Bo wrote:
"Regarding Bertrand Russell my philosophy book says nothing about his
'neutral monism'. Sound like Hegel's 'monades'."
Here is an essay written by Bertrand Russell about neutral monism. (Monads,
by the way, are a concept proposed by Leibniz, not Hegel, and I don't really
think they're related to neutral monism in any way, but I don't know much
about Leibniz's philosophy.)
What Is the Soul?
Bertrand Russell
1928
One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that
each one makes us know less than we thought we did. When I was young we all
knew, or thought we knew, that a man consists of a soul and a body; that the
body is in time and space, but the soul is in time only. Whether the soul
survives death was a matter as to which opinions might differ, but that
there is a soul was thought to be indubitable. As for the body, the plain
man of course considered its existence self-evident, and so did the man of
science, but the philosopher was apt to analyze it away after one fashion or
another, reducing it usually to ideas in the mind of the man who had the
body and anybody else who happened to notice him. The philosopher, however,
was not taken seriously, and science remained comfortably materialistic,
even in the hands of quite orthodox scientists.
Nowadays these fine old simplicities are lost: physicists assure us that
there is no such thing as matter, and psychologists assure us that there is
no such thing as mind. This is an unprecedented occurrence. Who ever heard
of a cobbler saying that there was no such thing as boots, or a tailor
maintaining that all men are really naked? Yet that would have been no odder
than what physicists and certain psychologists have been doing. To begin
with the latter, some of them attempt to reduce everything that seems to be
mental activity to an activity of the body. There are, however, various
difficulties in the way of reducing mental activity to physical activity. I
do not think we can yet say with any assurance whether these difficulties
are or are not insuperable. What we can say, on the basis of physics itself,
is that what we have hitherto called our body is really an elaborate
scientific construction not corresponding to any physical reality. The
modern would-be materialist thus finds himself in a curious position, for,
while he may with a certain degree of success reduce the activities of the
mind to those of the body, he cannot explain away the fact that the body
itself is merely a convenient concept invented by the mind. We find
ourselves thus going round and round in a circle: mind is an emanation of
body, and body is an invention of mind. Evidently this cannot be quite
right, and we have to look for something that is neither mind nor body, out
which both can spring.
Let us begin with the body. The plain man thinks that material objects must
certainly exist, since they are evident to the senses. Whatever else may be
doubted, it is certain that anything you can bump into must be real; this is
the plain man's metaphysic. This is all very well, but the physicist comes
along and shows that you never bump into anything: even when you run your
hand along a stone wall, you do not really touch it. When you think you
touch a thing, there are certain electrons and protons, forming part of your
body, which are attracted and repelled by certain electrons and protons in
the thing you think you are touching, but there is no actual contact. The
electrons and protons in your body, becoming agitated by nearness to the
other electrons and protons are disturbed, and transmit a disturbance along
your nerves to the brain; the effect in the brain is what is necessary to
your sensation of contact, and by suitable experiments this sensation can be
made quite deceptive. The electrons and protons themselves, however, are
only crude first approximations, a way of collecting into a bundle either
trains of waves or the statistical probabilities of various different kinds
of events. Thus matter has become altogether too ghostly to be used as an
adequate stick with which to beat the mind. Matter in motion, which used to
seem so unquestionable, turns out to be a concept quite inadequate for the
needs of physics.
Nevertheless modern science gives no indication whatever of the existence of
the soul or mind as an entity; indeed the reasons for disbelieving in it are
very much of the same kind as the reasons for disbelieving in matter. Mind
and matter were something like the lion and the unicorn fighting for the
crown; the end of the battle is not the victory of one or the other, but the
discovery that both are only heraldic inventions. The world consists of
events, not of things that endure for a long time and have changing
properties. Events can be collected into groups by their causal relations.
If the causal relations are of one sort, the resulting group of events may
be called a physical object, and if the causal relations are of another
sort, the resulting group may be called a mind. Any event that occurs inside
a man's head will belong to groups of both kinds;
Well, maybe not any event; to take drastic example, being shot in the head.
considered as belonging to a group of one kind, it is a constituent of his
brain, and considered as belonging to a group of the other kind, it is a
constituent of his mind.
Thus both mind and matter are merely convenient ways of organizing events.
There can be no reason for supposing that either a piece of mind or a piece
of matter is immortal. The sun is supposed to be losing matter at the rate
of millions of tons a minute. The most essential characteristic of mind is
memory, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that the memory
associated with a given person survives that person's death. Indeed there is
every reason to think the opposite, for memory is clearly connected with a
certain kind of brain structure, and since this structure decays at death,
there is every reason to suppose that memory also must cease. Although
metaphysical materialism cannot be considered true, yet emotionally the
world is pretty much the same as i would be if the materialists were in the
right. I think the opponents of materialism have always been actuated by two
main desires: the first to prove that the mind is immortal, and the second
to prove that the ultimate power in the universe is mental rather than
physical. In both these respects, I think the materialists were in the
right. Our desires, it is true, have considerable power on the earth's
surface; the greater part of the land on this planet has a quite different
aspect from that which it would have if men had not utilized it to extract
food and wealth. But our power is very strictly limited. We cannot at
present do anything whatever to the sun or moon or even to the interior of
the earth, and there is not the faintest reason to suppose that what happens
in regions to which our power does not extend has any mental causes. That is
to say, to put the matter in a nutshell, there is no reason to think that
except on the earth's surface anything happens because somebody wishes it to
happen. And since our power on the earth's surface is entirely dependent
upon the sun, we could hardly realize any of our wishes if the sun grew
cold. It is of course rash to dogmatize as to what science may achieve in
the future. We may learn to prolong human existence longer than now seems
possible, but if there is any truth in modern physics, more particularly in
the second law of thermodynamics, we cannot hope that the human race will
continue for ever. Some people may find this conclusion gloomy, but if we
are honest with ourselves, we shall have to admit that what is going to
happen many millions of years hence has no very great emotional interest for
us here and now. And science, while it diminishes our cosmic pretensions,
enormously increases our terrestrial comfort. That is why, in spite of the
horror of the theologians, science has on the whole been tolerated.
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