AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

That's interesting. I sort of have it in my head that a monism is obviously better than dualism, just in terms of parsimony. But he's saying the opposite, that any monist view is necessarily annihilating of a necessary difference.

Freud's desire to subsume his psychology under the umbrella of natural science, a desire stemming from his allegiance to Mach's doctrine of the unity of science, ran contrary to the dualistic epistemological zeitgeist. This epistemological dualism was nested within an ontological dualism that was virtually taken for granted by the educated German-speaking public; from this vantage point, Freud's monism was regarded as deeply counter-intuitive.

So this is just a fancy Jungian mystipoo way to say monism? That's no so bad, "monism" sort of implies that we know what the one underlying substance is, a weird Latin phrase emphasizes that underlying level is unknowable. See Taoism I guess.

I sympathize, I really do, but all my training and biases lead me to a different attitude, let's call it cybernetic monism or weird naturalism. There's only the one world, the natural world, it's physical at its core but it also permits the formation of systems and emergent pheonomena, including minds, meanings, agents and purposes. The universe is following physical law but those laws are fully capable of producing mind (we have an existence proof).

The first two I roughly translate to dualism and some kind of vitalist monism. The last one, as with other philosophical stances that purport to eliminate something, makes not one particle of sense to me, even though in some ways it is closest to my own position.

Monism

11 Sep 2022 - 17 Jun 2023