Processual monism: a fresh look at the mind-body problem
Our aim is to show how materialistic monism, which is the dominant metaphysics of natural sciences, reduces the mental ambit to the brain's physical/biological substrate. We refer to two variants of this monism by pointing out the main reason for their failure, i.e. the hard problem of consciousness. For this reason, we think that a more effective alternative to materialistic monism is neutral monism, of which processual monism is one version that has its own strong specificity. Very briefly, our thesis is that body and mind have to be considered as cognitive domains working as systems of pertinentization, through which a certain form/component of the unique world is instantiated. As we explain below, pertinentization is the process by which a certain subset of components/qualities of reality is foregrounded, and in so doing a certain phenomenal domain ( i.e. a certain reality ) emerges.