Editor’s introduction
what matter does rather than what it is . In arguing that this is science’s understanding of matter in his recent book, Philip Goff has gone back to the philosopher, Bertrand Russell and the physicist, Arthur Eddington. 11 In The Analysis of Matter , first published in 1927, Russell attempted to solve the incompatibility of idealism and materialism, and he thought he could do so by positing a matter that was neither material nor the stuff of thought: They [both materialists and idealists] have thought of the matter in the external world as being represented by the percepts when they see and touch, whereas those percepts are really part of the matter of the percipient’s brain. By examining our percepts it is possible . . . to infer certain formal mathematical properties of external matter . . . But by examining our percepts we obtain knowledge which is not purely formal as to the matter of our brains. This knowledge, it is true, is fragmentary, but so far as it goes it has merit in surpassing . . . the knowledge given by physics. 12 In a similar vein, Russell says that ‘mental events are part of that stuff [i.e., the stuff of the world], and the rest of the stuff resembles them more than it resembles traditional billiard- balls’. 13 For Russell, then, the intrinsic nature of matter is neither the stuff of the world nor mental events but a certain independent property. As he says : ‘A piece of matter is a logical structure composed of events.’ 14 Not many philosophers have followed Russell in what has been termed ‘neutral monism’ (i.e., there’s only one sort of stuff – monism, and it is neither physical nor mental – neutral), perhaps because he posited this third type of stuff to explain the other two types. Eddington agreed with Russell that we needed a new and better understanding of matter, because, though a celebrated physicist himself, he did not believe that physics told us anything about the intrinsic nature of matter. 15 But he did believe that a simpler answer was available.
Eddington argued the following:
a. Physics tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of matter. b. The only thing we do know is that some forms of matter – inside our brains – have an intrinsic nature made up of forms of consciousness.
So, the simple hypothesis is that the intrinsic nature of matter outside our brains is continuous with the intrinsic nature of matter inside our brains. As Eddington himself wrote (using ‘thought’ where we use ‘consciousness’): ‘Why not attach [matter] to something . . . of which a prominent characteristic is thought? It seems rather silly to prefer to attach it to something of a so- called “concrete” nature inconsistent with thought, and then to wonder where thought comes from.’ 16 This view has the benefit of being a non-dualistic theory: mass and charge in physics are very simple forms of matter- 11 Goff 2019. Goff (pp. 176-9) also discusses the response of certain philosophers of science – causal structuralists – who argue that to define mass in terms of distance and force (and so on) is relational rather than circular. 12 Russell 2009: 589. 13 Ibid.: 593. 14 Ibid.: 590. 15 In 1919, from observations of star positions in a total solar eclipse, Eddington confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity. 16 Eddington 1928: ch. 12; see Goff 2019: 130- 8 for a discussion of Eddington’s panpsychism.
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