Silberstein Michael, Stuckey William
Department of Philosophy, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA 17022, USA.
Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Entropy (Basel). 2020 May 14;22(5):551. doi: 10.3390/e22050551.
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.
在此，我们并非仅仅对运用动力系统理论、图论、信息论等去构建大脑动力学与网络以及意识过程的各种状态和程度之间的关系感兴趣。我们感兴趣的是现象学意识体验与基础物理学如何最深刻地相关这一问题。任何试图从数学和形式上对意识体验及其与物理学的关系进行建模的尝试，都必须在脑海中有一些关于意识体验的本质、物质的本质以及它们之间关系的本质的形而上学假设。如今，最突出的形而上学固定点是强涌现或泛心论的某种变体。在本文中，我们将详细阐述另一种独特的形而上学起点，即中立一元论。特别地，我们将聚焦于威廉·詹姆斯和伯特兰·罗素的中立一元论的一个变体。与强涌现和泛心论都以各自的方式从物理学作为基础出发不同，我们的目标是提出一种如何从中立一元论推导出基础物理学的方法。因此，从基于我们对中立一元论的刻画的两个公理出发，我们将勾勒出相对论和量子力学一些关键特征的推导及解释，这些特征暗示了这两种理论之间一种通常未被认识到的统一性。我们贯穿始终的解释方式将是原理性的，与爱因斯坦所理解的那种建设性的方式相对。我们将始终论证，对属性二元论的偏向以及对还原动力学和建设性解释的偏向，导致了意识研究中的难题和解释鸿沟，并在基础物理学中导致了严重的未解决问题，比如量子力学中的测量问题和纠缠之谜，以及在产生一个有充分经验依据的量子引力理论方面缺乏进展。我们希望表明，鉴于我们对中立一元论的理解以及由此得出的一切，上述问题能够得到令人满意的解决，从而为我们留下一个关于意识体验与物理学之间关系的更加直观和符合常识的模型。
