Polkinghorne’s Dual-Aspect Monism

To mathematical physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, the psychosomatic nature of human persons is best understood in terms of a “dual-aspect monism,” in which matter and mind are complementary aspects of a unitary being (Polkinghorne, 2009). He is sure that we're not simply matter, that reality is more than just ideas, and that none of the classical solutions seem to correspond to our experience.

In fact, Polkinghorne argues that classical materialism, idealism and Cartesian dualism all exhibit a bankruptcy in the face of the many-layered, and yet interconnected, character of our encounter with reality. This recognition encourages the search for some form of dual-aspect monism—similar theories are called “double-aspect theories”—an account that would acknowledge the fundamental distinction between experience of the material and experience of the mental but which would neither impose on reality a sharp division into two unconnected kinds of substance nor deny the psychosomatic unity of human beings (Polkinghorne, 2001).

Dual-Aspect Monism and Causality

Dual-aspect monism is designed to take seriously both our mental experiences and the material world. It claims that they are related in a very deep and complementary way in that there is only one stuff in the world. Dual-aspect monism seeks to avoid devaluing or subordinating either side. Polkinghorne rejects the charge that dual-aspect monism is a subtle form of materialism, because, he says, “It doesn't treat the mental as being just an epiphenomenon of the material” (Harris, 1998).

To give physical systems the kind of freedom and top-down control that he desires, Polkinghorne recruits complexity theory, with its dualities of parts/whole and energy/information. The intrinsic unpredictabilities present in nature, he states, afford the metaphysical opportunity to consider dissipative systems as exhibiting top–down causality (Polkinghorne, 2009).

Soul, Continuity, and Resurrection

Given that in dual-aspect monism there cannot be a nonphysical soul, much less an immortal soul, how does Polkinghorne account for the eschatological requirements of his strong Christian faith, especially the biblical resurrection of the dead? How might resurrecting the body and reconstituting the “soul” work?

Speaking on Closer To Truth, Polkinghorne asks, "Can you make credible understanding of a destiny beyond death for human beings?" From his theological perspective, he sets two equal and opposite requirements for the afterlife of a soul: continuity, in that the same person must live after death, and discontinuity, in that the afterlife-person must live on forever (Section: Polkinghorne, 2007).

“There is not much point in making Abraham, Isaac and Jacob alive again if they are going to die again,” he says. “So, you must have both continuity and discontinuity. Now when you think about the continuity side, what could make those people the same as the ones who lived on earth before? The traditional answer has been the soul, often understood in platonic terms—there is some sort of spiritual bit of us liberated at death that exists and carries on.”

Polkinghorne has none of that. “I think that's a mistake,” he says. “We are animated bodies, not animated souls. We're not apprentice angels; we are embodied human beings. But if we've lost our ‘spiritual soul’ [as a resource], have we lost our continuity? I don't think so, but we have to reconceive the soul.”

Polkinghorne focuses on the carrier of continuity for a person in this life. “It's quite difficult,” he says; “here am I, an aging, balding academic—what makes me the same person as that little boy with the shock of black hair in the school photograph of many years ago? It's not atomic-material continuity: the atoms in my body are totally different than the atoms in that schoolboy's body.”

“It cannot be the atoms,” he continues, “but it is the pattern of how some of those atoms are organized, in some extraordinary, elaborate, and complex way.” That, Polkinghorne states, is “what I think the human soul is. The soul is the information-bearing pattern; that's the real me” (Polkinghorne, 2007).

Thus, Polkinghorne reconceives the “soul” as an information-bearing pattern that is encoded by and carried in the body/brain, and which is dissolved at death along with the dissolution of the body. However, this unique pattern, this real me, is retained in the divine memory for re-embodiment at the resurrection of the dead (Polkinghorne, 2003). During this post-death, pre-resurrection state, this (reconceived) “soul” has no consciousness and no awareness.

“God will remember the pattern, not lose it,” Polkinghorne says, and ultimately, God “will reconstitute that pattern in an act of resurrection.”

That's the continuity side of things. The discontinuity side, Polkinghorne says, “is that I'm not made alive again in order to die again, so while I'm going to be embodied, I must be embodied in some new form of matter. And it is perfectly coherent to believe that God can bring into being such a new form of matter” (Polkinghorne, 2007).

To Richard Swinburne, the idea of afterlife existence germinating from a renewed instantiation of the pattern of information that we had when living on Earth is problematic. "The trouble is not merely how could God, if God so chose, bring into [renewed] existence a being with a specific pattern of information, but rather that God could [therefore] bring into existence a few thousand such beings. But because only one of them could be me, a pattern of information provides no additional criterion for distinguishing which one that would be. And whatever the extra criterion is, it would have to be such that there [logically] could only be one instance of it at one time. And if we have such a criterion, then what need is there for the pattern of information to be the same as a previous pattern?" (Swinburne, 2016; Kuhn, 2016b).