CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Santuccio, Marta |
|---|---|
| Title | Looking at the World with Fresh Eyes: the Perspectival Neutral Monism Model |
| Summary | In this thesis I aim to develop an alternative model for thinking about the question of the nature of consciousness and how it may fit with the physical world. I call this Perspectival Neutral Monism. Methodologically, I do this by casting a set of fresh eyes on the debate, hence questioning the notions and assumptions commonly adopted by popular views, in order to attempt to re-conceptualise and reframe the issue. Some of the ideas I question are the distinction of the phenomenal and the physical and whether these constitute ontological categories, whether we should adopt a physical conceptual scheme as a privileged description of reality, and whether we should assume an ontological hierarchy for investigating consciousness. The heart of this thesis is therefore to exercise our ability to carve a different avenue to approach the question of consciousness, rather than building a bulletproof position. For this reason I often refer to perspectival neutral monism as a model. Perspectival neutral monism is a monist position, it rejects the split ontology of the dualist, and commits to reality that is neutral, thus that extends beyond the material and the mental stuff traditionally posited by material and mental monists. The view, moreover, is aligned with prior versions of neutral monism, such as those defended by Mach (1886), James (1912), Russell (2021), and more recently by Coleman (2017), Nagel (2012) and Heil (2013), in that it commits to a conceptual dualism alongside a uniform neutral ontology. The model I develop, however, departs from prior versions. First, I expand the notion of neutrality beyond the orthodox Neither and the Both views, adding that the neutral stuff is best seen as an infinite multitude that can be wholly captured from a perspective-free position. Second, I argue that the distinction between phenomenal and physical concepts is based on the availability of two distinct and limited perspectives, subjective and objective, and that these concepts pick out properties as encountered from the different perspectives. This further supports a commitment to a neutral ontology. Third, I develop a neutral notion of perspective, modelled on the enactive approach, whereby "occupying a perspective" is neutral because it involves the organism as whole (all those processes and states that we can capture with phenomenal and physical vocabularies). I then employ neutral perspectives to explain how the phenomenal and the physical realms obtain in a neutral reality, following the enactivist idea that an organism narrows-down the environment into her world of significance on the basis of its internal specifications. I thus argue that a neutral subject narrows-down the neutral multitude into experience and the physical world, on the basis of her limitations. Discussing how perspectival neutral monist may deal with challenges such as the conceivability argument or the threat of mental monism, I conclude that the model seems to have the potential to coherently weave together the phenomenal and the physical within a neutral ontology and thus that our discussion shows that thinking about the problem of consciousness with fresh eyes is possible. |
| Supervisor | Katalin Farkas |
| Department | Philosophy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/santuccio_marta.pdf |
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