The Jay and the Quark - A Perspectival Dual-Aspect Monism
Jamison Johnson
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 7, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20579525 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Monism Event particle physics Relation database Class philosophy Meaning existential Feature linguistics Epistemology Theoretical physics Characterization materials science Principal computer security Position finance Quark |
| Key points | Proposes that reality is composed of fundamental events with two complete but mutually exclusive descriptions—interior experience and exterior physical structure—and that a coherence-oriented feature generalizes this view toward graded panpsychism. |
Abstract
This paper proposes a perspectival dual-aspect monism: the view that reality is composed of a single class of fundamental events, each of which admits two complete but mutually exclusive descriptions — an interior description in terms of experience and an exterior description in terms of physical structure. The fundamental event is named the Jay and is identified with the actual occasion of Whitehead's process metaphysics. The quark is taken as the exemplar of the purely exterior description: an entity exhaustively characterized by its structural and relational properties, and one never encountered in isolation. Following Russell's observation that physics discloses only the structure of the world while remaining silent on its intrinsic nature, the paper argues that the interior and exterior descriptions are two vantages upon one occasion, and that which vantage is available is relative to the observer's relation to the occasion described. A fundamental orientation toward coherence — closely related to Whitehead's notion of subjective aim — is proposed as the feature that, generalized across all occasions, carries the position from dual-aspect monism toward a graded panpsychism. The combination problem is acknowledged as the framework's principal open question.