The Jay and the Quark - A Perspectival Dual-Aspect Monism

Reality consists of a single class of fundamental events, each of which can be described in two mutually exclusive ways: an interior description in terms of experience and an exterior description in terms of physical structure. The fundamental event is named the Jay and identified with Whitehead's actual occasion. The quark exemplifies the purely exterior description, characterized only by structural and relational properties and never encountered in isolation. The interior and exterior descriptions are two perspectives on one occasion, available depending on the observer's relation to the occasion. A fundamental orientation toward coherence, related to Whitehead's subjective aim, moves the view from dual-aspect monism toward graded panpsychism. The combination problem remains the framework's principal open question.

Study at a glance

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.