Ok, so I got a couple of questions about the last post, which makes sense, because it was more of a brain dump than an article. So… I’m back to explain exactly what monism (vs dualism) actually is.

In a nutshell, monism is the idea that the universe is made up of only one kind of thing – often, in the modern world, that means material things, i.e., there is no such thing as an immaterial soul or spirit or mind or ideas.

It would probably be easier to understand if it was called “one-ism.”

Dualism, on the other hand, is the idea that the universe is made up of two fundementally different types of things – usually this means, for example, mind and body, or the mind and the physical world.

Descartes is probably one of the most famous philosophers to discuss this concept. They are a big part of his proofs of the existence of God and of the soul, which appear in his Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (I recommend the version translated by Donald A. Cress, which I’ve linked.)

What made Descartes’ view a bit controversial was his use of the term substance (which, since he wasn’t writing in English, is somewhat debateable, but let’s go with it). He said that the world of ideas (or mind or soul), was a different substance from the substance of the physical world. The word substance in English implies the material world, so thinking of the mind as a substance was confusing for people. But if I used the word thing, would it bother you so much? Probably not. An idea can be a thing if it’s the topic of our discussion. So, Descartes was really saying that mind and body, or the mind and physical world are two different types of things.

Now, if you dig deeper into this kind of philosophy you’ll see debates about how consciousness relates to the body, and you’ll discover that there are actually two kinds of monism. (Hey, maybe there’s more, but this is what most people mean.)

One type is called epiphenomenalism. These are the philosophers who argue that consciousness is like the “halo over the saint” or “like steam from a cooking pot.” It’s their idea that consciousness is just a by-product of the material world.

But then, there are other philosophers who prefer hypophenomenalism. This is the idea that everything is created by the mind. There is no material world, our imaginations create the illusion of one.

Both epiphenomenalism and hypophenomenalism admit the existence of only one aspect of reality – either material or mental, but not both. They are both monisms.

Dualism, or at the least the Descartes type of dualism, admits the existence of two fundementally different aspects of reality – the material and the mental – and that they interact with each other. Now, some people have issues with Descartes’ vision of that interaction. Or because they can’t imagine how the two could interact, they discard the whole idea. But, how two things interact with each other is a different question than simply admitting that they do.

Now, epiphenomenalism is a much more common assumption in the modern western world. So, when speaking of monism, this type is usually what people mean. In the past that might not have been the case, and it’s even possible that in some places on Earth today, the view is actually the reverse. But here in America, this is the most common philosophical assumption.

Empirical science, better know today as just science, is a philosophy that has helped human beings survive and thrive to such an immense degree that it has become, for the vast majority of humanity, a major religion. I say religion because most people learn how science works only basically and at a very young age. They do not realize that there is a philosophy behind it. And few would believe that a good deal of the advancement of that philosophy came from Descartes’ proof of the existence of God. What??

That’s right. But I digress. Back to science.

Science works by the use of a particular method – known as the… you guessed it… scientific method. The scientific method seeks to reduce subjectivity. The goal is to be objective. That means that our wishes, hopes, desires, and feelings, have no place in our study. We assume nothing. Rather, we coldly observe and collect data. We make a hypothesis and then we try to prove it wrong rather than right. We do this because we want to remove our biases. So, in a way, science seeks to investigate the world as if there is no mind. Hence, in my previous post, I referred to it as a methodological monism.

The trouble starts when people forget that they are engaging in a method and that this method seeks to eliminate subjectivity. They forget that the world isn’t actually like that. Hence, some epiphenomenalists end up making absurd statements like “a thought is nothing more than the movement of molecules in the brain.”

This is absurd because it breaks the very basics of logic. Those that we know from Aristotle. One of those basics is the law of identity:

A is A
A is not NON-A.

When you say you have a thought, do you mean you’re having “a movement of molecules in the brain” or do you mean a thought? These words don’t mean the same thing at all.

Now, you might say “well, a movement of molecules in the brain caused the thought!”

Perhaps. But we must still admit that they are not the same thing.

The universe has a dual nature. On the one hand is the physical world that is material, public (available to any mind capable of witnessing it), objective. On the other, the mental world is non-material, private, and subjective. These things do not have the same properties.

Perhaps one of the issues here is that consciousness is for each of us unlike anything else in our reality. We have nothing to compare it to because we are privy to only one example of it.

But if we say something like this, we can expose our error:

“A car is greater than the sum of it’s parts.”

Now we know nothing can be greater than the sum of it’s parts. So, we realize that what we are really saying is the car is greater than the sum of it’s material parts. We make statements like that because we are discounting the parts that are ideas and we do this because of a bias for the scientific method.

Once again, I’ve been a bit sloppy here. I’ve used some terms interchangeably when one could make a case they are very different. For example, mind, idea, soul, spirit, mental…. I’m not writing a philosophical treatise, but a post that I hope will clarify my ideas a little better. If you want to delve deeper, I cannot recommend more  A Critical Examination Of The Belief In A Life After Death by C.J. Ducasse. In the first half of that book he makes some of the best arguments I’ve seen so far on this topic. (Also, for another post dealing with this theme, see Red.)

I hope this helps clarify my previous brain dump a bit!