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20th Century Variants of Dual-Aspect Thinking

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c 2014 Imprint Academic Mind & Matter Vol. 12(2), pp. 245–288
20th Century Variants

of Dual-Aspect Thinking
Harald Atmaspacher
Collegium Helveticum
Zürich, Switzerland
Abstract
In the philosophy of mind and in psychology as well as cogni-

tive science, the program of naturalizing the mind is conventionally
understood as the attempt to reduce whatever appears mental to
physical explanations. In recent decades this has become a central
motif in cognitive neuroscience and consciousness studies, where it
features as the reduction of conscious states to brain behavior. On
the long run, the resulting physicalism can be viewed as a counter-
position against both idealist positions and Cartesian dualism.
But is physicalism the only alternative? At least since Spinoza,
there is a tradition of dual-aspect thinking in which both the physi-
cal and the mental are construed as aspects of an underlying reality,
which is itself neutral with respect to the mind-matter distinction.
I will present and compare some selected variants of dual-aspect
thinking in the 20th century, such as Bertrand Russell’s neutral
monism, the holistic dual-aspect monism of Wolfgang Pauli and
Carl Gustav Jung, David Bohm’s implicate order, and naturalistic
dualism according to David Chalmers. They can all be viewed as
versions of a naturalism that aims at a concept of nature beyond
the duality of the mental and the physical.
1. Kinds of Naturalism
The basic idea connected with the term naturalism is that “reality
is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the
scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, includ-
ing the “human spirit”, – so Papineau (2007) in his entry in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is evident that this characterization is not
particularly informative, as he himself admits, if not only for its lacking
precision than also because it just offsets the explanatory load from the
notion of “nature” to the notion of “reality” and leaves open how the
latter should be understood.
Papineau’s entry focuses on an understanding of nature whose devel-
opment began in the early 20th century and, eventually, led to the almost
246 Atmanspacher
hegemonial pretense of what is today called physicalism. In a nutshell,

physicalism pretends that nature is, ultimately, what physics is all about.
Today, naturalism appears essentially construed as physicalism, and nat-
uralizing the mind (the “human spirit”) means to explain mental states
and their behavior by brain states and their behavior. Most contemporary
neuroscientists adhere, knowingly or not, to this philosophical program.
But the notion of naturalism is neither historically nor systematically re-
stricted to physicalism, as discussed in detail by Hampe (2014).
There is a variety of different versions of this kind of physicalism (elim-
inative, epiphenomenal, reductive, non-reductive, etc.) which I cannot
discuss in detail here, see again Papineau (2007) for a very brief overview.
One crucial assumption in all of them is the “causal closure (or com-
pleteness) of the physical”, meaning that every event in nature that has
a cause has a physical cause. This assumption is widely held without
discomfort, though a number of authors have recently expressed concerns
about its unquestioned validity (Lowe 2000, Montero 2003, Bishop and
Atmanspacher 2011).
But many of the great hopes and promises that the enunciators of the
so-called “decade of the brain” (1990–1999) generated are still unfulfilled
today. There is no doubt that brain research yielded important insights,
yet an understanding of the fundamental problem of the relationship be-
tween our mental lives and what our brains do surely has remained an
open problem. The naive idea of one-to-one neural correlates of conscious
states has proven pure fantasy (cf. Anderson 2010), and other physicalist
oriented ideas replacing it may turn out difficult to realize as well.
At present we can see that the lack of success of physicalist approaches
toward one of the deepest questions in the history of humankind, the
nature of mind-matter correlations, entails the search for alternative ap-
proaches. There is a touch of irony in the fact that a most prominent one
among those alternatives is grounded in another, long neglected kind of
naturalism which differs substantially from physicalism. It has received
increasing attention under the notion of “dual-aspect thinking”.
The historical protagonist of dual-aspect thinking in philosophy is
Spinoza, whose framework of thinking constitutes the mental and the ma-
terial as “modes” under which humans can apprehend two “attributes”
of thought and extension of an infinite substance. This substance, in
a pantheist reading of Spinoza, is God and equivalently nature – or, in
Latin: deus sive natura.1 Since this psychophysically neutral substance
is infinite, it has infiinitely many attributes, but only two of them are
apperceptible by humans. In this sense, Spinoza’s philosophical system
belongs to the variety of dual-aspect monisms.
As one can guess from the terms Spinoza used for the attributes of
1 See the replies to my commentators below for more details on this issue.
20th Century Variants of Dual-Aspect Thinking 247
thought and extension, his thinking was a reaction to Descartes’ interac-

tive dualism. While this dualism clearly violated the assumption of the
causal closure of the physical insofar as the mental is capable of acting
upon the physical, causal closure in Spinoza is violated in a subtler way.
Since the modes, which do not interact directly, derive from the one sub-
stance, this substance may inject effects, intrusions as it were, into the
modes so that they cannot be causally closed in principle.
Spinoza was well received by the German idealists (Hegel: “philosophy
is Spinozist or it’s no philosophy at all”), and a number of other impor-
tant figures in the history of philosophy, such as Schopenhauer, Avenarius,
James, Whitehead, Russell remind us of Spinoza’s dual-aspect thinking.
Its more recent renaissance in philosophy is exemplified by Deleuze, Sayre,
Nagel, Chalmers, Rosenberg, Strawson, Seager, Brüntrup, and many oth-
ers. The rather influential accounts of Russell and Chalmers will be de-
scribed in more detail in Secs. 2 and 5.
Philosophically interested physicists with a dual-aspect account are
Mach, Pauli, Bohm and, more recently, Polkinghorne, Lockwood, d’Espag-
nat, Primas, and Haken. Of particular interest is the appearance of dual-
aspect thinking in psychology. Pertinent names are Jung (together with
Pauli), and currently Velmans, Damasio, Solms, Panksepp, Hobson, Fris-
ton, and the much discussed approch by Tononi. In Secs. 3 and 4 below
I will address the versions of Pauli and Jung and of Bohm.
2. Russell’s Neutral Monism

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, logician, aris-
tocrat, peace activist, atheist, and journalist who lived most of his life in
his home country Wales, where he was born and died. With respect
to philospohy, he is generally recognized as one of the main founders of
modern analytic philosophy. With respect to the mind-matter problem,
he sympathized with (in the 1910s) and later defended (from the 1920s to
the late 1940s) the position of neutral monism. Most of the text quotes
in the following are from his Analysis of Mind in 1921, although his later
Analysis of Matter of 1927 also contains in-depth discussions of neutral
monism (cf. Alter and Nagasawa 2012). A recommendable review of neu-
tral monism is found in Stubenberg (2010).
Russell picked up essential ideas for his neutral monism mainly from
the dual-aspect frameworks of thinking of Mach and James, but he is
likely its most widely known advocate – so widely that the notion of
Russelian monism was coined, and its current proponents are also called
neo-Russellians. In The Analysis of Mind, one of his works on the topic,
Russell (1921, pp. 3f) begins with a brief sketch of the situation between
physiscs and psychology of his time:
248 Atmanspacher
Figure 1: Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) at the foundation of a tri-

bunal examining US interventions in Vietnam in 1966. Later Rus-
sell tribunals were concerned with military juntas in Latin Amer-
ica (1970s) and, more recently, the Israel–Palestine conflict (after
2009).
On the one hand, many psychologists, originally those of the behav-

iorist school, tend to adopt what is essentially a materialist position
as a matter of method if not of metaphysics. They make psychol-
ogy increasingly dependent on physiology and external observation,
and tend to think of matter as something much more solid and in-
dubitable than mind. Meanwhile the physicists, especially Einstein
and other exponents of the theory of relativity, have been mak-
ing matter less and less material. ... Whoever reads, for example,
Professor Eddington’s Space, Time, and Gravitation, will see that
an old-fashioned materialism can receive no support from modern
physics.
Note that this quote refers to the development of general relativity in the
physics of the 1910s. As we will see in Sec. 3, the rise of quantum theory
after the mid 1920s contains material which makes Russell’s thesis even
more compelling. Anyway, with this prelude, he settles his standpoint
about the mind-matter issue in the following words (Russell 1921, pp. 4f):
The view that seems to me to reconcile the materialistic tendency
of psychology with the anti-materialistic tendency of physics is the
view of William James and the American New Realists, according
to which the “stuff” of the world is neither mental nor material,
but a “neutral stuff”, out of which both are constructed. ...
The stuff of which our experience is composed is, in my belief,
neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either.
Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which
they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense

above them both, like a common ancestor.
A cartoon-like schematic representation of this scheme can be seen in

Figure 2. It shows the two aspects of the mental and the material above
the horizontal line, and the psychophysically neutral domain below it. (I
will use the same scheme for all other dual-aspect frameworks discussed
in this paper to facilitate their comparability.)
mental domain material domain

subject(-ivity) object(-ivity)
psychophysically “neutral stuff”

sensations
Figure 2: Dual aspects in Russell’s neutral monism, often addressed

as the distinction of subject and object. As Mach did previously,
Russell referred to the psychophysically “neutral stuff” in terms of
sensations.
As a notable distinction from other kinds of dual-aspect thinking, Rus-

sell (along with James) conceives of the psychophysially “neutral stuff” as
consisting of elements whose composition gives rise to mental or physical
appearances (Russell 1921, p. 11):
James’s view is that the raw material out of which the world is
built up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind, but
that it is arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations, and
that some arrangements may be called mental, while others may
be called physical.
This conception is in line with Russell’s logical atomism (and, needless

to say, with the physical atomist doctrine of the time as well). For him,
a philosophical system is composed of individual atomistic elements, and
it is a logical consequence that the manifold of different phenomena then
follows from the manifold of different possible combinations.
However, Russell is not as clear as desirable about the precise logical
status of the neutral stuff. Sometimes he refers to “neither matter nor
mind”, sometimes he says the stuff “belongs equally to mind and matter”,
yet another phrase he uses is “intersection of mind and matter”. Strictly
speaking, these three characterizations describe three different scenarios:
“neither-nor” is the negation of the logical disjunction (also called the
250 Atmanspacher
logical NOR, or the joint denial), “both-and” and “intersection” point

at the logical conjunction (also called the logical AND). We will later see
that these different versions play an important role in comparison to other
dual-aspect variants.
Another important point is Russell’s insistence that the “neutral stuff”
can be apprehended, namely by sensations. Again referring to the paper
in which James (1904) introduced the concept of “pure experience” as the
neutral stuff that is apprehensible, Russell (1921, p. 12) writes:
My own belief ... is that James is right in rejecting consciousness as
an entity, and that the American realists are partly right, though
not wholly, in considering that both mind and matter are composed
of a neutral-stuff which, in isolation is neither mental nor material.
I should admit this view as regards sensations: what is heard or
seen belongs equally to psychology and to physics.
As the term sensation suggests mental rather than psychophysically neu-
tral activity it is somewhat infelicitously chosen. As a consequence, both
Russell’s sensation (Mach used the same term) and James’s pure expe-
rience have led to considerable confusion about their actual systematic
status.
In his work in general, and in particular in his work about neutral
monism, Russell was largely abstinent about the notion of causation. He
argued correctly that causation requires temporal direction, and since the
fundamental laws of physics are time-reversal symmetric, causal relations
cannot be part of a fundamental physical description of the world. As a
consequence (Russell 1913),
the law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among
philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy,
only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.
In this context, he shared the Humean position that cause-and-effect rela-
tions are always matters of interpreting observed correlations. All contem-
porary empirical science ascribes causal dependencies to correlations only
on the basis of established theoretical models with broken time-reversal
symmetry. As we will see in Sec. 3, an alternative to interpreting correla-
tions by causation is an interpretation in terms of meaning (Atmanspacher
2014a) – a speculative move that is entirely outside any current scientific
thinking though.
In his earlier work, Russell referred to meaning basically as a reference
relation between “subjective states” and their “objective” referents. This
is very much in the spirit of Brentano’s concept of intentionality (Rus-
sell 1921, p. 7ff), as usually construed by a two-place reference relation
between a mental phenomenon and its content. But now, Russell strives
for overcoming the duality of subject and object, and dissolves it by the
psychophysically neutral “acts of sensation”.
Figure 3: Artistic depiction of the “Pauli-Jung dialog” (acrylic on

canvas, 150 x 100 cm) by Jürgen Jaumann in 1995. The painting
is part of the author’s collection.
3. Dual-Aspect Monism à la Pauli and Jung

The ideas that Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) developed together with
Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) have the special flavor that they arose from
a 3-decades long interaction between two scientific giants at different sides
of the Cartesian divide. The physicist Pauli was one of the architects of
the early quantum theory, and the psychiatrist Jung played a key role in
the foundation of depth psychology.
They spent most of their lives in the Zurich area, where they discussed
and outlined their version of dual-aspect monism essentially in the late
1940s and early 1950s. Much background material can be found in their
correspondence edited by Meier (1992). In-depth discussions of their inter-
action with respect to the topic of this section are found in Atmanspacher
and Primas (2006, 2009) and Atmanspacher and Fuchs (2014).
Pauli’s and Jung’s common interest was anchored in their search for
a worldview better adapted to the extended body of scientific knowledge
than what philosophers had offered so far. Their joint target was the
“psychophysical problem”. How is the interface between the mental and
the physical to be understood, on which idea of reality can it be grounded,
how can psychophysical correlations be explained, and what is their epis-
temological status?
The special format of dual-aspect monism à la Pauli and Jung derives
from Pauli’s familiarity with basic principles of quantum physics, which
he used to design structural analogies for the psychophysical problem.
For instance, the idea of complementary descriptions in physics led him
252 Atmanspacher
to suggest that mind and matter may stand in a complementary relation

(Pauli 1952a, p. 164, translated by HA):
The general problem of the relation between psyche and physis,
between inside and outside, can hardly be regarded as solved by
the term “psychophysical parallelism” advanced in the last cen-
tury. Yet, perhaps, modern science has brought us closer to a more
satisfying conception of this relationship, as it has established the
notion of complementarity within physics. It would be most satis-
factory if physis and psyche could be conceived as complementary
aspects of the same reality.
Complementarity in this sense is not just a colloquial way to superficially
dissolve conflict, but has a strict meaning. Two or more descriptions of a
phenomenon are complementary if they mutually exclude one another and
yet are together necessary to describe the phenomenon exhaustively. This
can be formalized in terms of non-commutative algebras of observables or,
more generally, non-Boolean lattices of propositions.
At least as important as complementarity, however, Pauli regarded the
analogy from quantum holism, or quantum nonlocality, which matched
perfectly with Jung’s conception of a basic reality that does not consist
of parts but is one unfragmented whole – the unus mundus. Starting
from this holistic, psychophysically neutral reality, aspects such as the
mental and the material are generated by decomposition of the whole.
This is a decisive difference from neutral monism à la Russell, where
the aspects are created by composing psychophysically neutral elements.
While composition entails that the mental and the material are reducible
to these elements, the decompositional approach renders reduction to the
whole impossible. The fact that a primordial whole cannot be derived
from its parts raises the bar for an intuitively accessible reconstruction of
the psychophysically neutral domain in Pauli and Jung’s scheme.
The broken holism leading to mental and material aspects produces
mind-matter correlations for free – they emerge as a consequence of an
epistemic split of an underlying ontic holism, producing mental and ma-
terial aspects. This split represents one among many possible distinctions
which depend on further contexts (cf. Spinoza’s infinitely many attributes
of which thought and extension are just two). It resembles a kind of sym-
metry breakdown, another analogy from quantum physics. Some general
remarks on the status of structural analogies in model bulding, in partic-
ular for consciousness studies, have been discussed by Prentner (2014).
In our reconstruction of the Pauli-Jung scheme from their correspon-
dence and some scattered publications on the topic, we found that it
implies two basically different types of psychophysical correlations. They
imply interesting conceptual conjectures and empirical predictions some
of which have been implemented in innovative research projects with first
concrete results.

conscious objects observed objects
collective unconscious ⇐⇒ quantum nonlocality

unus mundus
Figure 4: In dual-aspect monism according to Pauli and Jung, the

mental and the material are manifestations of an underlying, psy-
chophysically neutral, holistic reality, called unus mundus, whose
symmetry must be broken to yield dual, complementary aspects.
From the mental, the neutral reality is approached via Jung’s collec-
tive unconscious, from the material, it is approached via quantum
nonlocality.
The two types of mind-matter correlations are indicated in a letter

from Pauli to Jung which itself is lost, but fortunately we know large
parts of it through their extensive quotation in the appendix to Jung’s
essay On the Nature of the Psyche (Jung 1969, par. 439, footnote 130):
On the one hand, the unconscious can only be made accessible in
an indirect way by its (ordering) influence on conscious contents,
on the other hand every “observation of the unconscious”, i.e. every
attempt to make unconscious contents conscious, has a prima facie
uncontrollable reaction back onto these unconscious contents them-
selves (as is well known, this precludes that the unconscious can be
“exhaustively” brought to consciousness). The physicist will, per
analogy, conclude that precisely this uncontrollable backlash of the
observing subject onto the unconscious limits the objective char-
acter of its reality and, at the same time, provides it with some
subjectivity.
The final part of this quote connects well with Russell’s statement
about physics and psychology. But from a systematic point of view, its
first part is more significant. Both “ordering influence” and “reaction
back” together constitute a bidirectional interchange between the psy-
chophysically neutral domain and its two aspects. While the “ordering
influence” is a structural feature leading to persistent mind-matter corre-
lations (such as so-called neural correlates of mental states), the “reaction
back” is induced by all kinds of contexts, and the resulting correlations
are unstable and evasive. The systematic analysis of these types of cor-
relations yields a compact and transparent classification of so-called ex-
ceptional experiences (e.g., coincidence phenomena, dissociation phenom-
ena) which significantly improves our understanding of several classes of
254 Atmanspacher
extraordinary mental states. Since this is not the place for more details,
interested readers should consult a recent paper by Atmanspacher and
Fach (2013), as well as commentaries and replies to it.
The concept of synchronicity (Jung 1952) finds a natural place in the
category of coincidence phenomena within this classification. Crucial cri-
teria for synchronicities between mental and material events are (i) their
connection by a common meaning and (ii) the absence of a direct causal
interaction. With respect to (i), Pauli (1952b, translated by HA) gave
a succinct characterization which clearly alludes to the induced type of
mind-matter correlations mentioned above:
synchronistic phenomena ... elude being captured in natural “laws”
since they are not reproducible, i.e., unique, and are blurred by the
statistics of large numbers. By contrast, “acausalities” in physics
are precisely described by statistical laws (of large numbers). Wanted:
a type of natural laws consisting of a “correction of chance fluc-
tuations by meaningful or purposeful coincidences of non-causally
connected events”.
With respect to (ii), Jung (1969) illustrated how he concretely conceived

the induction of synchronistic events indirectly via unconscious activity:
When an unconscious content trespasses into consciousness, its syn-
chronistic manifestation ceases and, conversely, synchronistic phe-
nomena can be elicited by putting a subject into an unconscious
state (trance). The same relation of complementarity can be ob-
served in those frequent medical cases in which particular clinical
symptoms disappear when their corresponding unconscious con-
tents become conscious. We also know that a number of psychoso-
matic phenomena, otherwise outside the control of volition, can be
induced by hypnosis, i.e. by an attenuation of consciousness.
Figure 4 suggests a sharp boundary between the mental and physical

aspects on the one hand and their underlying domain on the other. This is
a cartoon picture – as it is for the other approaches discussed here as well.
It should be refined by a whole spectrum of boundaries (difficult to sketch
pictorially), each one indicating the transition to a more comprehensive
level of wholeness until (ultimately) the distinction-free unus mundus is
approached. A viable idea in this regard is a picture with increasing de-
grees of generality: the unus mundus at bottom, the mental and physical
on top, and intermediate levels in between would make more sense. This
twist is additionally interesting because it also relativizes Jung’s (overly)
strict Kantian stance that the ordering factors (archetypes in Jung’s ter-
minology) in the collective unconscious per se are strictly inaccessible
epistemically, and thus empirically.
This extension of the Pauli-Jung scheme (which they did not indi-
cate themselves) resonates with a a concept originally proposed by Quine
(1969), developed by Putnam (1987) and later worked out in detail by

Atmanspacher and Kronz (1999): ontological relativity or, in another
parlance, relative onticity. The key motif behind this notion is to allow
ontological significance for any level, from elementary particles to ice-
cubes, bricks, and tables – and all the same for elements of the mental.
Ordering factors which may be regarded as ontic relative to the perspec-
tive of the mind-matter distinction, can be seen epistemic relative to the
unus mundus.
Additional recent work trying to develop Pauli’s and Jung’s specula-
tions and conjectures is found in Primas (2009) who discusses the mental
and material in terms of complementary notions of mental and material
time. This approach is formulated in a largely formal manner, based on
algebraic structures similar to those used in quantum theory, and it is not
easily digestable for the non-mathematical reader. Again, the key idea
here is to exploit structural analogies with quantum physics.
Bernard d’Espagnat is another important figure in the recent renais-
sance of dual-aspect monism. He uses the notion of “the Real”’ an in-
dependent primordial reality that is neither mental nor material. As in
the proposal by Jung and Pauli, this reality is “veiled” (d’Espagnat 1999,
2006) insofar as it is in principle inaccessible to direct empirical experi-
ence.
4. Bohm’s Implicate Order

There is yet another well-known physicist whose ideas about mind and
matter are not too different from the Pauli-Jung scheme: David Bohm
(1917–1992). Born and educated in the US, Bohm was prosecuted in the
McCarthy era and emigrated, first to Brazil, then to Israel, and finally
to the UK. From 1961 to his retirement he was professor for theoretical
physics at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Apart from his attempts to formulate hidden variables for quantum
theory, Bohm also proposed a dual-aspect approach to mind and matter
whose early precursors date back to the same time when Pauli and Jung
developed their approach – in the late 1940s and ealy 1950s. A detailed
historical account of this early work is found in Pylkkänen (2014). More
mature versions are based on his ideas about explicate and implicate or-
ders in Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Bohm 1980).
While the notion of an explicate order characterizes an empirically
and, thus, epistemically accessible reality, the notion of an implicate order
refers to an ontic realm. (Occasionally, Bohm (1980, e.g. p. 199) also notes
that implicate orders can sometimes be “directly perceived” or “sensed
immediately”.) The mind-matter distinction is part of an explicate order,
which is based on a psychophysically neutral implicate order without that
distinction (Bohm 1990, p. 273):
256 Atmanspacher
Figure 5: David Bohm (1917–1992) at the symposium “Art Meets

Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy: From Fragmen-
tation to Wholeness” at Amsterdam in 1990. Photograph taken
at a round table with Stanislav Menshikov, Robert Rauschenberg,
David Bohm and the Dalai Lama.
The whole universe is in some way enfolded in everything and each

thing is enfolded in the whole. From this it follows that in some way,
and to some degree, everything enfolds or implicates everything,
but in such a manner that under typical conditions of ordinary
experience there is a great deal of relative independence of things.
The basic proposal is then that the enfoldment relationship is not
merely passive or superficial. Rather, it is active and essential to
what each thing is.
Because the implicate order is not static but basically dynamic in
nature, in a constant process of change and development, I called
its most general form the holomovement. All things found in the
unfolded, explicate order emerge from the holomovement in which
they are enfolded as potentialities, and ultimately they fall back
into it.
The general implicate process of ordering is common both in mind
and matter. This means that ultimately mind and matter are at
least closely analogous, and not nearly so different as they appear
on superficial examination.
On Bohm’s account, mental and physical states emerge by explication,

or unfoldment, from an ultimately undivided and psychophysically neutral
implicate, enfolded order. This order is called holomovement because it is
not static but rather dynamic, just as in Whitehead’s process philosophy.
This means that Bohm’s aspect monism is not only holistic as in the
Pauli-Jung scheme, it is also fundamentally based on process rather than
substance. This is much less pronounced in Pauli’s and Jung’s views,

where structural and dynamical features (e.g., of archetypes) appear to
be regarded as equally important.
Bohm avoids concerns about a sharp boundary between below and
above the horizontal line in Fig. 6 by assuming many subtle levels of im-
plicate orders whose distinction-free limit would correspond to the unus
mundus. His picture also contains the idea that implication and explica-
tion are relative notions: each level of implicate order is the explication
of a more subtle implicate order, and each level of explicate order is the
implication of a less subtle explicate order. In this sense, Bohm’s thinking
is close to the concept of an ontological relativity as mentioned in Sec. 3
(cf. Pylkkänen 2007), although he (Bohm 1980, pp. 165ff) also has even
more radical ideas about this.
mental pole material pole

explicate thoughts explicate objects
subtle levels of implicate order

holomovement
Figure 6: In Bohm’s aspect monism the mental and the material

are unfolded explications of an enfolded, implicate order with many
subtle levels. These levels are increasingly holistic, and they are not
static but dynamic, hence Bohm coined the term holomovement to
characterize them.
This move allows him to hold a subtle intermediate position between

Russell and Pauli-Jung as far as experiential access to the psychophysi-
cally neutral is concerned. If a particular level of implicate order is not
(yet) explicated, it is experientially inaccessible. But every level of impli-
cate order can in principle be explicated, and if this happens, it becomes
accessible. Along these lines, Bohm proposed novel forms of dialog facil-
itating insight into deeper implicate, holistic levels of nature (see Bohm
and Peat 1987).
Psychophysical connections are governed by something Bohm calls ac-
tive information – not syntactic information but literally meaning to bring
something implicate into explicate form, both mentally and materially
(Bohm 1990, p. 282):
There is a kind of active information that is simultaneously physical
and mental in nature. Active information can thus serve as a kind
258 Atmanspacher
of link or “bridge” between these two sides of reality as a whole.

These two sides are inseparable, in the sense that information con-
tained in thought, which we feel to be on the “mental” side, is at
the same time a related neurophysiological, chemical, and physical
activity (which is clearly what is meant by the “material” side of
this thought).
By “bringing the implicate into form”, Bohm’s active information can
be seen very much in accordance with the archetypal ordering principles
in the Pauli-Jung scheme. The bidirectional relationship between the
psychophysically neutral and its aspects, expressed in Pauli’s quote of
1954, is mimicked in the mutual process of unfolding the implicate and
enfolding the explicate. And correlations between the mental and material
arise as a consequence of the fact that they are both projections of the
same implicate order.
Dual-aspect thinking invites the option to be interpreted in the spirit
of panpsychism, the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of the
world which exists throughout the universe (Seager and Allen-Hermanson
2010, Skrbina 2009). However, neither Russell nor Pauli or Jung make
concrete reference to panpsychism – but Bohm (1990, p. 283f) clearly
does:
A rudimentary mind-like quality is present even at the level of par-
ticle physics, and as we go to subtler levels, this mind-like quality
becomes stronger and more developed. Each kind and level of mind
may have a relative autonomy and stability. One may then describe
the essential mode of relationship of all these as participation, re-
calling that this word has two basic meanings, to partake of and to
take part in.
Regarding a panpychist interpretation, there may be a nuanced dis-
tinction between atomistic neutral monism and holistic dual-aspect monism.
While the psychophysically neutral itself is neither mental nor material
on the accounts of Pauli-Jung and Bohm, panpsychism can only refer to
the level of aspects. For Russell’s monism, where the elements of the
“neutral stuff” are sometimes characterized as both mental and material
(cf. Sec. 2), panpsychism would be an option even at the elementary level,
not only in the aspects.
After Bohm’s death in 1992, Basil Hiley has further developed Bohm’s
proposal using the formal apparatus of representations (in the mathemat-
ical sense) of algebraic structures. While these structures would stand for
the implicate order, their representation would be equivalent to explicate
orders. Specifying the general idea laid out by Bohm and Hiley (1993)
in their joint book The Undivided Universe (note that “undivided” is not
the same as “indivisible”!), Hiley works with a pre-space (and pre-time)
algebra and attempts to reproduce basic principles of the known physics
by representations of this algebra (Hiley 2001, de Gosson and Hiley 2013).
Concerning mind-matter relations, the idea would be that other rep-

resentations of the algebra, yet to be found, are relevant for mental pro-
cesses. Since both representations derive from the same algebraic struc-
ture, they are supposed to exhibit relationships that may be at the basis
of the psychophysical correlations that are the core of the mind-body
problem. Paavo Pylkkänen, a Finnish philosopher, has related Bohm and
Hiley’s work to modern approaches in the philosophy of science and the
philosophy of mind (Pylkkänen 2007).
5. Naturalistic Dualism According to Chalmers

In Chapter 8 of his book The Conscious Mind, entitled “Consciousness
and Information: Some Speculation”, David Chalmers (1996) outlines a
proposal of a theoretical basis, or a template of it, for how to explain
consciousness and its relation to the physical world. As the originator
of the notion of the “hard problem of concsciousness”, Chalmers (1995)
became known as an outspoken critic of aproaches that try to reduce
phenomenal experience to brain behavior all-too-quickly.
A key ingredient in Chalmers’ proposal is the concept of syntactic in-
formation à la Shannon – he does explicitly disregard semantics or prag-
matics, at least to begin with. The neutral stuff in his proposal consists of
Figure 7: Two aspects of David Chalmers, born at Sydney in 1966.

In 2000 (left) he was at the University of Arizona at Tucson where
he co-organized the biennial conferences “Toward a Science of Con-
sciousness” that have been of major influence for the emerging field
of consciousness studies. 2004 he returned to his home country
at Australian National University Canberra. 2013 (right) he was
elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
and in 2014 he accepted a full-time professorship at New York Uni-
versity.
260 Atmanspacher
information states (bits) that are neutral with respect to a mind-matter

split. They can be represented in so-called information spaces and man-
ifest themselves phenomenally and physically simultaneously (Chalmers
1996, pp. 284/286):
Whenever we find an information space realized phenomenally, we

find the same information space realized physically. And when an
experience realizes an information state, the same information state
is realized in the experience’s physical substrate. ...
Principles concerning the double realization of information could
be fleshed out into a system of basic laws connecting the physical
and phenomenal domains.
Needless to say, these basic laws are yet to be discovered – perhaps the
Weber-Fechner law of psychophysics may be regarded as a historical pre-
cursor. The classification of mind-matter correlations in Sec. 3 may be of
some general relevance in this direction. Truly psychophysical phenomena
in this spirit are neither physical nor psychological, and they are subject
to psychophysical laws, neither to physical laws nor to psychological laws
(Atmanspacher 2014b).
But let us return to a more detailed characterization of the abstract
information spaces. They are assumed to be endowed with combinatorial
structure and relational structure in the following way (Chalmers 1996,
p. 279):
An information space will have two sorts of structure: each com-

plex state might have an internal structure, and each element in this
state will belong to a subspace with a topological difference struc-
ture of its own. We might call the first of these the combinatorial
structure of the space, and the second of these the relational struc-
ture of the subspaces. Much of the time, each subspace will have
the same relational structure, so we can just speak of the relational
structure of the space itself. The overall structure of the space is
given by these combinatorial and relational structures together.
In other words, the relational structure exhibits the differences that

are needed to define the choices leading to informational units. For binary
choices, this unit is simply a “binary digit”, a bit. Sequences of binary (or
higher-order) choices are symbol sequences of bits (or high-order informa-
tional units). The simplest information state is thus one bit based on a
binary choice (or a qubit, respectively, if quantum information is consid-
ered). Obviously, the complexity of information states increases with the
length of the symbol sequence (combinatorial structure) and the number
of choices per symbol (relational structure).

phenomenal states physical states
syntactic information states

combinatorial and relational structures
Figure 8: Naturalistic dualism according to Chalmers posits that

the “hard problem of consciousness” can be addressed by psy-
chophysically neutral states characterized by syntactic information.
These states are represented in abstract information spaces and are
endowed with combinatorial and relational structure. At the level
of the mental and the material they are realized in terms of phe-
nomenal and physical states.
Starting around 2000, Tononi and collaborators (see, e.g., Tononi and
Balduzzi 2008) have developed and refined a theory of integrated infor-
mation that can be seen as a concrete implementation of many features
of Chalmers’ proposal. Tononi’s theoretical framework assigns different
levels of phenomenal experience to a system, depending on the measure
of integrated information characterizing that system. And Balduzzi and
Tononi (2009) even proposed a way to construct structures in so-called
qualia spaces which represent qualia by their shape.
Because phenomenal and physical realizations of information states
always go hand in hand, panpsychism is straightforwardly entailed by
naturalistic dualism. The integrated information approach predicts that
simple and purely reactive systems like photodiodes or thermostats have
non-vanishing – though not terribly interesting – phenomenal conscious-
ness. In recent work, it was shown that very complex networks, simulated
as feed-forward systems, can perform a high degree of functionality and
yet have zero (“zombie”) consciousness. This and many other interesting
results of Tononi’s work were recently published by Oizumi et al. (2014).
Naturalistic dualism shares with neutral monism that the mental and
the material, here the phenomenal and the physical, are reducible to the
psychophysically neutral, here the information states. Their realization
depends on the way they are composed – but also, importantly, on the
difference between their external and intrinsic features. So the overall
picture that naturalistic dualism presents is of the atomistic, not of the
holistic variety.
At the end of the chapter, Chalmers (1996, p. 305) discusses the meta-
physical dimension of his proposal:
262 Atmanspacher
The ontology that this leads us to might truly be called a double-

aspect ontology. Physics requires information states but cares only
about their relations, not their intrinsic nature; phenomenology re-
quires information states but cares only about the intrinsic nature.
This view postulates a single basic set of information states unify-
ing the two. We might say that internal aspects of these states are
phenomenal, and the external aspects are physical. Or as a slogan:
Experience is information from the inside, physics is information
from the outside.
The different ways of realizing information states are here connected
to their external relations (physics) and to their intrinsic nature (phe-
nomenology). The external relations needed for physical states are in-
timately linked to the notion of (efficient) causation: physical states are
realizations of information states “according to their effects along a causal
pathway” (p. 281).
Phenomenal states are not based on such pathways from causes to ef-
fects. They are realizations of the intrinsic structure of information states,
not of external relations. Since physical states are solely based on external
relations, the properties of the physical world that we usually conceive of
as intrinsic (spin, mass, charge, etc.) may thus actually be “projections”
grounded in intrinsic phenomenal properties. This hypothesis “again re-
quires a variety of ‘outrageous’ panpsychism” (p. 305), but its conceptual
elegance is hard to deny indeed.
As Chalmers points out, his proposal matches exactly the ontology
of property dualism, based on an ontically conceived notion of informa-
tion. The purported observer-independent ontic status of information is
at variance with the standard understanding of information as knowledge
relative to observers, hence epistemic. However, as we will see in the next
quote below, the fundamental information spaces of Chalmers’ approach
are based on “primitive” differences. These differences are assumed to be
primordially given as space partitions, so they need no observers.
There is some tradition of corresponding ideas in modern physics as
well – starting with Zuse in the 1960s and later employed by Fredkin,
Kantor, or Wolfram in terms of classical information theory. Finkelstein
and von Weizsäcker, also in the 1960s, pioneered the digital universe pic-
ture based on quantum information long before Lloyd, Brukner, Zeilinger
and others refined this framework of thinking. Its arguably most popular
expression is Wheeler’s (1990) illustrative phrase “it from bit”.
While all this work has been restricted mainly to physics (von Weizsäcker’s
“ur-alternatives” being an exception, cf. Böhme 2011), Chalmers’ ap-
proach is clearly more ambitious: It is designed as a basis for both the
physical and the phenomenal. His view offers (p. 303)
a picture of the world as a world of pure information. To each
fundamental feature of the world there corresponds an information
space, and wherever physics takes those features to be instantiated,

an information state from the relevant space is instantiated. As long
as these information states have the right relations among them,
then everything will be as it needs to be. On this picture of the
world, there is nothing more to say. Information is all there is.
This is how I understand the “it from bit” conception of the world.
It is a strangely beautiful conception: a picture of the world as
pure informational flux, without any further substance to it. ...
The world is simply a world of primitive differences, and of causal
and dynamic relations among those differences. On this view, to
try to say anything further about the world is a mistake.
6. Discussion
After the annotated presentation of selected variants of 20th century

dual-aspect thinking in historical sequence, they are now to be compared,
in a systematic fashion, with respect to their commonalities and dispar-
ities. For the hasty reader, this comparison is summarized in a synoptic
overview in Figure 9.
The one feature that all four variants discussed have in common is that
they regard the mental and the physical as two aspects of one underlying
reality that itself is neutral with respect to the mind-matter split. This
is the key point of dual-aspect approaches. They combine an (epistemic)
Mind-Matter Relations
dualism with an (ontic) monism
Dual-Aspect Thinkingand, in this way, suggest an alternative
Summary
to the conventional physicalist program of naturalizing the mind. In fact,
Russell Pauli-Jung Bohm Chalmers
notation neutral monism dual-aspect monism aspect monism naturalistic dualism

neutral sensations archetypes, implicate order, syntactic
domain (percepts) unus mundus holomovement information
empirically accessible inaccessible cond. accessible accessible
mereology composition decomposition decomposition composition
interlevel reductive holistic holistic reductive
implicit symbolic active
meaning content information
explicit objective synchronistic correlations phenomenal
meaning reference events between aspects experience
related Mach, James, d’Espagnat, Hiley, Rosenberg,
approaches Avenarius Primas Pylkkänen Tononi
Figure 9: Synoptic summary of key features of the four selected

variants of dual-aspect thinking discussed in this paper.
Harald Atmanspacher, Zurich / Freiburg 20th Century Versions of Dual-Aspect Thinking
264 Atmanspacher
dual-aspect approaches consider both mind and matter to be naturalized

by their underlying reality.
The most momentous distinctive features between the variants con-
sidered has to do with the way in which the underlying, psychophysically
neutral reality is conceived. Russell refers to sensations, Chalmers to syn-
tactic information, Pauli-Jung to archetypal ordering factors, Bohm to
holomovement and implicate order. While Russell and Chalmers both
allude to concepts with a pronounced “epistemic flavor”, Pauli-Jung and
Bohm refer to less intuitive metaphysical ideas.
Consistent with their epistemic leanings concerning the neutral do-
main, Russell and Chalmers posit that it can be epistemically accessed,
i.e. experienced or apprehended. This is different for Pauli-Jung, where
the neutral domain remains strictly inaccessible for direct apprehension.
On Bohm’s account, the overall idea is that there are levels of implicate
orders which may become accessible under the condition that they can be
explicated (for details see Sec. 4). Bohm’s way to relax epistemic inac-
cesibility can be mapped to Quine’s (1969) idea of ontological relativity
and its later refinements.
Russell’s and Chalmers’ neutral domain is conceived atomistically. For
Russell there are neutral elements whose composition decides whether the
compound state appears mental or material. Chalmers specifies these
states as information states whose external relations give rise to physical
states and whose intrinsic nature gives rise to phenomenal features.
Both Pauli-Jung and Bohm turn the compositional move upside down.
Their neutral domain is explicitly holistic, and the mental and material
aspects emerge due to decomposition. This idea resonates with a basic
philosophical insight of quantum theory – that systems are undivided
wholes without parts to begin with. In principle there are (infinitely)
many ways to generate parts by particular operations under particular
contexts. Among the accounts presented here, the Pauli-Jung conjecture
is the only one that addresses the (collective) unconscious and conceives
of it in a similarly holistic way.
The decompositional approach yields mind-matter correlations for free
– correlations emerge whenever the holistic symmetry of a system is bro-
ken. For some remarks about how this can be formally addressed in the
Pauli-Jung scheme see Atmanspacher (2014c). Moreover, mental and ma-
terial aspects are not reducible to the neutral domain – it is not possible
to uniquely reduce parts to wholes when there are (infinitely) many ways
to decompose wholes into parts. In virtue of these two features I think
that holistic dual-aspect accounts show an obvious conceptual advantage
over their atomistic competitors.
In order to explain mind-matter correlations, Chalmers introduces ex-
ternal and intrinsic features of the neutral information states that are
assumed to be correlated by default. Since external and intrinsic features
manifest themselves in physical and phenomenal states, these inherit the

default correlations. Thinking the aspects as compositions rather than de-
compositions provides the option to reduce mental and material aspects
to the neutral elements out of which they are composed.
Panpsychism can be related to all four approaches considered. If the
neutral domain is conceived holistically, it is neither mental nor mate-
rial, and panpsychism refers to the simultaneous appearance of both the
mental and the material aspects. If the neutral domain is conceived atom-
istically, it is possible to regard it as both mental and material (as Russell
occasionally does), so that panpsychism may even refer to the neutral do-
main itself. The so-called “combination problem” for panpsychism (Sea-
ger 2010), i.e. how experiences of fundamental physical entities combine
to yield experiences of higher-level physical entities, does not contaminate
decompositional approaches.
In both holistic versions of dual-aspect thinking, the notion of meaning
plays a significant role, and it does so in two respects. First, the experience
of meaning is constitutive for synchronistic correlations between mental
and material events in the sense of Jung. On Bohm’s account, experienced
meaning is due to correlations between mental and material states, which
arise as a result of unfolded active information. Both ways to conceive
meaning are based on the idea of an explicit two-place relation.
Second, there is also an implicit, not yet explicated sense of meaning.
In Bohm’s approach this implicit meaning is addressed by the notion of
active information, which Bohm emphatically distinguishes from syntac-
tic information. In the Pauli-Jung scheme it is enfolded in the symbolic
content of (unconscious) archetypal ordering factors, and it unfolds when
the respective archetype gets “constellated”, i.e. activated, in a particular
situation. As a consequence, the meaning experienced in a synchronis-
tic event is not merely “subjectively” ascribed – the range of possibly
experienced meanings is also “objectively” prescribed by the archetype.
In Russell’s and Chalmers’ frameworks of thinking, meaning does not
feature prominently, and certainly not in the implicit sense. Russell men-
tions Brentano’s concept of intentionality as a relation between a mental
state (a thought) and what its content refers to (an object). In a sense,
the intentional content of a mental state expresses its “meaning”. But, as
we have seen, Russell proposed to override the duality of a mental state
and its physical referent and introduces the term “sensation” for exactly
this purpose.
For the hard problem of consciousness according to Chalmers it is not
the intentional content but the phenomenal experience of a mental state
that matters crucially. The issue is what it is like to be in that state
(and how this relates to brain activity). Along this line, an experience
of meaning over and above meaning as intentional content should be a
phenomenal experience just as that of pain, sound, dizziness or whatever
266 Atmanspacher
else. Since his dual-aspect account is mainly concerned with syntactic

information states, his sophisticated work on semantics is not discussed
here (see, e.g., Chalmers 2006).
How far away are we from concrete or even practical applications of
dual-aspect thinking? Among the four approaches presented, those of
Pauli-Jung and of Chalmers did already initiate considerable empirical
and applied research. A number of first results and insights from the Pauli-
Jung lineage, mainly in psychology and psychiatry, have been included in
a collection of essays edited by Atmanspacher and Fuchs (2014). And
key ideas of Chalmers’s approach have been utilized and developed in
Tononi’s integrated information theory, with many recent results reported
by Oizumi et al. (2014).
The central challenge of dual-aspect thinking remains the problem of
how consciousness, mind and phenomenal experience are related to the
brain and the physical world in general. Mind-matter correlations are at
the heart of this problem – the way in which panpsychism works out for
inanimate systems, exceptional experiences apparently linking the mental
and the physical, or the relation between physical time and mental time
are only few examples.
No philosophical position in the mind-matter debate comes free of
charge. The most costly issue in dual-aspect thinking is arguably the
unclarified, some might say obscure, nature of the psychophysically neu-
tral domain underlying the mental and the material aspect. Since current
science is almost exclusively concerned with explorations of the two as-
pects, progress in understanding the neutral domain can be expected pri-
marily through conceptual speculations and conjectures. At first glance
they may seem as outrageous as their creators need to be courageous.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to David Chalmers, Paavo Pylkkänen, and three referees
for their helpful comments on how to improve earlier versions of this
manuscript.
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Received: 13 August 2014

Revised: 14 October 2014
Accepted: 14 October 2014
Reviewed by Robert Prentner, Stefan Schmidt, and another, anonymous, referee
270 Atmanspacher
Commentaries to Atmanspacher
Commentary by Michael Silberstein
Atmanspacher, like Seager, takes panpsychism very seriously as a con-

tender. For example, while Atmanspacher does not talk at length about
what he calls “holistic dual-aspect monism” (which he opposes to “atom-
istic panpsychism”), it seems to be largely equivalent to what Seager and
others mean by non-compositional panpsychism. Both Seager and At-
manspacher seem to think that non-compositional panpsychism or holis-
tic panpsychism solves the combination problem. One of my goals in my
main paper was to argue that neutral monism, panpsychism and dual-
aspect theories, as traditionally conceived, are not just different, not just
mutually exclusive, but one of them is better all the way around: neutral
monism. I argued that neutral monism is the most explanatory position,
most parsimonious, most in keeping with naturalism, most unifying, etc.
Let me be clear that I am not questioning Atmanspacher’s interpre-
tation of the specific thinkers he focuses on. To be sure, these accounts
of mind have historically and conceptually fuzzy boundaries. Nor do I
doubt his openness to neutral monism as such. The only reason I am
pursuing my taxonomic differences with Atmanspacher is that I want him
and others to appreciate that neutral monism as I have defined it – fairly
I think – is the view that most transcends the metaphysical assumptions
that lead to the mind/body problem in the first place. My worry is that
this cannot be fully appreciated if the essential differences are not first em-
phasized, before we go trying to create hybrids or synthesize these views.
So this brings me to my only significant difference with Atmanspacher,
how best to taxonomize panpsychism, neutral monism and dual-aspect
theories, and the evaluation of their relative strengths.
Let me focus on the taxonomic differences first. Atmanspacher sug-
gests that neutral monism and panpsychism belong in the category of
dual-aspect thinking (my italics):
I will present and compare some selected variants of dual-aspect
thinking in the 20th century, such as Bertrand Russell’s neutral
monism, the holistic dual-aspect monism of Wolfgang Pauli and
Carl Gustav Jung, David Bohm’s implicate order, and naturalistic
dualism according to David Chalmers. They can all be viewed as
versions of a naturalism that aims at a concept of nature beyond
the duality of the mental and the physical.
And even more explicitly here (again my italics):

The one feature that all four variants discussed have in common
is that they regard the mental and the physical as two aspects of
one underlying reality that itself is neutral with respect to the mind-
matter split. This is the key point of dual-aspect approaches. They
combine an (epistemic) dualism with an (ontic) monism and, in this
way, suggest an alternative to the conventional physicalist program
of naturalizing the mind. In fact, dual-aspect approaches consider
both mind and matter to be naturalized by their underlying reality.
Atmanspacher says, “dual-aspect thinking invites the option to be in-

terpreted in the spirit of panpsychism, the doctrine that mind is a funda-
mental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe”. Here
Atmanspacher makes clear that he does not think of panpsychism and
dual-aspect theories as necessarily mutually exclusive. In what follows
Atmanspacher also suggest that panpsychism and neutral monism are
not mutually exclusive (my italics):
Regarding a panpychist interpretation, there may be a nuanced dis-

tinction between atomistic neutral monism and holistic dual-aspect
monism. While the psychophysically neutral itself is neither mental
nor material on the accounts of Pauli-Jung and Bohm, panpsychism
can only refer to the level of aspects. For Russell’s monism, where
the elements of the “neutral stuff” are sometimes characterized as
both mental and material (cf. Sec. 2), panpsychism would be an
option even at the elementary level, not only in the aspects.
Panpsychism can be related to all four approaches considered. If the
neutral domain is conceived holistically, it is neither mental nor
material, and panpsychism refers to the simultaneous appearance
of both the mental and the material aspects. If the neutral domain
is conceived atomistically, it is possible to regard it as both mental
and material (as Russell occasionally does), so that panpsychism
may even refer to the neutral domain itself.
Again, focusing on the taxonomic differences for the moment, unlike

neutral monism and dual-aspect theories, panpsychism as traditionally
conceived has no neutral base, i.e., physical particulars such as particles
possess qualia. Note that merely moving to non-compositional panpsy-
chism does not give it a neutral base. Only neutral monism and dual-
aspect theories have a neutral base, but in the case of the latter, mind
and matter are essentially distinct and irreducible to that neutral base.
Neutral monism rejects the very duality between mind and matter,
whereas both panpsychism and dual-aspect theories affirm that essential
duality. Therefore, it is not obvious at the end of the day that panpsy-
chism and dual-aspect theories really are, as Atmanspacher says, “epis-
temic dualism combined with ontic monism”. The dualism in these views
looks pretty ontic and neither panpsychism nor dual-aspect theories seem
necessarily monistic at all. For these reasons panpsychism, dual-aspect
theories and neutral monism are, as traditionally defined, distinct views.
272 Atmanspacher
Showing that these views are distinct allowed me then in my main pa-
per to demonstrate that both panpsychism and dual-aspect theories have
various problems that neutral monism does not have. I will not reiter-
ate all those problems now, but for example, compositional panpsychism
as traditionally conceived is just dualism writ small, connecting qualia
or little-minds to particles rather than neurons or larger regions of the
brain. This tiny-dualism leads in turn to various combination problems.
True, one can mitigate these problems by moving to non-compositional
panpsychism, but in so doing the very compositional logic that drives
panpsychism is thrown out the window. If reality is not made of fun-
damental parts with primitive thisness and intrinsic properties such as
qualia, then panpsychism is a non sequitur.
If one is willing to reject this compositional picture of reality as con-
textual emergence does, then there is no reason to seek out fundamental
units of mind (whether they be correlated with individual particles or
entangled quantum states) and somehow “cohere” them into an individ-
ual human mind. I am trying to get Atmanspacher to acknowledge that
contextual emergence is already a thoroughgoing rejection of the kind of
atomistic thinking that breeds panpsychism to begin with. Dual-aspect
theories are certainly better off than panpsychism, but they are still stuck
with essentially different mental and physical properties that are not re-
ducible to one another, and yet somehow need to be correlated with one
another.
Most importantly of all, I want Atmanspacher and others to see that
the promise of neutral monism characterized as a form of contextual emer-
gence is to pull the mind/body problem out by the root, along with all the
odious assumptions that generated it. Given neutral monism as a form of
contextual emergence, the mind/body problem is simply and thoroughly
deflated. Neither panspsychism nor dual-aspect theories, as traditionally
conceived, hold out that promise. I understand that Atmanspacher him-
self and the thinkers he canvasses are open to embracing neutral monism.
Commentary by William Seager:

A New Way to Understand the Mind-Matter Relation?
Atmanspacher’s wide ranging survey of modern and current dual-

aspect approaches to the mind-body problem (and to the metaphysics
of nature more generally) casts considerable light and is especially useful
for bringing together the views of thinkers who are seldom compared or
contrasted with one another. I am in broad agreement with his philosoph-
ical taxonomy, but I have one grumpy complaint to make and then want
to discuss a more substantive albeit rather open-ended issue.
Near the beginning of Atmanspacher’s paper he makes an intrigu-
ing but to me rather obscure and prima facie implausible claim about
Spinoza and the so-called “causal closure of the physical” (the principle
that every physical event has an entirely sufficient purely physical cause).
Atmanspacher writes:
... causal closure in Spinoza is violated in a subtler way [as com-
pared to Cartesian dualism]. Since the modes, which do not interact
directly, derive from the one substance, this substance may inject
effects, intrusions as it were, into the modes so that they cannot be
causally closed in principle.
Causal closure of the physical would be, in Spinoza’s terminology, causal
closure over the attribute of extension. By and large, the modes of ex-
tension are material bodies (leaving aside the infinite modes, which are
generally taken to be the laws of nature). How could the realm of exten-
sion fail to be causally closed?
One way is the Cartesian postulate that mind and matter are in gen-
uine causal interaction with one another and represent entirely distinct
substances. In Spinozistic terms, this would have to be cross-attribute
causation and would thus illicitly violate the independence of the at-
tributes. Spinoza holds that “each attribute of a substance must be
conceived through itself” (Spinoza 1677/1985, Part I, Prop. 10). Since
Spinoza also holds as an axiom that to know an effect is to know its cause
(Spinoza 1677/1985, Part 1, Axiom 4), it is impossible for one attribute to
be causally involved with another (else one could conceive of one attribute
through the conception of another’s causal powers). For Spinoza the sys-
tem of modes of each attribute form a closed causal system, but one that
is isomorphic to the similarly isolated causal system of each of the other
attributes. Spinoza (1677/1985, Part 2, Prop. 7, scholium) illustrates this
in a famous passage:
... a circle existing in nature and the idea of the existing circle,
which is also in God, are one and the same thing ... therefore,
whether we conceive nature under the attribute of Extension, or
under the attribute of Thought ... we shall find one and the same
order, or one and the same connection of causes ...
This disjunction of ways of conceiving nature is exclusive, since the
attributes are what “the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting
its essence” (Spinoza 1677/1985, Part 1, Definition 4; my italics). For
Descartes, this exclusivity led to the conclusion that what Spinoza calls
distinct attributes are distinct substances. Against Descartes, Spinoza
rightly points out that nothing prevents a substance from having more
than one attribute (Descartes actually had to admit this, but took it that
each substance had a defining “principle attribute”).
Spinoza then attempts to prove that there is but one substance that
possesses all possible (conceivable) attributes. Nor is it clear how sub-
stance could generate anything like what Atmanspacher calls “intrusions
274 Atmanspacher
... into the modes”. The modes are the expression of the attribute (and
hence ultimately the substance) to which they belong, be it extension,
thought or any of the infinitely many other unknown and unknowable
attributes hidden from the human mind. The independence of the at-
tributes, again, guarantees that there could be no such intrusions.
This is of some importance if only to prevent premature foreclosure
of the range of positions possible within a dual-aspect approach. The
significance of Spinoza’s position is that it can both (1) endorse the causal
closure of the physical, which many take to be a regulative principle of and
perhaps even entailed by the structure of our most fundamental physical
theories, and (2) deny that mentality must be in some way reducible to
the physical.
Though perhaps not often noted, the same advantage can be found
in neutral monism. From an admittedly somewhat strained Spinozistic
perspective, the neutral monists can be regarded as denying what is some-
times called attribute parity: the view that all the attributes are equally
fundamental. The neutral monists by contrast hold a view that is akin to
selecting one attribute – in this case the “neutral” – as truly fundamental,
and relative to which all the other attributes are derivative.
Alternatively, the neutral could be likened to Spinoza’s substance, with
the attributes then compared to the derivative mind and matter, although
this is not a particularly apt analogy since the neutral monists find the
neutral “in” both mind and matter, in unchanged form, differing only in
the structure of relations under which they are “organized”. In Spinozistic
terms this seems to be another violation of attribute independence.
As Atmanspacher points out, Russell is probably the most famous
proponent of neutral monism, even though he came late to the party
after initially being strongly opposed to the view. But neutral monism
has a natural affinity for one of Russell’s core principles, that “whenever
possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities”.
This was perhaps first articulated in Russell (1914), but the sentiment is
frequently expressed in his writings.
What is surely curious here is: How can we construct anything from
the neutral, unless we have access to it? And how can we have access to it
unless we apprehend it as falling under and within our conceptual scheme?
It would take considerable defending, but I believe that the force of these
questions is what leads neutral monists to choose mentalistic terms to label
the neutral. As Atmanspacher notes, the use of the frankly mentalistic
terms “pure experience” (James), “sensation” (Mach and Russell) and
“sense data” or “sensibilia” (Russell) has led to confusion. However, it is
worth noting that they had other terms as well such as “elements” (Mach)
and “events” or “momentary particulars” (Russell).
In my opinion, the solution to this puzzle of accessibility is to take
the neutral as what is present to consciousness, which is indeed always
categorized or conceptualized in experience but which can be recategorized

if necessary in the face of new and recalcitrant further experience (as for
example one can imagine how one might come to recognize that one was
suffering from hallucinations or when a dreamer regains lucidity within
a dream and recognizes it as such). Such recategorization allows us to
develop the notion of the neutral: what is present to the mind is not
necessarily, in itself, either mental or physical. James (1912/2003, p. 7)
tells us that
... experience is a member of diverse processes that can be followed

away from it along entirely different lines. The one self-identical
thing has so many relations to the rest of experience that you can
take it in disparate systems of association, and treat it as belonging
with opposite contexts. In one of these contexts it is your “field of
consciousness”; in another it is “the room in which you sit” ...
And Russell (1913/1984, p. 15, as quoted in Tully 1999, p. 211) echoes:
the whole duality of mind and matter ... is a mistake; there is only
one kind of stuff out of which the world is made, and this stuff is
called mental in one arrangement, physical in the other.
If we try to look at neutral monism this way, we can see how it is perhaps
more closely connected to the holistic dual-aspect views of Pauli and Jung,
and Bohm, Hiley and Pyllkänen than would seem initially likely.
The reason for that, which Atmanspacher emphasizes, is the remark-
able fact that quantum theory provides a striking living analogy for a kind
of holism in which systems possess many aspects without those aspects
constituting the system and in which, in a certain sense, which aspect is
presented depends on the context of observation. Perhaps it is more than
an analogy but at the very least it gives us a solid and specific model.
Holism can be roughly defined in terms of the order of ontological
priority. We are all very used to a kind of weak reductionist viewpoint
in which the property of the whole is a function of the properties of the
parts (and their arrangement, or relational structure2 ). It is probably fair
to say that it is hard not to see this viewpoint as being just obviously
correct. We have built our artifactual world according to the dictates of
this kind of reductionism. The computer, carefully devised physically out
of literally billions of microscopic and macroscopic parts and logically out
of myriads of relational structures of elementary instructions, stands as
the apotheosis of this viewpoint. It is indeed pretty obvious that things,
including human beings, are made of parts and it certainly seems to the
2 This relational structure does not have to abide by locality or be limited to “me-
chanical” influences so this kind of weak reductionism is not equivalent to part-whole

reductionism, although it is compatible with it and inspired by it.
276 Atmanspacher
case that the overall features of familiar things are determined by the rela-
tions and interactions of their parts. More grandly, there are respectable
thinkers who liken nature to cellular automata, another perfect exemplar
of the “parts have priority” viewpoint (see, e.g., the remarkable paper by
’t Hooft (2014), but also the entire digital physics movement).
But philosophically speaking, the idea that the parts have ontological
priority is not an analytic truth (for a nice presentation of philosophical
holism see Schaffer 2010). Quantum theory suggests a picture in which
the whole takes ontological priority and the “parts” are derivative. The
whole has priority in the very robust sense that there does not exist a
unique breakdown of a quantum system (as specified by the wave func-
tion) into components. On the other hand, the experimenter is free to, as
it were, generate such components by performing an appropriate measure-
ment. Orthodox quantum theory furthermore denies that prior to such
measurement the components were already present in some definite form
within the whole. Much if not all of the oddity and paradoxical nature of
quantum mechanics results from these facts.
Although stimulating and highly suggestive, the quantum model may
not smoothly fit onto a holistic dual-aspect outlook in all respects. If
we regard complementary observables as the “aspects” we find that each
precludes the other rather than being co-accessible or even, as suggested
by classical neutral monism, identically present in experience. There is
no isomorphism between the aspects; each embodies distinct information.
There is something akin to inter-attribute causation or at lease influence.
If we measure momentum, we irrevocably alter information about posi-
tion.
Such considerations suggest that quantum physics may not directly in-
form our metaphysics. The difficulty can be illustrated via Atmanspacher’s
discussion of the Pauli-Jung conception of the mind-body problem. To
take one explicit example, Pauli wrote both that “a mirror-image principle
is a natural way to give an illustrative representation of the psychophysical
relationship” (Pauli and Jung 2001, p. 159) and that “it would be most
satisfactory if physis and psyche could be conceived as complementary
aspects of the same reality” (Pauli (1952/1994). As noted, complemen-
tary observables cannot be in a mirror-image relation, since in that case
complete knowledge of one would, in principle, yield complete knowledge
of the other. And yet, a dual-aspect approach to the mindbody problem
quite naturally suggests the kind of isomorphism between them as was
envisaged by Spinoza.
Here, to use Pauli’s phrase, we need a “a new idea of reality” (from a
1948 letter from Pauli to Markus Fierz, as quoted in Atmanspacher and
Primas 2006, p. 16). Quantum theory stands as a kind of metaphorical
beacon on the road towards this new idea, but it may not itself embody
that “new idea”.
Atmanspacher H. and Primas H. (2006): Pauli’s ideas on mind and matter in

the context of contemporary science. Journal of Consciousness Studies 13(3),
5–50.
James W. (1912/2003): Essays in Radical Empiricism, Dover, Mineola.
Pauli W. (1952/1994): The influence of archetypal ideas on the scientific theories
of Kepler. In Writings on Physics and Philosophy, ed. by C. Enz and K. von
Meyenn, translated by R. Schlapp, Springer, Berlin, pp. 219–280.
Pauli W. and Jung C.G. (2001): Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters
1932–1958, ed. by C.A. Meier, C. Enz, and M. Fierz, translated by D. Roscoe,
Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Russell B. (1913/1984): Theory of knowledge: The 1913 manuscript. In The
Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 7, ed. by E. Eames, Routledge,
London.
Russell B. (1914): The relation of sense-data to physics. Scientia 16, 1–27.
Schaffer J. (2010): Monism: The priority of the whole. Philosophical Review
119, 31–76.
Spinoza B. (1677/1985): Ethics. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. by
E. Curley, Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp. 401–617.
’t Hooft G. (2014): The cellular automaton interpretation of quantum mechan-
ics: A view on the quantum nature of our universe, compulsory or impossible?
Manuscript accessible at http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548.
Tully R. (1999): Russell’s neutral monism. In Bertrand Russell: Critical As-
sessments, Volume 3, ed. by A. Irvine, Routledge, London, pp. 257–276.
Commentary by Steven Horst:

Dual Aspects and Neutral Monism: Some Cognitivist Concerns
Atmanspacher provides an illuminating discussion of several types of

dual-aspect neutral monist theories. Some of these were previously unfa-
miliar to me, and so I think my best way of engaging his paper is to do
so critically, from a cognitivist perspective.
Intuitive Development
Human understanding of the world involves the application of concepts
and the formation of judgments. Some concepts divide the world into
classes of things, and others pick out ways those things can be. Judgments
involve commitments to things being some particular way, expressed in
terms of concepts. The number of basic judgment types is small; but
even an intellectually unremarkable human adult has a large repertoire of
concepts, a repertoire that is dramatically increased through specialized
learning and is in principle open-ended.
Concepts and judgments may not be all that is needed for understand-
ing – I, for example, think the semantics of concepts are largely derivative
278 Atmanspacher
from mental models – but to think concrete thoughts at all, we have to

apply concepts. But if we have many concepts, they are not simply a
motley laundry list. More specific concepts, for example, can be grouped
under more generic concepts, and philosophers and lexicographers have
produced various taxonomies and thesauri that attempt to capture a pat-
tern of organization, perhaps even a canonical pattern. There is a natural
question about whether there are unique and canonical highest-level divi-
sions – e.g., mental and physical – before we reach the purely categorical
level of such bland generalities as “object”, “property”, and “relation”, or
whether there is an irreducible hodgepodge of overlapping ways of classi-
fying things.
Naive Realism
In ordinary thinking, we take the ways we conceptualize things to be
ways things really are, or at least can be. There is no distinction made
between concepts on the one hand and kinds and properties on the other,
though of course even the most naive of us is aware that we may be mis-
taken in any particular application of a concept to a given individual or
state of affairs. The first step out of naiveté comes with the realization
that some concepts do not capture real features of the world, or at least
that some (like Locke’s “secondary qualities”) are not features that are
truly “in the object”, but are artifacts of our responses. The job of under-
standing the world then becomes one of obtaining and using concepts that
adequately reflect the real mind-independent properties objects (suppos-
edly) have in their own right, and making correct judgments about the
world using those concepts.
From this realist standpoint, the taxonomic project is not merely, or
even primarily, one of finding order in our concepts viewed as psychological
entities, but finding the most basic kinds of things (substances), proper-
ties, relations, processes, and events in the world. It is within this project
that we must locate claims that there is one type of substance (bodies, or
perhaps minds) or two types (minds and bodies) or perhaps some larger
number. There can be promiscuously pluralist realisms (Aristotle, Dupré),
but most realist philosophical metaphysics is fundamentalist, seeking to
identify some kinds and properties as those on which all others depend.
Kantian Idealism and Other Cognitivisms
Cognitivist philosophies, the most familiar of which is Kantian ideal-
ism, take an opposite approach. The phenomenal world is regarded as
real, but is made up of objects as interpreted through the mind’s own fac-
ulties. The outer limits of how we can conceive of things are determined
by constraints of our cognitive architecture, though within this there is
room for a great and perhaps indefinite variety of “empirical concepts”
whose aptness is to be judged by their empirical robustness in ongoing
experience.
For Kant, the Categories, Forms of Sensibility, and the different posits
required by theoretical, practical and teleological reasoning play a pre-
dominant role in determining the highest-level divisions of the ontology
of the phenomenal world, and transcendental analysis reveals the basic
types of operations of the mind. My Cognitive Pluralism allows for ex-
perience and conceptual innovation to play a much larger role, suggests
that there may be less overarching order to the various model-based ways
we possess of understanding phenomena, and predicts that some of them
will prove to be abidingly inconsistent with one another, even if they are
each individually apt.
On such a view, the notion of “objects as they are in themselves” turns
out to be curiously empty. On Kant’s view, the “negative” conception
of the noumena is obtained by starting with a phenomenal object and
abstracting away from all of the conceptual and sensual content. One
cannot give any kind of concrete characterization of noumena, because to
do so, one needs to apply concepts and form judgments, and once one
does that, one is no longer treating them as noumena but as phenomena.
If “natures” need to be things that can in principle be described with
concepts, noumena qua noumena can have no natures.
Multiple Aspects and Neutral Monism
Multiple-aspect theories begin with the recognition that one and the
same thing can be felicitously characterized in more than one way.3 In
itself, this does not amount to a philosophical theory; it is more like a
common-sense observation that things have many good descriptions, that
problems can be thought about from many angles, etc.
It begins to become a philosophical theory once we suppose that not
just every difference in conceptual framing makes for a distinct aspect:
that our most general ways of thinking of things, if they are sufficiently
comprehensive and sufficiently orthogonal to one another, are the real
candidates for aspecthood. Where it truly gains the status of philosophi-
cal theory is in how it elaborates its differences from other philosophical
theories. Unlike fundamentalist realism, it holds that two aspects can
apply to the same things without either aspect being derivative from the
other, but being, as it were, coeval. Unlike cognitivism, it holds the as-
pects to be features of the world itself and not merely different basic ways
of interpreting the world.
The best-known dual-aspect view, Spinoza’s, has additional charac-
teristics which, I take it, a dual-aspect view need not have: (1) each
Spinozistic Attribute is comprehensive, in the sense that everything has a
3 One usually hears them called “dual-aspect” theories, but I see no reason to limit
the number of aspects to two, and indeed Spinoza claimed that the number of At-
tributes is in fact infinite, with only our powers of grasping them limited to so small
an integer value.
280 Atmanspacher
characterization under each Attribute (though not, of course, in the sense

that any one Attribute includes all of the good characterizations), and
(2) each Attribute provides us in principle with a deductive system from
which we could infer all of the facts about the world (under that aspect)
a priori. Some contemporary dual-aspect views embrace the first claim,
but I know of none that advocate the second.
Atmanspacher’s characterization of neutral monism adds something
to all this: the supposition that, underneath the aspect dualism, there is
an ontically monistic “neutral domain”, in the form of a common ground
which we can understand through multiple aspects. This strikes me as
something absent from Spinoza (except perhaps in the independence of
his notions of Substance and Mode from that of Attribute), and I think
Atmanspacher may agree, as Spinoza’s view is not represented in the
schematic diagrams that depict various forms of neutral monism or in the
chart that compares them.
There are things here that a cognitivist can like. For example, At-
manspacher characterizes the “key point” as the combination of “an (epis-
temic) dualism with an (ontic) monism”. At least the “epistemic” side of
this seems grist for the cognitivist’s mill. Again, I do not see it as central
to the neutral monist view that the number of aspects be exactly two;
and so long as it is larger than one, a Cognitive Pluralist like myself can
endorse the conclusion that none need take pride of place over the others,
as the fundamentalist realist monist would have it.
What is a potential sticking point, however, is the “(ontic) monism”.
The questions here involve just what one is committed to in calling it
“ontic”, and what (if anything) can be said about its ontic nature. From
a cognitivist standpoint, the worry is this: insofar as it can be accurately
described at all (leaving aside metaphorical gestures in its direction), we
end up treating it, in Kant’s terminology, as phenomenon. If the language
in which we describe the “neutral” level is distinct from that of our aspect-
languages, what we then would seem to have is an additional aspect. And
if that is the case, and it is still treated as more fundamental than the
others, a fundamentalist realistic monism has snuck in through the back
door.
Among the theories Atmanspacher describes, Chalmers’ informational
approach seems most clearly to invite this interpretation.4 Perhaps this is
supposed to be avoided by making the properties of the neutral substrate
purely formal. But I am not sure that it is purely formal. On the one
hand, at least reference seems to be in the picture, as we can refer to
“information states”. On the other hand, a description of a system of
relata characterized only by a set of relational properties would seem to
4 Although Chalmers’ notion of “information” strikes me as importantly different
from the notion I am more familiar with from Shannon and coding theory, and so I am
not fully confident of my reading of his view.
have at least a limited amount of sense: the senses of the relational terms.
What must be avoided, of course, is having the key notions of the aspect-
languages in the description of the neutral system. But this does not
prevent the latter from amounting to an additional aspect, but merely a
different one.
Alternatively, the talk of a neutral base might simply be a way of ex-
pressing our intuitions that our ways of thinking about things through
concepts are beholden a transcendent referent, which can never be cap-
tured fully in our concepts, and certainly not concepts confined to a single
aspect. But this in itself is not a metaphysical theory, and it is not clear
that it should be turned into one. And, perhaps more directly, it is not
clear that the I-know-not-what that we posit in regarding an object or
phenomenon as transcendent should be regarded monistically. Indeed, it
seems odd to speak of counting at all except when things are interpreted
under concepts. At best, saying the ontic base is “monistic” seems intel-
ligible only in the negative sense of saying that it is not carved up into
separate partitions by the aspects, but is “the common reality” under-
stood through both aspects.
Now there is another option which I think might merit the name
“monism” in a stronger sense. Mystic practitioners report a mode of ex-
perience which is non-discursive, non-conceptual, and in which the world
is not experienced as divided into objects. Certain strands of Platon-
ism/Neoplatonism and some Buddhist lineages (and, as I learned from
Silberstein’s article, Advaita Vedānta ) have held that this mode of expe-
rience presents reality more directly, and as an undivided unity. In the
Neoplatonist tradition, this mode of experience is called noesis, the name
given to the highest form of cognition in Plato’s divided line.
I think Jung may have endorsed a view of this type, and it seems
more compatible with Atmanspacher’s “decompositional” than “compo-
sitional” forms of neutral monism. Of course, one question we might then
pose is whether such a form of “access” is itself “epistemic”. Plato con-
trasts noesis with both episteme and dianoia, but perhaps this simply
reflects Plato’s own theoretical use of the term episteme and has no bear-
ing on whether it is “epistemic” in the sense that aspects are said to be
“epistemic”.
282 Atmanspacher
Replies by Atmanspacher
Let me begin with my sincere thanks to the authors of the three com-
mentaries, which reflect some of the lively discussions at the symposium
from which this issue of the journal emerged. More specifically, I am
grateful for the opportunity to expand somewhat more on a number of
points about which my target paper was not elaborate enough. Since the
commentaries contain sufficiently distinct material (though there are also
common points of concern), I think it is in the service of clarity to respond
to them individually.
Reply to Silberstein’s Comments

Since Silberstein emphasizes the taxonomic issues in his comments,
let me briefly begin with a few words about where the origins of my
hesitations and predilections lie. I hesitate to subscribe to the notion of
neutral monism because of two reasons. The first is that the historical
sources favoring neutral monism mostly use mentalistic notions for the
neutral domain, such as experience (James) or sensation (Mach, Russell),
and this has arguably entailed a considerable amount of confusion about
the status of the “neutral”.
The second reason is that these same sources describe their views, as
far as I know, predominantly in terms of a compositional picture: con-
stellations of neutral elements may lead to mental or physical aspects
depending on their actual arrangements. The presented versions of dual-
aspect monism, by contrast, are decompositional. Silberstein obviously
favors this move himself – at least at the end of his main paper, where he
suggests “pure being” or “pure presence” as possible notions to address
the ultimately neutral as thoroughly holistic.
He states his reluctance toward dual-aspect terminology by saying that
the “dualism in these views looks pretty ontic”. This may be correct
in certain examples, but it is clearly not the case for the proposals by
Bohm and Pauli/Jung that I presented. They both empasize a neutral
domain from which the mental and the physical “emerge” as aspects – in
ways which need to be clarified, of course. I cannot see anything about
the aspects in those proposals that might make them suspicious of being
interpreted as ontic. (I’ll say a bit more about this below, in fact I think
the story is a bit more complex.)
In my view, panpsychism does not play a leading role in this discus-
sion. Yet, I did not want to exclude it from the comparative part of my
article, because it can be embedded differently in the different approaches
presented. Of course, panpsychism is also an interpretive option for on-
tological dualism – which I am certainly not arguing for.
Now I want to come to an issue that may be more interesting than

terminology. In Silberstein’s comments, and even more so in his main
paper, he alludes to the concept of contextual emergence as an ontological
relation. The way in which Bishop and myself introduced contextual
emergence was different though. In the title of the first paper introducing
it ten years ago we referred deliberately and explicitly to the “description
of properties”, not to properties “out there” in nature.
This was a matter of both carefulness and cautiosness. All our ar-
guments against strong reduction and in favor of contextual emergence
were couched in theoretical terms tailored for the examples described.
And the guiding principles for applying contextual emergence in situ-
ations with less well developed theoretical frameworks also use clearly
descriptive terms. So we left issues of ontology aside to begin with.
But it is a natural question to ask whether and how this restricted
epistemological framework can be related to ontology. And if the ambi-
tion in dual-aspect monism (or neutral monism) is to express a relation
between an ontic neutral domain and its epistemic aspects, we need to
have an idea about the relation between them. Is there a way to connect
ontic and epistemic elements in a way that is general enough to be useful
in this respect?
A philosophical proposal that shows a possible direction to go has been
suggested by Quine (1969) with his ontological relativity. The key idea
is to reject a fundamental ontology from which everthing can be derived
and permit ontological status for all systems in nature. Not only are
elementary particles ontic, but everything else can be considered ontic as
well, up to bricks, tables and icecubes (a triad put up by Putnam (1987)
in his work on internal realism, a variant of Quine’s proposal).
Neither Quine nor Putnam told us how to apply this to concrete sci-
entific scenarios. Some time ago, we tried to outline possibilities which
might serve this purpose (Atmanspacher and Kronz 1999, Atmanspacher
and Primas 2003).5 We sketched a way in which ontic and epistemic
states of systems can be formally related to one another such that we can
legitimately talk about ontic states (of nature) and epistemic states (of
our knowledge about nature) at each domain (level).
Taking this picture seriously means that the epistemic aspects in dual-
aspect monism can be assigned ontic relevance as well, namely relative to
higher-level epistemic states. Relative to the ontically conceived neutral
base they are to be regarded epistemic. As a consequence, there is the
option for both the mental and the physical to be interpreted ontically.
But this is in no way like brute ontological dualism – the picture now
5 Another, related proposal along different lines was suggested by Elena Castellani
under the name ontological democracy. See her lecture at the Seven Pines Symposium
XVI on “Analogy and Duality in Physics” in May 2012, accessible at http://pitp.
physics.ubc.ca/confs/7pines2012/talks/Castellani.pdf.
284 Atmanspacher
is much subtler. Subtleties of this kind, I think, must be carefully con-

sidered if Silberstein wants to use contextual emergence in an ontological
framework of thinking that is consistent with its (weaker) epistemological
underpinnings.
Reply to Seager’s Comments
The causal closure of the physical is a principle that has almost reached
the status of an ultimate truth in analytical philosophy of mind. Seager’s
“grumpy” comment on my “obscure” note that “causal closure in Spinoza
is violated” is therefore well motivated. But I think the status of the causal
closure of the physical is not as solid as it may appear from (much of) the
literature. Its discussion also gives me an excellent opportunity to spell
out some corresponding features of dual-aspect monism which I didn’t
address in my main paper.
First of all, “causal closure” is usually understood as completeness with
respect to efficient causes: Every physical effect has a physical efficient
cause. The causal closure principle features with particular significance in
the discussion of mental causation, where it ultimately prohibits mental
efficient causes to affect physical events. In Spinoza’s terms, the modes
of the attribute of extension cannot be influenced by the modes of the
attribute of thought.
Now, Spinoza’s and other kinds of dual-aspect thinking include a
monistically conceived substance in addition to the attributes: “God” for
Spinoza, or the more profane “neutral” in other versions. Seager wants
me to clarify how this substance could “inject effects, intrusions as it were,
into the modes” if the modes are expressions of the attributes which in
turn are attributes of the substance.
I can see that Seager’s concern is plausible within a certain reading
of Spinoza as a pantheist, equating God with nature. If this equation
comes out even, it seems absurd to think of anything like causes and
effects between God and nature. However, there is a long tradition of
interpreting Spinoza as a panentheist, where God is immanent in nature
but not identical with it: God is infinite and nature is finite, and the finite
things can only have God as their cause (Lloyd 1996, p. 40).
But does “cause” here mean efficient cause? Hardly, I think, and this is
why my obscure remark needs clarification indeed. What kind of “effect”
the neutral domain in dual-aspect thinking might “inject” into its aspects
may become clearer in the following quote from a letter of Pauli to Fierz
in 1948 (von Meyenn 1993, p. 496, my italics):6
6 In this letter Pauli discusses the concept of archetypes which Jung previously
had defined as inner images of the psyche. Pauli argues correctly that this would be
inappropriate within a dual-aspect framework of thinking.
The ordering and regulating factors must be placed beyond the dis-
tinction of “physical” and “psychic” – as Plato’s “ideas” share the
notion of a concept and of a force of nature (they create actions
out of themselves). I am very much in favor of referring to the “or-
dering” and “regulating” factors in terms of “archetypes”; but then
it would be inadmissible to define them as contents of the psyche.
The mentioned inner images (“dominant features of the collective
unconscious” after Jung) are rather psychic manifestations of the
archetypes which, however, would also have to put forth, create,
condition anything lawlike in the behavior of the corporeal world.
The “ordering and regulating factors” in this quote ought to be conceived

much more like formal causes rather than efficient causes. They are pro-
jections from the neutral into the mental and the physical, and generate
manifestations of the neutral domain which itself, according to the Pauli-
Jung picture, remains inaccessible.7 In this sense, both the mental and
the physical are “causally open” – not for mutual interaction, but with
respect to structural ordering factors residing in the tertium quid of dual-
aspect monism. For more discussion see Atmanspacher (2012).
Conceiving the psychophysically neutral domain holistically rather
than atomistically reflects the spirit of a corresponding move in quan-
tum theory, which started out as an attempt to finalize the atomistic
worlview of the 19th century and turned it into a fundamentally holistic
one. This elucidates why the protagonists of holistic dual-aspect thinking
have their roots in quantum physics. However, I agree completely with
Seager that “quantum physics may not directly inform our metaphysics”
of the mind-matter problem, and I also agree with his arguments for this
statement.
For instance, I think it is deceptive and will not be viable to look for a
direct influence of consciousness on physical matter via the not-yet-fully-
understood measurement process in quantum physics. My correspond-
ing critique of the proposals of eminent scientists in the lineage of von
Neumann, London and Bauer, Wigner and Stapp can be found in At-
manspacher (2011). My ideas are pretty much different, so what Seager
indicates at the end of his reply to my comments is definitely not pointing
my way. Here are two key points of what I try to promote:
(1) A holistic conception of dual-aspect monism implies correlations
between the mental and the physical as a direct consequence of the bro-
ken symmetry of the holistic neutral domain. No other approach to the
“hard problem of consciousness” has such a natural explanation of mind-
matter correlations. And the notes that Pauli and Jung left in their
correspondence even give us thrilling hints for how these correlations can
be systematically addressed (see Atmanspacher and Fach 2013).
7 This is an important and problematic issue which both Seager and Horst raise. I
will address it in my reply to Horst.

286 Atmanspacher
(2) If epistemic quantum features emerge from the holistically neutral

domain on the physical side, then we should expect analogous epistemic
quantum features on the mental side as well. This is not to say that
quantum physics might explain psychology – what it means is that basic
formal principles such as non-commuting operations, which are central
in quantum physics, should also play a role in the mental domain. This
conjecture has already led to cutting-edge research in decision theory,
perception, and other areas of cognitive science (see Wang et al. 2013 for
an introduction).
The price to be paid for these (and hopefully more) bonus points is to
buy into a neutral domain about which we (today) know next to nothing
– a “new kind of reality”, as Pauli speculated, neither physical nor mental
nor a simplistic combination of the two. And this brings me to a grave
issue raised by Horst.
Reply to Horst’s Comments

Horst’s concern, which I think is very much to the point, is about the
status of what I called “ontic monism”. He gives three options of how to
understand this notion:
(A) The “onticity” in ontic monism is actually part of an epistemology,
insofar as it is subject to a theoretical description. I agree that
Chalmers’ information based approach has much of this flavor, and
I have elsewhere criticized it precisely because of this friction.
(B) The “onticity” of the neutral base refers to a transcendent referent,
which can never be fully captured in theoretical terms. But then it
is unclear why this neutral base reality should qualify as “monistic”
– it is just “not carved up into separate partitions by its aspects”.8
(C) The “onticity” of the neutral refers, in Horst’s words, to “a mode of
experience which is non-discursive, non-conceptual, and in which the
world is not experienced as divided into objects”. In this version “ex-
perience” is involved as a clearly epistemic (though non-conceptual)
issue, and this casts doubt on the notion of the “ontic”.
For me, (C) is the most promising move, but this needs to be explained.
The key point is that the overall cartoon picture shown in Figures 2, 4,
6, and 8 (which serves the purpose of illustrating the core idea) is in need
of refinement.
In fact, the boundary between the mental and physical aspects on the
one hand and their underlying domain on the other is by far not as sharp
8 The simplest kind of partition is a bipartition, the decision of a binary alternative,
leading to a dual-aspect view. However, in principle multiple aspects are possible,

as Horst alludes to in a footnote. Let me add that the partitions should also satisfy
certain stability criteria in order to be useful. We don’t know how such a criterion
looks like for the mind-matter distinction, but it seems to be fairly robust!
as those illustrations suggests. One should conceive of a whole spectrum

of boundaries, each one indicating the transition to a more comprehen-
sive level of wholeness until (ultimately) a totally distinction-free domain
is approached in the limit. A viable idea within the Pauli-Jung conjec-
ture, for instance, might be archetypal levels with increasing degrees of
generality: the undivided world at bottom, the mental and physical on
top, and intermediate levels in between.
This entails that a tight distinction of fundamentally ontic and de-
rived epistemic domains is too simplistic. In my commentary to Horst’s
main paper I made an attempt to relate his “cognitive pluralism” to an
“ontological pluralism” through a concept that we introduced as “relative
onticity” (Atmanspacher and Kronz 1999), but perhaps I failed to get
this across clearly enough. Using the terminology of Pauli and Jung, an
archetype which may be regarded as ontic relative to the perspective of
the mind-matter distinction, can be seen epistemic relative to undivided
wholeness.
Such a refined picture also relativizes Pauli’s and Jung’s overly stern
Kantian stance that archetypes per se, as formal ordering factors in the
“collective unconscious”, are strictly inaccessible epistemically. This would
be close to option (B) and entail that any experiential apprehension what-
soever is impossible. If, however, archetypes are understood as epistemic
or ontic relative to other archetypal levels, this opens up a way to epis-
temic access.
Modern philosophy of mind speaks of a mode of experience, originally
introduced by Evans in 1982 (cf. Bermúdez and Cahen 2011), which is
highly relevant in this context: the experience of non-conceptual content.
Horst eplicitly uses this term in his option (C), and I think the two of us
may have a thrilling point of convergence here (which challenges another
Kantian doctrine: that “thoughts without contents are empty, intuitions
without concepts are blind”). Let me finish my reply with some details
about this.
Briefly speaking, mental states with non-conceptual content are states
to which no propositional attitude can be ascribed. There are several ways
to characterize such states. One framework in this regard (often applied
in ecological psychology) has been proposed by Feil and Atmanspacher
(2010) based on formal tools of the theory of complex dynamical systems.
It can be used for standard representational accounts in the philosophy of
mind, but at the same time offers the potential to proceed beyond such
accounts.
This framework is called a state-space approach: mental states are
represented as subspaces of a space spanned by the properties that are
associated with the states. Typically one needs stable states (attractors)
in order to represent concepts in the sense of propositional attitudes. By
contrast, marginally stable or unstable states (without or outside attrac-
288 Atmanspacher
tors) do not represent concepts. Nevertheless, they can be experienced –

or so one might claim.
Feil and Atmanspacher (2010) distinguished basically two types of
mental states with non-conceptual content: (i) states in the absence of
representations (no stable attractors) of any kind, refereed to as pre-
categorial, and (ii) states in the presence of fully established representa-
tions (stable attractors) none of which is actualized by the state, referred
to as a-categorial. Many mystical, aesthetic, existentialist and other nu-
minous experiences (see, e.g. the introduction to the anthology edited by
Gunther (2003)) belong to this second type.
I agree with Horst that Jung must have been sympathetic to such
“noetic” experiences. And relativizing the ontic-epistemic divide should
allow us to explore their metaphysical status systematically.
Atmanspacher H. (2011): Quantum approaches to consciousness. In Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by E.N. Zalta, accessible at http://plato.
stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/
Atmanspacher H. (2012): Dual-aspect monism à la Pauli and Jung perfo-
rates the completeness of physics. In Quantum Theory: Reconsideration of
Foundations–6, ed. by A. Khrennikov, American Institute of Physics, New York,
pp. 5–21.
Atmanspacher H. and Fach W. (2013): A structural-phenomenological typology
of mind-matter correlations. Journal of Analytical Psychology 58, 218–243.
Atmanspacher H. and Kronz F. (1999): Relative onticity. In On Quanta, Mind
and Matter, ed. by H. Atmanspacher, U. Müller-Herold, and A. Amann, Dor-
drecht, Kluwer, pp. 273–294.
Atmanspacher H. and Primas H. (2003): Epistemic and ontic quantum realities.
In Time, Quantum, and Information, Springer, Berlin, pp. 301–321.
Bermúdez J. and Cahen A. (2011): Nonconceptual mental content. In Stan-
ford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by E.N.Zalta, accessible at http://plato.
stanford.edu/entries/content-nonconceptual/.
Feil D. and Atmanspacher H. (2010): Acategorial states in a representational
theory of mental processes. Journal of Consciousness Studies 17(5-6), 72–101.
Gunther Y.H., ed. (2003): Essays on Nonconceptual Content, MIT Press, Cam-
bridge.
Lloyd G. (1996): Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and The Ethics,
Rotledge, London.
Putnam H. (1987): The Many Faces of Realism, Open Court, La Salle.
Quine W.V.O. (1969): Ontological relativity. In Ontological Relativity and
Other Essays, Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 26–68.
Wang Z., Busemeyer J., Atmanspacher H., and Pothos E. (2013): The potential
of quantum theory to build models of cognition. Topics in Cognitive Science 5,
672–688.
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20th Century Variants of Dual-Aspect Thinking

Article in Mind and Matter · January 2014

contextual emergence View project

chaos in laser systems View project

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20th Century Variants

In the philosophy of mind and in psychology as well as cogni-

hegemonial pretense of what is today called physicalism. In a nutshell,

thought and extension, his thinking was a reaction to Descartes’ interac-

2. Russell’s Neutral Monism

Figure 1: Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) at the foundation of a tri-

On the one hand, many psychologists, originally those of the behav-

they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense

A cartoon-like schematic representation of this scheme can be seen in

mental domain material domain

psychophysically “neutral stuff”

Figure 2: Dual aspects in Russell’s neutral monism, often addressed

As a notable distinction from other kinds of dual-aspect thinking, Rus-

This conception is in line with Russell’s logical atomism (and, needless

logical NOR, or the joint denial), “both-and” and “intersection” point

Figure 3: Artistic depiction of the “Pauli-Jung dialog” (acrylic on

3. Dual-Aspect Monism à la Pauli and Jung

to suggest that mind and matter may stand in a complementary relation

mental domain material domain

collective unconscious ⇐⇒ quantum nonlocality

Figure 4: In dual-aspect monism according to Pauli and Jung, the

The two types of mind-matter correlations are indicated in a letter

With respect to (ii), Jung (1969) illustrated how he concretely conceived

Figure 4 suggests a sharp boundary between the mental and physical

(1969), developed by Putnam (1987) and later worked out in detail by

4. Bohm’s Implicate Order

Figure 5: David Bohm (1917–1992) at the symposium “Art Meets

The whole universe is in some way enfolded in everything and each

On Bohm’s account, mental and physical states emerge by explication,

substance. This is much less pronounced in Pauli’s and Jung’s views,

mental pole material pole

subtle levels of implicate order

Figure 6: In Bohm’s aspect monism the mental and the material

This move allows him to hold a subtle intermediate position between

of link or “bridge” between these two sides of reality as a whole.

Concerning mind-matter relations, the idea would be that other rep-

5. Naturalistic Dualism According to Chalmers

Figure 7: Two aspects of David Chalmers, born at Sydney in 1966.

information states (bits) that are neutral with respect to a mind-matter

Whenever we find an information space realized phenomenally, we

An information space will have two sorts of structure: each com-

In other words, the relational structure exhibits the differences that

mental domain material domain

syntactic information states

Figure 8: Naturalistic dualism according to Chalmers posits that

The ontology that this leads us to might truly be called a double-

space, and wherever physics takes those features to be instantiated,

After the annotated presentation of selected variants of 20th century

Russell Pauli-Jung Bohm Chalmers

notation neutral monism dual-aspect monism aspect monism naturalistic dualism

Figure 9: Synoptic summary of key features of the four selected

dual-aspect approaches consider both mind and matter to be naturalized