Abstract
Herein we are not interested in merely using dynamical systems theory, graph theory, information theory, etc., to model the relationship between brain dynamics and networks, and various states and degrees of conscious processes. We are interested in the question of how phenomenal conscious experience and fundamental physics are most deeply related. Any attempt to mathematically and formally model conscious experience and its relationship to physics must begin with some metaphysical assumption in mind about the nature of conscious experience, the nature of matter and the nature of the relationship between them. These days the most prominent metaphysical fixed points are strong emergence or some variant of panpsychism. In this paper we will detail another distinct metaphysical starting point known as neutral monism. In particular, we will focus on a variant of the neutral monism of William James and Bertrand Russell. Rather than starting with physics as fundamental, as both strong emergence and panpsychism do in their own way, our goal is to suggest how one might derive fundamental physics from neutral monism. Thus, starting with two axioms grounded in our characterization of neutral monism, we will sketch out a derivation of and explanation for some key features of relativity and quantum mechanics that suggest a unity between those two theories that is generally unappreciated. Our mode of explanation throughout will be of the principle as opposed to constructive variety in something like Einstein’s sense of those terms. We will argue throughout that a bias towards property dualism and a bias toward reductive dynamical and constructive explanation lead to the hard problem and the explanatory gap in consciousness studies, and lead to serious unresolved problems in fundamental physics, such as the measurement problem and the mystery of entanglement in quantum mechanics and lack of progress in producing an empirically well-grounded theory of quantum gravity. We hope to show that given our take on neutral monism and all that follows from it, the aforementioned problems can be satisfactorily resolved leaving us with a far more intuitive and commonsense model of the relationship between conscious experience and physics.
Highlights
Panpsychism is committed to the co-fundamentality of material and mental properties, and by definition associates fundamental mentality with whatever is physically fundamental; and the panquiddities or panqualityism view is committed to the idea that, “the qualities that we find in experience can exist unexperienced and they do exist in fundamental matter” ([27], p. 160), not so in the case of neutral monism
Those arguments are fraught with many interpretative perils and controversies, but the basic idea is that experience is possible for me only if some experiences are conceptualized as being of enduring objects, enduring through time and space
The bottom line is that general relativity (GR) is divergence-free per Axiom 1 and satisfies Axiom 2 more fundamentally than special relativity (SR) or Newtonian physics, since it holds for relatively accelerated reference frames
Summary
In the program opener for the Models of Consciousness Conference devoted to “formal approaches to the mind-matter relation”, held at Oxford in September of 2019, it says the following: Entropy 2020, 22, 551; doi:10.3390/e22050551 www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy. Contra Goldstein, the idea motivating the Oxford conference and the motivation for this special issue of Entropy is that perhaps the Galileo or Galileos of consciousness studies will figure out ways to formally model and explain various aspects of conscious processes and maybe even relate formally some of those aspects to neural processes or more fundamental physics Along with Galileo, one accepts that matter is fundamental and essentially non-conscious and one is a realist about conscious experience, one is forced into strong emergence and naturalistic property dualism; one is forced to look for something like brute psycho-physical bridge laws or some brute dynamical or causal process from which consciousness emerges [5,6]. This is where neutral monism parts company with the other accounts we have mentioned so far
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