Atmanspacher’s Dual-Aspect Monism

Physicist-philosopher Harald Atmanspacher presents mind and matter, mental and material domains of reality, as manifestations, or aspects, of one underlying, fundamental reality in which mind and matter are inseparable. He distinguishes between the epistemic discernment of both the separate domains and the underlying reality, and the ontic existence of the “psychophysically neutral domain” (Atmanspacher, 2020a).

Neutral Domain and Frameworks

He also distinguishes two classes of dual-aspect theories based on “the way in which the psychophysically neutral domain is related to the mental and the physical.” In Russellian monisms, “the compositional arrangements of psychophysically neutral elements decide how they differ with respect to mental or physical properties. As a consequence, the mental and the physical are reducible to the neutral domain” (Atmanspacher, 2020a).

Holism, Correlations, and Extensions

Whereas in decompositional dual-aspect theories, “the basic metaphysics of the psychophysically neutral domain is holistic, and the mental and the physical (neither reducible to one another nor to the neutral) emerge by breaking the holistic symmetry or, in other words, by making distinctions. This framework is guided by the analogy to quantum holism… [which is] based on speculations that clearly exceed the scope of contemporary quantum theory.”

Atmanspacher establishes connections between the ontic and epistemic domains of dual-aspect theory and David Bohm's famous notions of implicate and explicate order. “Mental and physical states emerge by explication, or unfoldment, from an ultimately undivided and psychophysically neutral implicate, enfolded order.” This order is dynamic, not static, as in Whitehead's process philosophy (Atmanspacher, 2020a).

Atmanspacher finds dual-aspect potency in the conjecture by quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and analytical psychologist Carl Jung on the concept of synchronicity and draws on dual-aspect elements from the two disciplines (“Jung’s Collective Unconscious and Synchronicity”; “Double-aspect theory,” 2023)

In other words, Atmanspacher's dual-aspect theory hypothesizes that mental and material manifestations may inherit mutual correlations because they are jointly caused by the psychophysically neutral level. Such correlations, he says, would be “remnants reflecting the lost holism of the underlying reality” (Atmanspacher, 2020a).

Atmanspacher and philosopher of physics Dean Rickles extend the metaphysical position of dual-aspect monism by aligning “the deep structure of meaning” as “a fundamental feature of the nature of reality,” stressing that “the decompositional version of dual-aspect monism considers the mental and the physical as two aspects of one underlying undivided reality that is psychophysically neutral.” Crediting their forerunners (Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Jung, Arthur Eddington, John Wheeler, David Bohm, and Basil Hiley), the authors “reconstruct the formal structure of these approaches, and compare their conceptual emphases as well as their relative strengths and weaknesses.” Their intent is to establish dual-aspect monism as a scientifically and philosophically robust alternative to physicalism, dualism, and idealism (Atmanspacher & Rickles, 2022).