Tyler’s Emergent Aspect Dualism

Vision scientist Christopher Tyler’s Emergent Aspect Dualism is based on the concept that energy, understood as irreducibly dynamic flux, is the sole fundamental constituent of reality, as expressed by the Schrödinger equation, which is fundamental to the whole of physics. The kinetics of this energy flux becomes organized into a hierarchy of operational levels, with operating principles that are “functionally emergent” from the level below. Thus, while there is a monistic continuity of the energy flow through the levels, the operating principles at a higher level may have no trace¹ of their operation at a lower level.

Phenomenal consciousness is one such level: a process of brain activity, not a state or a substance, distinguished from every other emergent process by the fact that “we” are that process and therefore know it experientially from the inside (in addition to our scientific knowledge of brains from the outside). This exclusive inside view, the irreducible asymmetry between experiential and neurophysiological descriptions of one and the same process, is what Tyler calls the emergent dualism; ontologically the theory is monistic, with mental and neural aspects of the energy flows in strict functional parallel, though potentially differing in identifiable properties due to the complementarity of the internal/external viewpoints. Note that this differs fundamentally from currently popular theories of consciousness as emergent information complexity, since information is static structural property with o energy flow and no internal/external differentiation.

Energistic Monism and Functional Emergence

Tyler first presented the view as “Emergent Dualism” (Tyler, 2015), then added “Aspect” on learning that William Hasker had already used the former term for an emergent nonphysical self, which is far from his physicalist position (Tyler, 2018). He describes the ontology as fundamentally “energistic,” and elsewhere as an elaboration of the Heraclitean dictum that all is flux (Tyler, 2019). The continuous Schrödinger equation and mass-energy equivalence describe the base-level energy flows; quarks, hadrons, atoms, amino acids, proteins, organelles, cells, brains, and minds are successive organizations of that energy. “Functional emergence” is meant to sit between weak and strong emergence, weak in the sense of being progressively built up from constituents, yet strong in yielding wholly new principles of operation (Tyler, 2020), while punting on the issue of the downward causation² associated with strong emergence (Tyler, 2015). On this view, consciousness is not itself a form of energy but a particular organization of neural energy flow that instantiates a representation of its own processes (Tyler, 2020).

Phenomenal Consciousness as the Inside of a Process

Emergence alone, Tyler argues, cannot solve the Hard Problem (Chalmers, 1995): a tornado is an enormously complex organization of energy, yet manifests no evident subjectivity. What is unique about consciousness is that it is the only process known from the perspective of what it is like to be itself, and since we cannot take the internal perspective of any process but our own brain’s, the Hard Problem is at root a problem of privacy (Tyler, 2015). The aspects may differ sharply in their descriptive properties without differing in “stuff”: the sky is experienced as continuously blue although only a small fraction of retinal receptors sample it discretely (Tyler, 2018). Some neural features, such as spikes, are inaccessible to subjective experience, while qualia are inaccessible to objective recording (Tyler, 2019).

Tyler’s focus is explicitly Block’s (1995) phenomenal consciousness. Within that realm, he distinguishes awareness, the basic experience of qualia without operational intentionality, from representational consciousness of the object world, along with reflexive “self-” variants of each (Tyler, 2015).

Aspect, Not Substance

Unlike Descartes, for whom mind and matter are separate philosophical domains, Tyler treats them as two sides of one coin, or aspects. Against Hasker, he holds that mind is not “produced by” the brain but is a distinguishable aspect of brain function, and that Hasker’s attempt to keep the mind emergent from, yet not added to, the brain draws an impossibly fine line (Tyler, 2018). Any causal efficacy belongs equally to the mental and neural aspects. Against Stapp’s mental causation, Tyler maintains full psychophysical parallelism, conceding only that the mind’s causal role is always mirrored in its neural aspect (Tyler, 2019). Free will is reconciled with physical determinism through MacKay’s (1960) argument that no prediction of a choice from neural activities, once communicated to the chooser, can bind it to making that choice (Tyler, 2020).

Interrogacy and the Relocation of Quantum Superposition

Tyler identifies “interrogacy,” the capacity to formulate questions and envisage possible answers, as unique to conscious systems, a function akin to Gregory’s (1980) concept of perception as hypothesis testing. A probability is an answer to such a question, and probability as a concept already contains superposition (complementary states weighted p and 1−p) and collapse (resolution on observation), in horse racing as much as in physics. Superposition and collapse are therefore properties of the knower’s conceptual apparatus, not of physical reality. Invoking nested series of sealed chambers around Schrödinger’s cat and its immediate observer shows the outcome collapsed for one observer and uncollapsed for another simultaneously (Tyler, 2018), proving its physical impossibility. Unlike QBism, however, the relevant probabilities are communal and objectively definable rather than individual credences.

This view inverts Wigner–von Neumann and Stapp: observation does not cause physical collapse; collapse is inherent in consciousness when an observation is made. It also excludes quantum theories of the substrate, since privacy rules out nonlocal mechanisms. Tyler acknowledges that his semiclassical view, which places quantized detection in the detector rather than the field, questions established interpretations of empirical results without full mathematical resolution (Tyler, 2018); this view departs from standard quantum mechanics, but is hinted at by many of its early proponents, such as Schrödinger himself.

Ten Testable Properties and the Neural Substrate

Tyler replaces the “neural correlate of consciousness” with the “neural substrate for conscious processing” (NSCP), since correlates may not be substrates. He proposes ten properties of phenomenal consciousness: privacy, unity, interrogacy, extinguishability, iterativity, operationality, multifacetedness, complex interconnectivity, autosuppressivity, and self-referentiality, each paired with empirical tests. Phenomenality itself is not directly testable (Tyler, 2020), but essential to the operational definition of these properties. Claustral stimulation that reversibly abolishes consciousness (Koubeissi et al., 2014) exemplifies extinguishability. Consciousness is cast as the gatekeeper of memory storage, and Tononi’s IIT as at best a theory of access consciousness. Tyler (2021) located a plausible substrate in central interstitial column of nuclei extending from the brainstem through thalamic intralaminar nuclei to the claustrum. (Subsequent developments have shown that interrogacy is not unique to consciousness, since massively generative AI can formulate fully-informed answers to questions within the present corpus of human knowledge, a capability that was not available at the time of writing.)

Assessment

Emergent Aspect Dualism describes itself as distinctive in providing an emergent form of dualism whose ontology is monist and physicalist, though in terms of energy flows rather than substances, states, or information structure. It holds the explanatory gap as the consequence of complementary internal/external perspectives rather than of a second substance or property. It ties phenomenal consciousness to interrogacy and probability, thus reversing the usual quantum-consciousness direction of explanation, and locates quantum indeterminacy, superposition and collapse in the mind of the observer rather than the physical substrate.

Taxonomy Placement

The classification is Non-Reductive Physicalism, understood here as physical process monism that preserves an irreducible experiential aspect. Tyler explicitly describes the 2018 position as fundamentally materialistic, although process-oriented or “energistic,” and rejects a separately existing mental entity. His 2024 formulation continues to identify consciousness with brain activity while emphasizing the qualitative distinction between its internal and external aspects (Tyler, 2018, 2024). Note that the theory defines itself against Hasker. Tyler renamed “Emergent Dualism” to “Emergent Aspect Dualism” specifically because Hasker had already used the term for an emergent substance dualism, which Tyler denies with his emergent aspect dualism. Ontologically, Emergent Aspect Dualism is a monism. In 2019, he says that despite its dualistic name, it is at heart a fundamental realism.

References

Block, N. (1995). On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18(2), 227–247.

Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219.

Gregory, R. L. (1980). Perceptions as hypotheses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B, Biological Sciences, 290(1038), 181-197.

Koubeissi, M. Z., Bartolomei, F., Beltagy, A., & Picard, F. (2014). Electrical stimulation of a small brain area reversibly disrupts consciousness. Epilepsy & Behavior, 37, 32–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yebeh.2014.05.027

MacKay, D. M. (1960). On the logical indeterminacy of a free choice. Mind, 69(273), 31–40.

Tyler, C. W. (2015). The emergent dualism view of quantum physics and consciousness. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 11(2), 97–114.

Tyler, C. W. (2018). The emergent aspect dualism view of quantum physics: A new ontology to resolve the complementarity conundrum. Journal of Research in Philosophy and History, 1(2), 166–182. https://doi.org/10.22158/jrph.v1n2p166

Tyler, C. W. (2019). Points of contact between the Stappian philosophy and Emergent Aspect Dualism. Activitas Nervosa Superior, 61, 6–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41470-019-00039-y

Tyler, C. W. (2020). Ten testable properties of consciousness. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1144. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01144

Tyler, C. W. (2021). The interstitial pathways as the substrate of consciousness: A new synthesis. Entropy, 23(11), 1443. https://doi.org/10.3390/e23111443.