The authors argue that conscious experience and fundamental physics are most deeply related through a metaphysical starting point called neutral monism, specifically the variant from William James and Bertrand Russell. Rather than treating physics as fundamental, they derive key features of relativity and quantum mechanics from two axioms grounded in neutral monism, suggesting a unity between these theories. They claim that biases toward property dualism and reductive dynamical explanation create the hard problem of consciousness and the explanatory gap, as well as unresolved issues in physics like the measurement problem and quantum entanglement. The paper aims to resolve these problems and offer a more intuitive model of the relationship between conscious experience and physics.
Neutral monism, the view that the fundamental nature of reality is neither mental nor physical but a neutral substance, offers the best solution to the hard problem of consciousness—explaining why and how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. This philosophical position also provides a distinctive path to a new form of panentheism, the belief that the divine pervades and interpenetrates the universe while also extending beyond it, through the lens of Advaita Vedanta, a non-dualistic school of Hindu philosophy. The argument presents neutral monism as superior to rival theories and connects it to a theological framework.