Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In yesterday's post I laid out three "neutralist" theories and said something about the relationship of William James' thought to each. I'd like to tie that line of inquiry up a bit today. Again, the theories are: neutral monism; dual aspect theory; panpsychism. What they maintain in each case is that there is some stuff that is neither mental nor physical, and that the mental and physical realms are constructions out of this stuff, so that we can allow for mind-body interaction without freaking out over HOW? For a neutral monist, the stuff is an underlying collection of data or unclassified facts such as an image of a piece of paper. For a dual aspect theory, the stuff is God, the Universe, Everything Considered as a Totality. For a panpsychist, the stuff is, well, mindful matter. Which includes all matter (and, likely enough, all mind.) I shared yesterday, too, my own impression that the first listed of those three arises out of a principle of pars...

One traditional approach to the mind-body problem in philosophy is this: look for some neutral stuff. The interaction of an immaterial consciousness with a material body/brain would seem less mysterious were there some neutral stuff out of which both consciousness and physicality were themselves created. The term "neutral" here means simply that the theorist at issue isn't trying to dissolve one half of the dichotomy into the other. There are three broad types of neutralism, one of which is simply called "neutral monism." The other two that one can put into this category have different names and slightly different approaches: panpsychism, and double-aspect theory. I will say a brief word now about how each of them relates to the philosopher who inspired the existence of this blog: William James. Tomorrow, I'll try to say something about how they are different. Neutral Monism William James is a and perhaps even the key figure in the development ...

On the critical question of the relationship between the mind and the brain, James seemed to have two distinct views. Sometimes he was a sort of dualistic interactionist. Not of course in a Cartesian sense, in which the "ego" is a soul, an enduring substance. But in a distinct sense of his own in which the ego is a "stream of consciousness" consisting of a series of overlapping pulses of attention, each appropriating the pulses that came before it. THIS self seems to be immaterial in some of James' tellings, even a potential candidate for survival after death, hence his concern with Leonora Piper and all that. Further, this mind/self seems to interact with the brain, in both directions. James doesn't know how that is possible, but isn't concerned unduly by that, since he sees causation itself as a mystery, so brain/mind interaction isn't ESPECIALLY mysterious. In other contexts and passages, though, James was a monist. There is only one stuff,...

Here's a link to a philosophical defense of old-fashioned interactionist dualism , dated 2006 and submitted by a candidate for an M.A. in philosophy at Monash University. I'll come to Koksvik's argument in another post, but for now I'll review my understanding of the state of play. Interactionist dualism was famously Rene  Descartes ' answer to the question of the relationship between mind and body . There exist a lot of different possible answers to this question, from the materialist reductionism that says in essence that the 'mind' is an illusion, to the Berkeleyan idealism that says in essence that the 'body' is an illusion. Dualists all by definition say that mind and body are very different things or types of thing, and that they are both real. Dualists differ among themselves on whether the mind and body really interact. They certainly SEEM to interact! If I skip lunch, the thought "I'm hungry" will be in m...