A testable solution to the mind-body problem?

A guest post by Mostyn Jones.

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Some of you know Mostyn through the writing workshop I organized not long ago here on Substack. After that we got to chatting and I discovered not only that we’d had a philosophy professor in our midst all along, but also that he’s publishing articles about the mind-body problem! (A hot topic in this ‘hardcore philosophy’ crowd.) Naturally I was eager to read his papers. In them you’ll find a fresh, pragmatic approach and a theory I found intriguing and instructive. I thought you might too. Luckily, he’s agreed to let me share it with you.

The excerpt below is taken from his published paper, A Simple, Testable Mind–Body Solution? It gives us a nice summary of various theories of mind and their problems. This is followed by a roundup of the problems he’s attempting to address. At the end you’ll find links to his papers where you can find out more about his neuro-electrical panpsychist theory of mind.

Enjoy!

—Tina

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Canva AI image generated from the words: monad, consciousness, mind body problem. Not bad. Not bad at all

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A Simple, Testable Mind-Body Solution?

Prominent mind–body theories

by Mostyn Jones

TRADITIONAL DUALISM treats minds and brains as different substances that interact yet can exist apart. But it’s unclear how such different substances can have any causal relations. For example, how do our non-spatial, immaterial minds cause our bodies to move? …These debates have been hard to decisively resolve.

DUAL ASPECT THEORIES traditionally treat the mental and physical as two (out of infinite) aspects of an underlying substance (God or nature). This evades dualism’s specific causal issues, but its causality is nonetheless highly obscure. For it shifts causation to a deeper level — the underlying substance, whose nature and aspect relations are deeply mysterious.

IDEALISM traditionally reverses the physicalist reduction of minds to bodies. It claims that bodies just exist as perceptions in the mind or spirit. While this is hard to refute, it controversially relies on God to explain what causes the objective world of bodies we perceive. It’s also rather obscure about why minds and brains are so intimately conjoined.

PHYSICALISM treats everything as physical. Its traditional reductive form tries to fully explain minds via physical science so that they’re nothing over and above brain activity. The main problem is that the two seem too different to be identical. This can be cast in various terms involving, for example, explanatory gap, conceivability, and knowledge problems (Levine, 1993; Chalmers, 1996; Jackson, 1982). But Leibniz put it most clearly: if we could enter our bodies like we enter a building, we wouldn’t find anything there that explains our perceptions. That is, we can’t see visual images by peering into brains, so how can they be identical? One reply is that science’s history is full of things once thought to be beyond understanding, so being currently unknown doesn’t entail being always unknowable. Such debates seem irresolvable.

Today’s dominant view is arguably NON-REDUCTIVE PHYSICALISM in which minds and bodies are dual properties of certain physical substances. For example, pain is a function involving information processing that detects and reacts to tissue damage. Pain can be realized in multiple hardwares, organic or non-organic, which abstracts it from any particular hardware. This view ends up with three quite different entities — abstract information, non-conscious brains, and conscious pains — with obscure, complicated interrelations. For example, how can the pains we feel be abstract, relational information processing?¹ And how can these abstract functions be realized in neurons (which seems as mysterious as Plato’s ideal forms being embodied in matter)? And how can pain pop into existence from non-conscious neurons once they process information in certain ways?

Another view today is RUSSELLIAN MONISM.² It typically says that physics describes the world only in terms of abstract mathematical structures and dynamics. Objects are thus described extrinsically via what they do to each other, not intrinsically via what they are in themselves. These monists say that these intrinsic natures exist and ground the abstract descriptions. Without this ground, the world would exist only as abstract structure lacking substance or qualities. An example is Chalmers’ dual aspect view, in which ‘Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.’³ These monist views are highly complicated. They’re also quite obscure about how pains can be the intrinsic nature of abstract information structures, and how they can help make them exist in substantial ways. Also, their grounding relation has the same obscurity as the realization relation mentioned above.

These prominent mind–body theories are obscure about how such radically different minds and bodies can be related by identity, causality, realization, third entities, etc. Endless debates involving these and various other mind–body theories have raised many further claims and counterclaims. These theories have long been crafted to be consistent both internally and with known facts about the world. They’re thus hard to refute empirically. For example, how can we experimentally test whether minds and bodies can exist apart — or whether the world exists in God? Debate is therefore unending. The result is obscurity and deadlock…

I’ll now try to avoid the hard and easy problems with a theory that makes mind–body relations clearer and simpler than in the theories above.

It’s called NEURO-ELECTRICAL PANPSYCHIST THEORY OF MIND, or neuro-electrical panpsychism (NP) for short. For it combines a neuro-electrical approach to the easy empirical problem with a pure panpsychist approach to the hard metaphysical problem.⁴

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Hey it’s me again. (Tina. Just to be perfectly clear).

If you’re not intrigued by now, you will be once you see what NP attempts to address. Here’s a quick roundup I gleaned from his papers, links below.

Upsides of neuro-electrical panpsychism

• Avoids the hard problem because there’s only consciousness.

• Avoids mind-brain identity and epiphenomenalism.

• Avoids obscure causality of dual aspect theories.

• Avoids complications in Russellian monistic theories.

• Avoids mysterious emergence and the need to ground abstractions (like information or mathematical structures) found in non-reductive physicalism.

• Avoids computationalism’s ‘binding problem’.⁵ (How can various circuits combine to create unified consciousness)?

• Explains the unity of consciousness when neuroscience and other physicalist theories fail—because consciousness is a substance (fundamental ‘stuff’ of nature) rather than an abstract computation.

• Explains the mind’s privacy, why we have a problem of other minds.⁶

• Includes a testable component based on growing empirical evidence.

Last but not least:

• Aligns with direct introspective evidence that conscious subjects are free, autonomous agents.

Challenges for neuro-electrical panpsychism

• The combination problem: how do simple (micro) experiences combine to form (macro) experiences?

• The subject problem: how can micro-subjects combine to form a unified consciousness?

• Not intuitive.

Find out his response to these challenges…

All articles are free to download.

Both papers below give a similar overview of the metaphysics of NP, though each is framed in a different way. I would recommend starting with whichever emphasis most interests you. If you want to dig deeper, there are quite a few papers addressing various components of the theory in greater detail, which you can access by clicking “Other works”:

• If you’re interested in hearing more about the testable, scientific component:

  A Simple, Testable Mind–Body Solution?

• If you’re interested in learning more about Russellian Monism, here’s a draft of a paper currently under review:

  Avoiding Russellian Monism’s Problems

• Other works by Mostyn Jones.

Further Reading:

This is an important paper if you want more background on panpsychism.

• Galen Strawson’s Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism

Thanks, Mostyn, for sharing your work on the mind-body problem with us!

—Tina

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MOSTYN JONES has taught philosophy at various mid-Atlantic institutions in the USA, including George Washington University and Washington & Jefferson College. His PhD is from Manchester University in England. His writing has focused on topics in the philosophy of mind such as imagination, consciousness, free will, and human nature.

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What do YOU think?

Feel free to ask questions and leave comments!

1. Later in this paper, he says, “Neuroscience today typically treats brains as computers (augmenting computationalism, which treats minds as computers). This computational neuroscience hasn’t explained how separate, distributed circuits bind together to support the unified experience of, say, a talking, smiling friend — nor of the unified mind as a whole. This is the so-called ‘binding problem’.”

2. In another paper, Avoiding Russellian Monism’s Problems, Jones describes Russell’s theory of mind as “metaphysical magical mystery tour” with “obscurities about how the concrete grounds the abstract, how proto-entities constitute the mental and physical, how experience emerges from what lacks experience, and how simple experiences combine to form complex experiences. Arguably, these obscurities aren’t as unintelligible as reductive physicalism, which paradoxically implies that the observable brain activities of neuroscience are identical to experiences not observable in brains. But RM’s obscurity may often seem just as obscure as, for example, dualist causality.”

3. Chalmers, D.J. (1996) The Conscious Mind, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 305.

4. Jones, Mostyn (2024). A Simple, Testable Mind–Body Solution? Journal of Consciousness Studies 31 (1):51-75.

5. Later in this paper he says, “Neuroscience today typically treats brains as computers (augmenting computationalism, which treats minds as computers). This computational neuroscience hasn’t explained how separate, distributed circuits bind together to support the unified experience of, say, a talking, smiling friend — nor of the unified mind as a whole. This is the so-called ‘binding problem’.”

6. “In NP, the mind’s unity is tied to another of its key traits — its privacy. Our minds are private (inaccessible to each other) in NP because EM fields happen to be exceedingly weak between our brains, as just noted. Another source of privacy in NP is that we can’t observe other people’s minds by peering into their brains — they’re necessarily hidden in brains beyond what is physically observable. This privacy underlies the subjective–objective contrast of phenomenology and physical science, respectively.” 4.1, The Mind’s Unity.

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