Abstract
Abstract The dual-aspect monist conjecture launched by Pauli and Jung in the mid-20th century will be couched in somewhat formal terms to characterize it more concisely than by verbal description alone. After some background material situating the Pauli–Jung conjecture among other conceptual approaches to the mind–matter problem, the main body of this paper outlines its general framework of a basic psychophysically neutral reality with its derivative mental and physical aspects and the nature of the correlations that connect these aspects. Some related approaches are discussed to identify key similarities to and deviations from the Pauli–Jung framework that may be useful for cross-fertilization.
Highlights
The question of how the mental and the physical are related to one another is likely as old as humans are pondering the human condition
Any psychophysically neutral state ΦPPN can manifest itself in separate states ΦM and ΦP in state spaces and, respectively, representing the derivative realities M and P
Since ΦM and ΦP derive from the same state ΦPPN, their manifestation co-creates correlations between them, denoted as (ΦM ∼ ΦP). These correlations are acausal, meaning that they are not due to a causal influence between ΦM and ΦP, and they are not chance events either. Since they are co-created in the manifestation process, they depend on the state ΦPPN from which they derive
Summary
The question of how the mental and the physical are related to one another is likely as old as humans are pondering the human condition. The other is known as materialism, or physicalism, where some form of the physical is granted ontological primacy, while the mental is considered as derivative Both of them avoid the problem of interacting substances, because only one substance is left as fundamental. For Mach, James, Russell, and the neo-Russellians, often subsumed as neutral monists, the compositional arrangements of psychophysically neutral elements decide about their mental or physical properties In this picture of wholes constituted by parts, following classical systems theory, the mental and the physical are reducible to the neutral domain. As a particular point of comparison, their different outlook on cosmic consciousness, panpsychism, and the psychophysically neutral will be analyzed
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