11. Exploring the Alternatives

We did a deep dive on Physicalism primarily because it goes well with science and the majority of the scientists are Physicalists (I think). As I called it out before, science is the best and the most successful tool we have to explain the world. It is only when we try to build an entire philosophy that explains everything, including our mind, we run into some issues which we saw in the last few chapters. Whether science will be able to surmount these challenges in the future, is an open question.

Now we will look at other philosophies, which aren’t perfect by any means themselves. They all have their own demons to deal with. There are numerous types of ontological philosophies and subtypes. In theory, we could imagine infinite possible philosophies which are consistent with our experience. We will focus on the most popular ones.

Remember that believing in these alternate philosophies does not mean you have to oppose science. You can treat science as a tool that allows you to make predictions in the world we perceive while rejecting the hypothesis of Occam’s Razor. You can refuse to believe that the mind can be explained based on physical processes. You can treat quarks, spacetime, etc. as imaginary constructs which help you predict what you perceive rather than things which exist for real.

All these philosophies have their own problems, just like physicalism. With that in mind, let’s go over a few of them.

Dualism

When philosophers hear the word Dualism, the first name that comes to their minds is René Descartes. There are different types of dualism though.

Dualism is just a philosophy that says there are two categories of entities making up the reality. One of them is almost always the physical reality which Physicalism treats as the one and only reality. The nature of the second entity making up reality and its relationship with the physical reality is where different dualist philosophies differ.

Most people believe in “souls”. We treat the soul as something that is unique per individual and can exist even if the physical body dies. So we have two categories of entities - the physical reality and the reality of the souls. Some dualistic philosophers claim that the second entity is that of mind as opposed to souls. If soul and mind are the same can be debated and understood only by the philosophers who proposed these philosophies. Both of these theories are still dualistic.

The ones who call it the mind usually use dualism as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness. Descartes claimed that the mind is a “substance” outside of the physical reality. Hence, his theory is called Substance Dualism.

There is another dualistic philosophy named Property Dualism which states there’s only one kind of ‘stuff’ - ordinary physical matter like brains - but it has two irreducibly different kinds of features: physical features (weight, electrical activity) and mental features (what pain feels like). The mental ones can’t be fully reduced to the physical ones. Property dualism has many subtypes. The property dualists have to answer what kind of matter actually has mental properties.

Panpsychism says even the tiniest bits of matter have a faint spark of experience - not full human-like consciousness, more like a whisper of ‘what-it’s-like.’ Human consciousness is what you get when you combine gazillions of these sparks. This makes it difficult for them to explain how we only sense one consciousness as a human when in practice, every part of our brain must have its own consciousness.

Substance dualism, on the other hand, generally considers the mental substance as just one entity for each mind. Let us look at a short list of pros and cons of substance dualism.

Pros

Seems to do well in explaining the unity and immutability of self. It is only the matter in physical reality that is divisible and can be mutated, But this non-physical entity is described as indivisible and immutable and capable of providing a single unified experience of the world.
Qualia is also explained away as a process that happens beyond physical processes.

Cons

What is the nature of the relationship of this non-physical entity with the physical world? If we believe in free will of mind, the mind should be able to affect the physical world. But if we can see the impact of this supposed non-physical entity on real life, shouldn’t it just be considered a physical entity as we could make observation of its presence, albeit indirectly? Another way to look at it is that it would really break the scientific laws if a substance sitting outside of the physical reality can cause changes in the physical world.
If a dualist says that this non-physical entity only experiences the world but doesn’t have an impact on the physical world, it makes the above problem go away. But still there is an open question of how this non-physical entity connects with the world to experience it. Dualists could argue that we will never find out.
Unlike science, dualism gets away with some hard problems of consciousness by handwaving and saying that we have no way to know how the second reality works because it is not part of physical reality. This puts off people who want some kind of explanation for these phenomena.

For the systematic ones, this is what a substance dualist philosophical system that also trusts science would look like:

It has the following rules to add any statement to the system
- The statements are about reality and knowledge which are considered true in the philosophical system that is proposed.
- The statements in this system have to follow the rules of logical reasoning and inferences.
- Any law added to the system about the physical world must make observable predictions and be falsifiable.
It has the following brute statements
- We assume that an objective world exists.
- We assume that people around us have minds just like us.
- Laws of classical physics.
- Laws of quantum physics.
- Laws of thermodynamics.
- Each mind is a separate substance that exists outside the physical reality.

As you can see, I have removed Occam’s razor, physicalist statement about the mind and added a brute sentence about the mind existing outside reality. It would look different for panpsychism. In case you want to build a philosophy that doesn’t want to rely on scientific principles, you can drop the rule requiring statements to have observable predictions and being falsifiable.

Idealism

Just like Descartes’s name is associated with Dualism, Berkeley’s name is most commonly associated with Idealism. Idealism asserts that the mind or the spirit is fundamental. One famous version of idealism - Berkeley’s - says there’s no mind-independent physical stuff at all; what we call physical things are really patterns of experience, a bit like a shared dream. (Other idealists, like Hegel, tell a different story - for him reality is a universal Spirit unfolding through history.) Everything about the world we observe is mental, like a dream. Unlike the dream we have inside this world, the world we think is “reality” is a shared dream with all the other people. It is a type of monism, with the only real entity being the mind.

The biggest challenge for idealism is how do you account for the physical world which looks objective and also the other minds, the two brute statements we added to the layman’s system. In other words, how do you escape Solipsism in an idealistic philosophy? When I dream, I am the only conscious entity in the dream. The rest of the people in the dreams are just projections made in the dreamer’s mind. If this world where you are reading what I have written is also your dream, are all the other characters in this dream just your projection? Am I a projection that is not real? Wouldn’t that lead to solipsism?

The answer Berkeley had for this is that God is the ultimate dreamer who ensures that the objective world runs even when you are not aware and God shares this dream with all the minds.

There is also Hegel’s idealism that considers reality as a universal spirit that evolves throughout history and develops self-awareness. It is difficult to understand, right? It is indeed. There are lots of memes about how Hegel’s philosophy is hard to understand.

The advantage of idealism is similar to dualism. As the mind is a non-physical entity, they can easily explain its unity and indivisibility. The main disadvantage is that just like dualism, it handwaves most of the phenomena we observe to be part of mental entities we cannot understand and hence give up the responsibility to explain it all. Plus, let’s face it. It is so counter-intuitive that it is hard to believe for any normal person.

Neutral Monism

Neutral monism is another alternative worth knowing about, and it has an impressive pedigree: Spinoza gestured at it in the 1600s, and it was developed seriously by Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell in the early 1900s. The idea is disarmingly simple. Dualism says reality is made of two kinds of stuff - mind-stuff and matter-stuff. Physicalism says there is only one kind of stuff, and it is physical. Neutral monism says there is only one kind of stuff, but it is neither mental nor physical. Mind and matter are just two different ways this neutral stuff can be arranged or viewed - like how the same curve looks concave from one side and convex from the other. The curve itself is neither; “concave” and “convex” are just perspectives on it.

Why would anyone believe this? Because it neatly sidesteps both of the classic traps. Dualism struggles with the interaction problem - how does ghostly mind-stuff push physical neurons around? Neutral monism has no interaction problem, because there is only one stuff; nothing needs to cross between realms. And physicalism struggles with the hard problem - how does experience arise from dead matter? Neutral monism softens that too, because experience doesn’t have to arise from anything; Russell suggested the intrinsic nature of the neutral stuff might already be experience-like, with physics describing only its outer structure and relations. In a way, it is the most economical theory on the table: one stuff, no miracles, no magic emergence.

The catch, of course, is that nobody can tell you what the neutral stuff actually is. Say “it is neither mental nor physical” and the critic will ask what is left - and the honest answer is that neutral monists mostly describe what it is not. Push on the “experience-like intrinsic nature” and the theory starts looking like panpsychism wearing a different hat; push on the “physics describes its structure” and it starts looking like physicalism with extra steps. Russell himself never fully settled the matter. Still, as a logical possibility, it deserves its seat at the table: it shows that “mind versus matter” might be a false choice, and that the real answer could be neither.

Personal God

All the religious philosophies which involve a personal God tend to believe in the existence of a separate realm outside of the physical world. This makes these philosophies mostly dualistic. But instead of the soul world or the mind world just being filled with souls or minds, the philosophies say that a personal God also exists in this world. Sometimes, they also add other worlds like heaven, hell, etc. which makes it pluralistic rather than just dualistic.

These philosophies tend to posit that the personal God has some level of control over the world, while also imposing moral values that people must follow, which leads to a lot of open questions.

If God is good and has control over the world, why do bad things happen in this world?
If things are anyway in God’s control, why do we have free will and why are we punished for our bad deeds after life if God could have stopped us from doing the bad deeds?

Different religions answer these differently which may be convincing for some but not for the others. And then there is the Greek religious philosophy, where Gods don’t seem to care about what is Good or Bad and they control the humans based on their whims. In such a philosophy, there is still the question of who created God.

Eastern philosophies

Eastern philosophies (both Hinduism/Vedic philosophies and Buddhism) deal a lot with the philosophy of mind. They have their own versions of dualism and idealism. There are also some esoteric philosophies which are very close but don’t quite fit with idealism or dualism. If you are interested, do read about Advaita Vedanta (the Vedic view that everything is ultimately one reality, Brahman), Vishishtadvaita (the world and individual souls are real but inseparably depend on God), Madhyamaka or ‘Emptiness’ (the Buddhist view that nothing has an independent essence), Yogacara or ‘Consciousness-only’ (everything we know is shaped by mind), and the later Buddhist synthesis of the two.

While Advaita and Visishtadvaita are Vedic, meaning that they are philosophies based on the religious text of Vedas, Shunyavada, Vijnanavada and Svatantra Vijnanavada are Buddhist, based on interpretations of Buddha’s teachings. There are many more Vedic and Buddhist philosophies. It is interesting how the same teachings can be interpreted in numerous ways. The intellectual arguments made by these philosophers are quite profound and are in no way less intellectual than Western Philosophies. It is unfortunate that Eastern Philosophies don’t receive the respect they deserve Western World. They are often ignored as mystic or religious. While there are mystic philosophies as you will see in the section below, there are many non-mystic philosophies too.

The Infinite God

Many eastern philosophies and even some Western philosophers, describe the God as impersonal “Absolute”. They argue that God is just a type of infinity that humans cannot reach through rational or empirical knowledge. While some philosophies state that this infinite God is unreachable for humans, other philosophies claim that one can reach God through Mysticism.

We came across mysticism when we discussed the type of knowledge. The perceived empirical knowledge and rational knowledge achieved by thinking are considered the two types of knowledge humans possess. The mystics argue that there is a third kind of knowledge that you cannot just share with one another, like empirical or rational knowledge. You have to learn it by yourself through the processes which will lead you there, like meditation.

How does this Absolute relate to the human mind? There are different theories. Some say that human minds are just part of the Absolute. Others claim that the human mind is a reflection of the absolute. Again, you will understand only if you are capable of attaining the mystic knowledge.

If you do so, these philosophies claim that you can indeed reach or understand the Absolute. Whether you want to trust this and embark in this direction is up to you. It is a big decision.

General criticism

As we saw with dualism and idealism, there is a common thread across all these alternative philosophies, which is that the most difficult questions are usually pushed into realms we cannot understand. Mind? Yes it is in a non-physical realm that we can’t really explain. It just exists. God? Yes he is in a non-physical realm we don’t know about. Absolute? Can’t be understood easily. Follow the things I say and you may understand it before you die.

Physicalists and many scientifically minded people don’t like these kinds of answers and use this to criticise the non-physicalist philosophies. On the other hand, many people consider these philosophies which put human souls on a pedestal to be a much more satisfactory explanation of the reality than to imagine ourselves as a bunch of atoms pieced together by physical processes.

It is up to you to decide which one you prefer. Just don’t be a solipsist, please. I promise, I have a conscious experience.

A solipsist who does not care