Russellian monism
Explanation
Russellian monism is a contemporary proposal that revives an intuition of Bertrand Russell: physics describes the relational structure of reality but says nothing about the intrinsic nature of the entities that compose it. Physics tells us that electrons have certain masses and charges that manifest in interactions, but does not tell us what electrons are in themselves.
Contemporary Russellian monists (David Chalmers, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff among others) suggest that this intrinsic nature could be precisely what we call phenomenal experience, or at least proto-experience. If so, the mind-body problem dissolves: matter has an inner face (phenomenal) and an outer face (structural), and the inner face is the ultimate source of consciousness.
The thesis combines two ingredients. On the one hand, a structural realism: physical science genuinely captures the structure of the world, but only the structure. On the other, a metaphysics of intrinsic properties: there is something things are over and above their relations, and that something could be experiential. Combine the two and you obtain an enriched physicalism that does not eliminate experience but anchors it in matter.
There are two variants. Russellian panpsychism holds that the intrinsic properties are experiential in a full sense (micro-minds). Panprotopsychism holds that they are proto-experiential: not full experiences, but the ontological basis from which experiences emerge when organised in the right systems. Each variant has advantages and problems.
Among the technical problems, the combination problem stands out: how do micro-experiences or proto-experiences give rise to unified macro-experiences? Various strategies are explored: strong emergence, metaphysical fusion, constitutive principles. None is settled, and this is the Achilles' heel of the proposal.
Russellian monism has gained increasing attention in recent decades as a route within broad physicalism to accommodate the hard problem of consciousness. It represents a compromise between materialism and panpsychism, between scientific rigour and phenomenological seriousness. Its future depends on whether the combination problem can be resolved satisfactorily.
Strengths
- An intermediate route between dualism and reductionism.
- Elegantly dissolves the hard problem.
- Compatible with integrated information theory.
- Natural connection with theoretical physics.
Main critiques
- Commitment to (proto)experience is metaphysically strong.
- Inherits from panpsychism: the combination problem.
- Hard to differentiate empirically from physicalism.
- Accused of 'covert idealism' or 'elegant animism'.