Re-Thinking the World with Neutral Monism:Removing the Boundaries Between Mind, Matter, and Spacetime.
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) May 14, 2020 Michael Silberstein, William Stuckey 21 citations
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.