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from the dept. Although neutral monism is a metaphysical doctrine about the nature of reality (like its rivals materialism and idealism), it also finds a place in Philosophy of Mind as an attempt to come to terms with the traditional mind-body problem or today's hard problem of consciousness. Generically defined, it may state that: Neither mind nor matter is ontologically basic, but are both reducible to another more fundamental principle that is neutral between them. Because early advocates of neutral monism were often empiricists, it is sometimes erroneously assumed that *experience* is the default selection as a neutral agency (i.e., the rest of perceptual qualities made mind-independent as extension and motion were in material realism). But newer versions may take the view that the neutral *stuff* is either quantum or spacetime *events*, as Bertrand Russell later shifted to; or dispositions of a noumenal substrate represented by logical constructs and abstract formalism. Example, Kenneth Sayre: "The neutral monism I advocate holds that the fundamental principle to which both mind and matter are reducible is not a substance in any sense (Aristotelian, Cartesian, whatever), but is rather [a] structure of a sort that can only be represented mathematically. This structure is what information theorists call information." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/ < | >
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Neutral Monism: a semi-forgotten, adaptable option in POM
