
they are made to be handled, but perform functions of different kinds. Likewise,
words might share the same look-and-feel but play roles of different kinds.
Here, I will use language-games to differentiate the roles played by terms of two
particular classes: physical and mental. For instance, the preposition ‘in’ has the same
look-and-feel in sentences such as these: “I have some food in my stomach” and “I
have a pain in my stomach.” The meaning of ‘in’ is, however, fundamentally
different: in the first case, it denotes the spatial containment of an object; in the other,
it denotes a psychophysical correlation. A shared linguistic appearance hides that
difference, inducing the naïve belief that, in this example, the pain is actually inside
the stomach.
This differentiation of meaning is illustrated in the Wachowskis’ The Matrix
(1999), whose protagonists move between an immersive virtual-reality and a physical
world (Lloyd 2003a). By Tarski’s (1933) definition of truth, a statement such as “Neo
is sitting in a noodle bar” is true if he is sitting in a noodle bar. Now, consider (a)
sitting in a noodle bar in the physical world and (b) sitting in a simulated noodle bar
in the computer-generated world. In both Neo can truthfully say, “I am sitting in a
noodle bar,” but what does the sentence actually mean in situations (a) and (b)?
Consideration of the divergent ‘truth-conditions’ and ‘truth-tests’ of that sentence
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will give us two different ideas of the meaning. On the one hand, the truth-conditions
of that same sentence in the situations (a) and (b) are mutually exclusive: if Neo sits
in the physical noodle bar, then he is not wired into the virtual-reality and he cannot
be sitting in the simulated noodle bar; and vice versa. On the other hand, the truth-
tests of the sentence in (a) and (b) are identical: Neo looks around and sees the tables
and bowl of noodles, and smells and tastes the food; if he telephones Trinity and
invites her to join him, she can have sensory impressions consistent with his.
Therefore, when Trinity asks “Are you in the noodle bar?” and he says “Yes,” he
conveys information about his sensory impressions, not the unobserved putative
substrate. So, empirically, the meaning intended by the utterance is not the truth-
conditions but the truth-tests. The common academic doctrine that truth-conditions,
rather than truth-tests, constitute meaning misses this point.
In the physical language-game, statements refer to truth-tests within the physical
world; in the other, they refer to truth-tests within the simulated world. A proposition
may belong to one or the other language-game according to whether it is intended to
be about the physical or simulated world. In both cases, the truth-tests may be the
same, but the tests are carried out in different situations.
These language-games, however, are not equal. For, Trinity and Neo are
acquainted with both worlds and can move between them, so when Neo invites her
to join him, she may ask, “Which noodle bar? The real or the simulated?” In Tarski’s
terms, the physical language-game is a metalanguage to the simulational language-
game. This metalinguality consists in the fact that the results of truth-tests of the
simulational language-game are logically supported (in Foster’s term) by facts within
the domain of the physical language-game; and not vice versa. The contents of the
computer database (which are facts within the physical world) define the truth or
falsity of statements (hence facts) within the simulational language-game. Thus
Neo’s being in the simulated noodle bar is a fact in the simulated world, but it rests
on data that have been populated in a physical computer; and those data are physical
facts. Consequently, from the point of view of the metalingual language-game (in this
case, the physical one), the world denoted by the subordinate language-game (in this
case, the simulational one) is a construct.
This extends Chalmers’ (2003) analysis of The Matrix. For individuals who are
locked into the Matrix, Chalmers wrote that the claim that their world is a computer
47
simulation is not a sceptical hypothesis but a metaphysical one. “The Metaphysical
Hypothesis here tells us about the processes underlying our ordinary reality, but it
does not entail that this reality does not exist. … Both the Physical Hypothesis and
the Metaphysical Hypothesis tell us about the processes underlying chairs. They do
not entail that there are no chairs. Rather, they tell us what chairs are really like.” For
individuals, such as Neo and Trinity, who understand what the Matrix is and can
move between the simulated and natural worlds, that analysis is not sufficient. For
them, the claim that the world inside the Matrix is a computer simulation is no longer
just a metaphysical hypothesis. They can leave the Matrix and visit Machine City
where they can see the machines that run the simulation. It is to accommodate this
broader perspective that I propose that we should view the discourse of Neo and
Trinity as a hierarchy of language-games, for the simulated and physical worlds. In
fact, Lloyd (2003b) argued that what seemed to be the real world in The Matrix is
revealed in the sequel, The Matrix Reloaded (Wachowski & Wachowski 2003) to be
another computer simulation inside another world, which implies a hierarchy of three
language-games.
Let us pause to recapitulate. First, a given sentence may entail fixed truth-tests
but also entail multiple different truth-conditions that depend on which language-
game it is uttered in. Second, if one language-game is metalingual to another (in the
above sense) then the truth-conditions of statements in the subordinate language-
game describe a construct that is logically supported by facts in the metalingual
language-game.
This conclusion is pivotal to removing the common misconception that mental
monism is pragmatically refutable since it requires disbelief in the necessities of
everyday life. How, for example, can I write this essay on mental monism if I believe
that this laptop is unreal? The answer is that (a) in the physical language-game, the
laptop can be said to exist; but (b) in the mental language-game, the laptop can be
said to be a fiction, and (c) the mental language-game is metalingual to the physical
one. The physical language-game is subordinate insofar as the results of truth-tests of
physical statements are supported by facts in the mental world. For example, a truth-
test for the (physical) statement that there is a potential difference of 1.5 volts between
the terminals of the battery in this laptop would involve reading a voltmeter; but my
consciously seeing a reading of 1.5 volts is a fact in the mental world, which is
PeterBLloyd
48
articulated in the mental language-game. It is in precisely this sense that all physical
truth-tests are supported by mental facts; and that the physical language-game is
therefore subordinate to the mental language-game.
With that distinction of language-games in mind, we can now dispel a common
objection to Berkeleyanism. According to mental monism, it is true that (p) the laptop
on which I am writing is real, but on the other hand, it is also true that (q) the laptop
on which I am writing is a fiction. The proviso is that the proposition (p) is taken in
the physical language-game, and the proposition (q) is taken in the mental language-
game. This is a distinction of precisely the same kind as the one we make when
dealing with virtual-realities such as the Matrix, which allows us to make the true
statement (r) I am in the noodle bar (in the simulational language-game), and (s) I am
not in the noodle bar but wired into a virtual-reality (in the physical language-game).
Differentiating the language-games obviates the self-contradiction that many impute
to Berkeley’s philosophy, and we see that mental monism is pragmatically
serviceable as well as logically sound.
7. Discussion: Potential Applications
The motivation for looking at mental monism, and the arguments defending it, are
philosophical, but that does not mean the theory has no value outside philosophy.
Although mental monism changes nothing in physics—the laws governing the
physical construct are those that have been uncovered, and will continue to be
uncovered, by the disciplines of the physical sciences—nevertheless there is
considerable evidence for anomalous phenomena (e.g. Utts 1996, Hyman 1996,
Radin 1997). Psi phenomena—principally telepathy, telekinesis, and telecognition—
resist explanation in physical terms at a deep level. If mental monism provides a way
to develop naturalistic explanatory models of psi that do not violate physics, then that
is worth following through. On a different front, the problem of consciousness
engineering—of building artificial conscious minds—is one that requires a
fundamental framework in which consciousness is understood as a real component
of reality rather than eliminated. Both of these potential applications are examined in
follow-on papers in preparation.
Acknowledgement: This paper was improved by critical comments on an early
49
draft, from Bill Adams, David Chalmers, and John Gregg.
In memoriam: Michael J. Lockwood (1944-2018) was my tutor at Oxford, and
my intellectual debt to him is great. His death is a great loss to the study of
consciousness.
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1 Chalmers (2018) gives three variants: panpsychism asserts “microphysical entities have mental
states” (p 6), or “some fundamental physical entities have mental states” (p 11), or “some
fundamental microphysical entities have mental states.” (p 12). Chalmers has said that the second
one is right. But the differences are not germane to the present discussion. He also uses Strawson’s
term “micropsychism” (p 12) to mean “the thesis that some fundamental microphysical entities have
mental states”, in other words microphysical panpsychism.
2 Chalmers (2018, p 11) also defined it thus: “Micro-idealism is the thesis that all concrete facts are
grounded in facts about the mental states of fundamental microscopic entities, such as quarks or
photons.” That, however, would mean that micro-idealism is not a form of idealism, since it would
make the microphysical entities fundamental rather than the conscious minds and their contents.
Were micro-idealism to be defined in this way then it would trivially entail panpsychism, but that
would not be relevant here as it would say nothing about idealism.
