Monism, in its most basic form, is the belief that the world is comprised of a single substance. I believe there to be a genuine way to prove this, regardless of whether or not you understand what this ‘single substance’ might be at root. We can go from logic, to monism, and then we can make some assumptions about the physical universe, which I believe to be helpful. Furthermore, you can use this formulation of monism to understand ideas of consciousness, separation of minds, physicalism, and a cavalcade of hitherto unsolved problems within physics.
In this first section, I will explain how to get to this monism, and discuss possible axioms that can be applied to other disciplines.
Getting there
We can start from a point of complete skepticism about everything. Regardless of your specific beliefs about the probability of a simulated universe, or if you are a pure idealist, you can say with confidence that at least something exists. Even if this is a dream in the mind of a Boltzmann brain, it is true that something exists, it might not be the reality that you’re experiencing now, but something has to exist in order for you to supervene on it.
On some level, something exists — this is the main thrust of the first part of the argument. Counterarguments about skepticism do not matter, because the hypothetical daemon making me hallucinate this world may belong to a universe that does actually exist in some form. Even hallucinations have to exist to be hallucinated.
Let’s say this existence is made up of two entirely separate things, for example, matter / mind (the classic disjunct) — and see where that leads us. If they are made of entirely separate things, then they would not be able to interact. If they can interact, like mind and matter appear to, then that is proof that they must be comprised of the same thing at their root, for if they were not, they would not be able to interact. Perhaps they interact through a third thing — but this ‘third thing’ does not mean that the world is constructed of 3 components (mind / matter / bridging thing) — it means that the entire world is comprised of that bridging thing, and mind and matter are just names arbitrarily assigned to points on said bridge.
We do not even have to use the controversial topic of mind and matter to prove this. We can say that any two things that are able to interact share the same root material. Imagine if there was a substance that did not interact with the world. Let’s call this ‘Dlrow’. What properties must this substance have? It must not be able to interact with this world in any way. This means that it cannot ever be reached by world-substance. Distance is not enough, it cannot be a vigintillion-squared parsecs away — even being able to describe how far it is away from the world means that they share coordinate axes. Dlrow might have to exist on separate axes — for example, ABC rather than XYZ. But we cannot know this, for if we concretely know that Dlrow is describable via ABC-axes, then that means that we understand something about Dlrow, and that means that the materials are not separate.
Through the Dlrow thought experiment, we can show that, for our purposes, the world is constructed of one material, for even if it was not, we could logically never know anything about it — because if we did know something about it, then it would be part of our world. We cannot be linked in any way, hypothetically, cognitively, spatially, to this actually-existent Dlrow, otherwise we could find some connection to it, and thus, the world and Dlrow could be proven to be made of one substance.
I would say that this proves that the universe is comprised of one substance, though it says nothing about the content of that substance.
If you believe that mind and matter exist, independent of one another, then how could it make sense that they conjoin in such a fashion? They may be very distinct things, but if they were completely unlinked, they could not conjoin together to make experience as we understand it. Thought without matter is impossible, and vice versa. The link between mind and matter may not be understood, but this does not matter: we know that they must be linked, just not exactly how.
We might see this as analogous to two peaks of a mountain range. We understand that they are part of the same range, but also be able to see them as distinct peaks. Different levels of modelling can give different ontological results.
Having arrived there
So, we’ve arrived at the point that the world is comprised of one substance. How might we move on from here? A simple starting point is to assume that the physical world is comprised of one substance, which removes a lot of current thought surrounding matter.
A single-substance world would have to be continuous, and the ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ of modern-day conceptualisations of particle physics do not work — how can there be particles moving within space if they are comprised of the same substance? What is moving relative to what? What does ‘movement’ even entail? We must look at this low-level explanation of a single-substance world in order to explain higher-level concepts like particles, we have to explain the mechanisms behind their generation.
This low-level explanation affords us two benefits:
We cannot rely on fine-tuning in regards to constants. A world made of one substance is mathematically rigorous, and with no possibility for adding secondary axioms which do not rely on the main one.
We have to explain everything from the ground up. This means we cannot posit any ad-hoc explanations. Modern theoretical physics is full of these ad-hoc explanations.
I’m going to stop here, because there’s an awful lot of actual physics that you can derive from this axiom, and I’m just making sure that the bedrock is stable before attempting to build anything on it. I’ve tried to address counterarguments, but perhaps there’s things that are simply outside the scope of my argumentative vision right now.
Getting To and From Monism
Monism, in its most basic form, is the belief that the world is comprised of a single substance. I believe there to be a genuine way to prove this, regardless of whether or not you understand what this ‘single substance’ might be at root. We can go from logic, to monism, and then we can make some assumptions about the physical universe, which I believe to be helpful. Furthermore, you can use this formulation of monism to understand ideas of consciousness, separation of minds, physicalism, and a cavalcade of hitherto unsolved problems within physics.
In this first section, I will explain how to get to this monism, and discuss possible axioms that can be applied to other disciplines.
Getting there
We can start from a point of complete skepticism about everything. Regardless of your specific beliefs about the probability of a simulated universe, or if you are a pure idealist, you can say with confidence that at least something exists. Even if this is a dream in the mind of a Boltzmann brain, it is true that something exists, it might not be the reality that you’re experiencing now, but something has to exist in order for you to supervene on it.
On some level, something exists — this is the main thrust of the first part of the argument. Counterarguments about skepticism do not matter, because the hypothetical daemon making me hallucinate this world may belong to a universe that does actually exist in some form. Even hallucinations have to exist to be hallucinated.
Let’s say this existence is made up of two entirely separate things, for example, matter / mind (the classic disjunct) — and see where that leads us. If they are made of entirely separate things, then they would not be able to interact. If they can interact, like mind and matter appear to, then that is proof that they must be comprised of the same thing at their root, for if they were not, they would not be able to interact. Perhaps they interact through a third thing — but this ‘third thing’ does not mean that the world is constructed of 3 components (mind / matter / bridging thing) — it means that the entire world is comprised of that bridging thing, and mind and matter are just names arbitrarily assigned to points on said bridge.
We do not even have to use the controversial topic of mind and matter to prove this. We can say that any two things that are able to interact share the same root material. Imagine if there was a substance that did not interact with the world. Let’s call this ‘Dlrow’. What properties must this substance have? It must not be able to interact with this world in any way. This means that it cannot ever be reached by world-substance. Distance is not enough, it cannot be a vigintillion-squared parsecs away — even being able to describe how far it is away from the world means that they share coordinate axes. Dlrow might have to exist on separate axes — for example, ABC rather than XYZ. But we cannot know this, for if we concretely know that Dlrow is describable via ABC-axes, then that means that we understand something about Dlrow, and that means that the materials are not separate.
Through the Dlrow thought experiment, we can show that, for our purposes, the world is constructed of one material, for even if it was not, we could logically never know anything about it — because if we did know something about it, then it would be part of our world. We cannot be linked in any way, hypothetically, cognitively, spatially, to this actually-existent Dlrow, otherwise we could find some connection to it, and thus, the world and Dlrow could be proven to be made of one substance.
I would say that this proves that the universe is comprised of one substance, though it says nothing about the content of that substance.
If you believe that mind and matter exist, independent of one another, then how could it make sense that they conjoin in such a fashion? They may be very distinct things, but if they were completely unlinked, they could not conjoin together to make experience as we understand it. Thought without matter is impossible, and vice versa. The link between mind and matter may not be understood, but this does not matter: we know that they must be linked, just not exactly how.
We might see this as analogous to two peaks of a mountain range. We understand that they are part of the same range, but also be able to see them as distinct peaks. Different levels of modelling can give different ontological results.
Having arrived there
So, we’ve arrived at the point that the world is comprised of one substance. How might we move on from here? A simple starting point is to assume that the physical world is comprised of one substance, which removes a lot of current thought surrounding matter.
A single-substance world would have to be continuous, and the ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ of modern-day conceptualisations of particle physics do not work — how can there be particles moving within space if they are comprised of the same substance? What is moving relative to what? What does ‘movement’ even entail? We must look at this low-level explanation of a single-substance world in order to explain higher-level concepts like particles, we have to explain the mechanisms behind their generation.
This low-level explanation affords us two benefits:
We cannot rely on fine-tuning in regards to constants. A world made of one substance is mathematically rigorous, and with no possibility for adding secondary axioms which do not rely on the main one.
We have to explain everything from the ground up. This means we cannot posit any ad-hoc explanations. Modern theoretical physics is full of these ad-hoc explanations.
I’m going to stop here, because there’s an awful lot of actual physics that you can derive from this axiom, and I’m just making sure that the bedrock is stable before attempting to build anything on it. I’ve tried to address counterarguments, but perhaps there’s things that are simply outside the scope of my argumentative vision right now.