Rev Left Radio - Philosophy of Mind: Marxism, Materialism, and Dialectical Monism

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

In this episode, Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante join forces for a deep philosophical conversation on Marxism, consciousness, and the mind-body problem. Using China Miéville's essay on consciousness and materialism as a starting point, they explore why the nature of subjective experience remains such a profound challenge for crude or reductionist forms of materialism -- and why this question matters for Marxists. Alyson begins by carefully summarizing Miéville's original essay and its challenge to conventional Marxist materialism. From there, Breht lays out several major positions in the philosophy of mind, including dualism, physicalism, idealism, panpsychism, neutral monism, emergentism, eliminativism, and epiphenomenalism. Together, they then work through two responses to Miéville's essay, clarifying the arguments, tensions, and stakes of the debate. In the second half, Breht argues for a different approach: a dialectical monism informed by dependent origination. Rather than reducing consciousness to matter, escaping into idealism, or treating mind and matter as separate substances, this view understands reality as a single, dynamic, relational process in which consciousness, embodiment, nature, society, and practice arise interdependently. The conversation closes by bringing Buddhist philosophy and phenomenology into dialogue with Marxism, exploring emptiness, experience, nonduality, and the limits of conceptual thought. What emerges is not a rejection of materialism, but a call to deepen it -- beyond reductionism, beyond dualism, and toward a more dialectical understanding of consciousness & reality. Find Fluss and Frim's response (Their Materialism and Ours) to Mieville HERE Find Pineda's response (Naturalized Dialectics) to Mieville HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Red Menace. All right, on today's episode, we have a fun, perhaps challenging, philosophically rich conversation for you today. And I'll toss it over to Allison to kind of, you know, set the table for what we'll be discussing. It's one of those episodes where some people are really going to love it. Some people are going to find it challenging, which is totally good and fine. And some people might not be interested at all. But it's certainly in line with Allison and I's interest. And I think it actually is a genuinely fascinating conversation. And if you are one of our listeners that really likes the dialectical materialism stuff and the philosophy stuff, I think you'll really get a lot out of this episode too. Yeah. Hopefully this episode is of interest to people. I think, yeah, there are some people who listen to the show who will probably find this quite interesting. And I think the author who we're engaging with makes a good claim that we should be somewhat interested in this. So hopefully that is also a compelling argument. But it's definitely one of those episodes where it's Brett and I getting interested. to a topic that I think both of us have some background and interest in, but that is kind of relevant in Marxism at the moment. So in this episode, we are going to be responding to an essay called Beyond Folk Marxism, Mind, Metaphysics, and Spooky Materialism, which was published in Salvage Magazine by China Mayville. I suspect a lot of people here recognize that name and are maybe familiar with his work, but China Mayville is a, I think, relatively important British Marxist,

who has made some theoretical contributions to the field, who's written, I think, one of my favorite histories of the Russian Revolution, the book October, as well as really fantastic fiction, largely in kind of the weird fiction genre. And who is very much, I think, like, I see him as an intellectual heavyweight in many ways in public discourse around Marxism. I also wanted to say that we've had China on the episode, on Rev. Left radio to talk about his book, a specter haunting on the Communist Manifesto, which is really, really interesting, fascinating, sort of a literary analysis of the Communist Manifesto. People can check out.

And I also went on the Workers Lit podcast to talk about his work of fiction called The City and the City. You can find that as well if you're interested. Yeah. And I would definitely recommend checking out his work. I think he's a fantastic writer. And, yeah, I think we will be interacting somewhat critically here, but mostly because I think he's put out a very, interesting piece that makes a very strong argument that has been somewhat scandalous. So in this essay

that Mayville put out that we'll get into a little more development of, he really is engaging in analytic philosophical discussions about the problem of consciousness, making an argument that this is a problem that Marxists ought to care about, and then quite scandalously in the essay, perhaps rejecting metaphysical materialism and embracing some sort of metaphysical idealism. When this essay first came out, I saw a lot of people referring to this as basically like, oh my God, a major Marxist has renounced materialism. And it certainly is an essay that I think is meant to be provocative and get that kind of response. And that has, I think, so far, garnered a few responses from other theoreticians trying to weigh in and engage in this. And when this essay came out, I found it very interesting.

It sparked a pretty deep dive that's been going on for months now for me into analytic philosophy and the philosophy of my. mind. So if this is not a topic you care about, I am sorry. This one is on me, not on Brett, the one who's been freaking out about it and wants to dive in a little bit more. But I think Mayville makes a good argument that we should care about this. And hopefully, this will be useful and interesting for our listeners. Brett, I'll throw it over to you for any kind of upfront thoughts. Yeah, I mean, I think a core tension that is being explored in this essay and obviously throughout the rest of this podcast episode and our conversation about it is what is, what is, is actually the connection between the materialism of Marxism, which is focused on the social,

the political, the historical, the economic, right? Historical materialism is about the evolution of human societies anchored in their modes of production and how those evolve into one another over time. And certainly, nobody, I believe, is contending that, right? Everybody involved in this conversation, obviously including us, are maintaining historical materialism as a mode of social and historical analysis. But there's another type of materialism. And sometimes people unthinkingly claim it as part of the Marxist tradition. And I think China Miavill is making an interesting intervention here, whether you end up agreeing or disagreeing with him, which is what is actually the position of metaphysical or ontological materialism in relation to our materialism as

Marxist, right? So there's the on the ground human historical, historical materialism that we're all used to, what actually is the connection with that to our understanding or our philosophical position on the ontological foundation of reality itself, right? Do we need to be materialists in the metaphysical and ontological sense in order to be historical materialist in the socioeconomic and historical sense? Or are those things actually separable? What happens when we just crudely and automatically assume that we have to have that position, which I think, you know, China calls folk Marxism. Is that folk Marxism, folk materialism? It's folk Marxism, right? Yeah, folk Marxism. Yeah, which is this Marxist sort of knee-jerk acceptance of ontological

and metaphysical materialism as just like a blind, of course, we have to adopt this view and not really thinking through it. And then also what's politically at stake in that conversation? at all. And as Allison will summarize, Mieville does think that there are political stakes to a sort of folk Marxism or a vulgar acceptance of materialism and unthinking acceptance of metaphysical and ontological materialism. And as we'll get into various authors responding to Mieville's position, arguing against it and putting out their own position, they also think that there are political implications here. So we'll explore that kind of tension, those implications. And implications and try to perhaps at the end of this conversation work toward our own view of metaphysics and

ontology. And we'll get there in due time. But obviously, I do think it is important. I think some of the political implications can be debated. Sometimes they are unclear. But this is a tension that I don't think is often explored on the Marxist left. And I just do think as Marxist, we have this overburdened responsibility to engage in all sorts of conversations and all arenas of human thought, even ones that we are not well-versed in. And, you know, that can be incredibly challenging. If you don't have a philosophy background, some of this stuff can be challenging. We are going to do our best to make this conversation accessible. This is a sophisticated philosophical debate.

And, you know, there's no way around that. And we're not going to get every single nuance and caveat correct. And these essays are free online. We'll link to them in the show notes. So if you're interested in this conversation, you yourself can and should perhaps. go engage in those actual articles and the back and forth between them. But that's kind of what we're trying to do today. That's what we're trying to explore. What is this connection between historical materialism and metaphysical materialism and what, if any, political implications does

that debate actually have? And I think that starts this fascinating chain of back and forth so that we're going to humbly perhaps intervene in ourselves. Yeah. So with that said, I'm going to go and try to summarize for you what Mayville's argument is here. And again, with a huge amount of humility, I am an amateur when it comes to analytic philosophy. This is not what I studied academically, but I have become increasingly fascinated by this field, and I think have entered it somewhat late to the game similarly to Mayville, and so I hope this will be a fair and useful summary. So in this essay, Mayville is worried about something, and I think he's quite worried about something. So what is it that worries him?

Well, he opens by saying that, quote, what he's worried about is how little the underlying problem of consciousness to court registers on the left. That is, putting to one side its specifics in politics, why is their consciousness full stop? Why and how are any of us capable of self-reflective thought, of experiencing emotion, ratiocination, gosh, these words, preference, cold, whim, melancholy, and joy, anything at all. With important exceptions for the most part, the left has remained untroubled by the voluminous and vexed ruminations of these issues, untroubled and worse, end quote. And so right here, just in this kind of opening volley, we get what the key issue is, which is that the left has dodged what Mayville thinks is a remarkably important philosophical question. And it is worth noting that he is not alone in thinking this is an important philosophical question. This comprises much of contemporary philosophy and philosophy of the last multiple centuries, honestly. And so really this is a big topic that he feels like Marxists are not engaging in.

And for Mayville, it's not strictly necessary that Marxists have to care about metaphysics and ontology and the relationship to consciousness. But what's concerning to him is that in his view, it's not just that most Marxists are uninterested in it, but that almost none of us are. In a sense, he thinks that when it comes to these questions, the best that the left can really muster is a big gesture towards something, something materialism explains it, in a way that points to a kind of unexamined and unreflective approach to these questions. And this is a problem. To quote Mabel in this, he writes that, quote, far from agreeing to bracket the underlying question for large swaths of the Marxist left, especially the activist left. Some such answer is simply assumed. This is a tenet of what we might call folk Marxism. And so in this folk Marxism, there's an assumption that materialism must have an explanation for these other questions like consciousness and metaphysics that your average Marxist does not want to engage in, but there's not actually an exploration of what that answer is or whether or not it is justified. Marxism, of course, in some sense of the word, proclaims itself to be materialist.

But in this essay, Mayville asks us to question exactly what we mean by that. He's interested in the question of whether or not Marxism needs to be metaphysically or ontologically materialist, whether it can embrace a more modest understanding of materialism, or even whether materialism is just a methodological materialism in the realm of historical or social analysis. In order to get at this idea, Mayville quotes Ralph Milibrand, who writes that quote, in its broadest sense, materialism contends that whatever exists just is, or at least depends upon matter. In its more general form, it claims that all reality is essentially matter, in its more specific form that human reality is. In the Marxist tradition, materialism has normally been of the weaker, non-reductive kind, end quote.

So what we see here is that materialism itself can have multiple meanings with weaker and stronger iterations. In several portions of this essay, Mayville argues that Marx, but notably not Ingalls, embraces a weaker or more constrained understanding of materialism, where for Marx, materialism is, as Milibrand points out there, more about human reality being material in nature, rather than these broader metaphysical and existential claims. But Engels, on the other hand, according to Mayville, does extend materialism into this broader, more metaphysical framework. Mayville argues that Marx had a methodological materialism, but that Ingalls and Lennon totalized this in some way.

And one of the things that he is frustrated at is that folk Marxism, this term that he is talking about, has failed to adequately interrogate whether or not the philosophical foundations for this materialism are actually justified. Rather, it just kind of takes it for granted. Mayville cites Sebastiano Temprenaro, who writes that, quote, Marxism was born as an affirmation of the decisive primacy of the socioeconomic level over juridical, political, and cultural phenomena. If a critique of anthropocentism and an emphasis on the conditioning of man by nature are considered essential to materialism, it must be said that Marxism and Marxism in the first phase is not materialism proper. Even more than by Marx, though evidently

not in dissent from him, the need for a construction of a materialism which was not purely socioeconomic but also natural, was felt by Ingalls, and this was a great merit of his, end quote. While Timprenaro makes a case for this stronger sense of materialism, Mayville is kind of in contrast to this, more concerned that a lot of Marxists aren't actually theorizing or philosophizing such materialism. He writes that, quote, the predication of Marxism on metaphysical materialism is often not even stated, simply given, it is sometimes hazily, probably unconsciously, by non-Marxists and more importantly by many Marxists. This is this kind of folk Marxism that Mayville is concerned about and decrying in this essay

and that the title of this essay gestures to. And I think we will get into this, but I think it's fair to say that this is kind of a real phenomenon that plagues the left to a certain degree. So on the one hand, Mayville is upset about the existence of folk Marxism, the unexamined and unreflective nature of it. But that's just one part of his issue. He's upset about this for a specific reason, which is mainly that folk Marxism manages to elide a core philosophical debate on the basis of its refusal to theorize its own metaphysics.

Historical materialism, according to Mayville, must contend with certain metaphysical questions, in particular the long-standing philosophical questions related to the relationship between the body and the mind. Mayville feels that folk Marxism has claimed to transcend physicalism or vulgar materialism, but that it has actually failed to adequately demonstrate how its own theories of materialism have become non-mechanistic or non-reductive in some new way that can account for all of the phenomena that a more fundamental metaphysics must account for. Marxism, of course, does not claim that ideas do not exist, right?

The entire theory of ideology is built around an understanding of the relationship between the material world and ideas. So it's not like Marxism hasn't engaged in discussion of what, is often thought of as non-material reality. And for Mayville, this is well and good, but he believes that folk Marxists have skipped a step in the development of their theory of mind. It's one thing to explain how ideas relate to, are shaped by, and shape the material conditions in which humanity lives,

but there's a more fundamental question that we're not dealing with if we jump straight there. We first have to ask, why do humans have ideas at all? And why, and more importantly, how can conscious experience exist, and come into being. Again, something that a theory of ideology kind of just takes for granted, according to Mayville, and doesn't actually develop. So Mayville argues that Marxists have articulated a theory

in which, quote, were presented with the consciousness as an involved, intrinsically social phenomena, and one that reacts back on the structures out of which it emerged, end quote. And this theory is useful inasmuch as it does move past a purely mechanical and non-dialectical

notion of materialism. But, and this is really the sticking point, it remains purely descriptive of the position that consciousness plays within specific social context. For Mayville, it avoids answering this more fundamental question of what consciousness is, how it comes to be, and why it comes to be. And this is where Mayville introduces us to a very classic philosophical problem, which is the hard problem of consciousness. So those who have a background in philosophy may already have some familiarity with this,

and it won't be new, and I am certainly going to state this problem in a somewhat reductive way to try to make it understandable. So forgive me for that. But I do think Mayville is correct when he says that Marxists by and large have not really engaged with the debates around the hard problem of consciousness. And Mayville's essay, if nothing else, is an attempt to kind of force that engagement. Part of why we're responding to it. So in setting up the hard problem of consciousness, Mayville quotes David Chalmers, who kind of first formalized this problem in its current iteration, and he just quotes them at length to really establish the foundation of it. Chalmers writes that, quote, how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences of the mind and the

world, when I see protons hit my eyes, they send a signal that goes up the optic nerve. This is how science might describe me from the objective point of view. But there is also a subjective point of view. there is what it feels like for the agent who is seeing the scene. When I see you, I see colors, I see shapes, I have an experience from a first person point of view. There is something that it is like to be me, end quote. And here Chalmers is working with a now somewhat classic definition of consciousness when he invokes the idea that there is something that it is like to be me, while we can

describe physical processes that at least correspond in some way to that consciousness and materialist terms, those processes are not obviously identical to the subjective experience of being me. And this is kind of where the problem starts to happen. The hard problem then results from the fact that we can observe and study these physical processes that correlate in some way or another to consciousness, but that we can't explain why these processes result in an experience of consciousness or of qualia. It seems obvious to me at least that there's some sort of necessary correlation between the physical and the experience of consciousness. After all, as far as we can tell,

if the physical matter of the brain is destroyed, the subjective experience of consciousness goes with it. However, the difficulty is that the correlation is not sufficient to explain why or even the how of consciousness. Why or how do certain physical realities produce qualia, but other physical realities do not? According to the hard problem, there's a gap here that remains unanswered.

The question is not whether or not physical realities. processes in some way accompany consciousness, but why they do? Could they not simply exist without any subjective experience at all? And here Mayville invokes the notion of the philosophical zombie, another kind of classic idea in this debate, to explain why this is a pressing concern. A philosophical zombie is, quote, a creature physically and in terms of all observable behavior identical to a human being, but without interiority and subjective experience, absent consciousness. A flawless biological automaton, end quote. The philosophical zombie is not something that actually exists, of course, but it's a thought

experiment that is designed to help demonstrate a specific point. Namely, quote, P zombies illustrate that we can coherently imagine beings physically identical to humans and possessing and performing all the physical processes of humans, but lacking consciousness. which at the very least implies that consciousness might involve non-physical properties or processes, end quote. So here we have kind of this presentation of the hard problem with the accompanying sort of thought experiment to help us understand what's at play here. And for Marxists, as materialists, the hard problem might indeed be a real problem. Ideology as a theory, again, can tell us how ideas are shaped by material processes, but this theory, according to Mayville, might sidestep this more fundamental question of why there are subjective experiences of those ideas in the first place.

And this is a difficult question if we want to hold on to metaphysical materialism, because it forces us to encounter a difficulty in terms of the kind of things which exist. Are ideas and even experiences themselves material? If not, how could they be produced by material processes? But if they are material, in what meaningful sense are they ontologically material? Can you demonstrate the matter that makes up an experience, which would be distinct from the matter of the brain, which we can concede in some way correlates to the possibility of an experience? These are the kind of questions that start to come up that Mayville is kind of concerned Marxism has dodged.

The hard problem thus opens up a space of metaphysical debate about consciousness that has fundamental importance for those who believe that metaphysics is worth engaging in. In response to the hard problem, you have a whole array of theories, and we will get into these. You have materialist theories that believe reality is fundamentally material or physical, with that distinction being somewhat debated within the field, idealist theories that believe that existence is fundamentally mental, dualist theories that try to wed the existence of distinct material and ideal substances, and monist theories which suggest the existence of a single substance, which might be material, ideal or something else entirely.

Now, Mayville goes into a little bit of depth on these, but largely focuses on materialism. Up front, he just rejects dualism on face, writing that, quote, dualism works as a vague holding theory and description, one that evades the impasse of materialism and the scandal of idealism, but it's hard to conceive of a systematically dualist philosophy of mind and thus of reality, and which one or the other two poles does not ultimately assert primacy. whether or not it is true that nature, as has been said, abhors a dualism, certainly, as heart insists, reason does. The simple fact that the two, mind and brain, are related, indeed that any two phenomena in the same universe are related, mitigates against any such

foundational dualism, end quote. The actual choice he insists is between idealism and materialism. Dualism just becomes philosophically non-tenable. And so for the remainder of his essay, he's working with these two camps. So as he kind of gives that summary, he then looks at the two moves that he thinks materialism tries to make to resolve this hard problem. And there are really two that he gives detail to. Mayville first deals with what he kind of thinks is the most frequent move, which is emergentism. And emergentism is an attempt to offer a non-reductionist account of how consciousness can emerge from matter. Mayville quotes Gail Edwards here, who summarizes the position as follows. Quote, properties and powers can emerge from reality's underlying strata, but are not

reducible to them. People's liabilities and powers are not determined by their biology. For example, human reason, intentions and consciousness emerge from them, but are not reducible to neurophysiological matter, end quote. Now, we'll get into some of the details of what this all means, but up top, I think it's worth noting that this might seem to play fairly nicely with Marxism and with an evolutionary or developmental understanding of reality, which one can find in Ingalls' dialectics of nature, for example, which holds that quantitative changes can lead to a transformation in qualitative changes. If these kind of laws are correct, you know,

it makes sense that sufficient physical complexity or electrical firing within a lower level system could lead to a qualitative break in the emergence of something like consciousness. I think the attraction that some Marxists who have engaged in these debates have had to emergentism makes sense, given some of the work already done. And there's really something quite common sense to the emergentist theory. The idea that more complex phenomena can emerge from more foundational lower level systems isn't hard to understand. Mayville quotes Paul Davies demonstrating this quite simply when he writes that, quote, water may be described as wet, it would be meaningless to ask whether or not

a molecule of H2O is wet, end quote. And this is kind of a nice analogy for understanding what the emergentists are getting at. Unfortunately, Mayville rejects it out of hand. He says that to say that wetness emerges from the material reality of molecules is sort of fine. We can assert that, but wetness is still a physical property. Physical properties emerging from underlying physical realities are not hard to explain or conceive of, but it's not clear that the emerging consciousness we are interested in is, is in fact physical in the same way that the brain is. Marxist, Mayville insists, can demonstrate how physical emergence is possible, but they fail to wrestle with the core issue of the hard problem,

namely that we lack an explanation of how a physical process could produce a seemingly non-physical phenomena. Mayville takes particular frustration with emergentist assertions that there's simply insufficient empirical data for us to explain the exact reasons for the emergence of consciousness, but that we will eventually find it. For Mayville, this still misses the point inasmuch as it assumes that we will find more information about the physical processes,

but the issue might be non-physical. Mayville insists that even if we understood all the minute details of neuroscience, we would still have an explanatory gap regarding how the physical process produces non-physical consciousness. Folk Marxism, according to Mayville, still has this glaring gap in its metaphysics that remains unfilled,

And as much faith as the folks Marxists have that the finer details of emergence will become clear as our scientific prowess develops, this faith is still based in a category error, according to Mayville. So given this supposed failure of emergentist materialism, Mayville then turns to the second answer from the materialist, which is a liminative materialism. And here, Mayville quotes Paul Churchland, who I think summarizes this quite well, writing that quote, Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, so fundamentally defective that both its principles and ontology will eventually be displaced completely by neuroscience. He then quotes Avram Stroll, who writes that, quote, the correct view, according to Elimitative Materialism, is that there are no mental states

and of folk psychological sense, end quote. And this, of course, kind of solves the entire hard problem, but it does so in a way that also negates the idea that consciousness exists at all. For the Elimitative Materialist, we have this problem of folk psychology. Our understanding of mind is insufficiently scientific, and our theories kind of rely on incorrect notion and ideas such as beliefs or desires that we treat as real or independent phenomena. This is rejected by a limitivist. They say that when I experience a desire, to eat food, that desire is in fact essentially a myth, a colloquialism, a folk psychology. And the reality is simply that various physical systems in my body have released hormones which

produce a physical response of hunger. For the limit to this, the physical process is all that really exists. As our scientific understanding of these processes develops further, notions like desires and beliefs will actually be discarded in the same way that the natural sciences discarded ideas like miasma or humors. This radical position, according to Mayville, has alongside emergentism, been adopted by some Marxists as an attempt to wrestle with the hard problem. So for Mayville, what's wrong with the limitivism? Well, he simply believes that it just rejects the existence of something which kind of obviously

exists. Mayville writes that, quote, where the Eliminative considers a thought or emotion better expressed in terms of underlying processes, such qualia, whatever their associated brain states, and or historical and social context are phenomena, and irreducibly so. Consciousness, which repudiates a limited materialism. When Dennett describes the illusion of consciousness, this raises the question of what is being fooled by that illusion, if not a consciousness. In Richard Seymour's words, Eliminative Materialism presupposes the very subject that it tries to eliminate, for there to be a

theater of consciousness which beguiles us with impressions derived from physical impulses, there has to be an observer to be beguiled." And for Mayville, this argument, as well as the response to emergentism, points to the untenability of materialism in the face of the hard problem. So materialism's in trouble, according to Mayville. Following Chalmers, he suggests that there may not necessarily be a good reason then to think that idealism is highly probable. but perhaps there's a reason to think that idealism is the least bad option in the face of the problems that dualism and materialism has.

And this is a pretty scandalous suggestion for a self-described Marxist, but Mayville assures us that there are Marxist thinkers who do not require metaphysical materialism, and he really tries to push this point home at the end of this essay. He writes that, quote, it might mollify heresy hunters to go back to Miliband's observation about the less ambitious materialism in Marxism. We must remember that there have always been traditions and understandings of Marxism, including that of Marx, not even explicitly not, predicated on metaphysical materialism, and sharp contradistinction to the more voluble and familiar folk Marxism. Lesser Kalikowski distinguishes Plakhanov from the most Western European Marxists of his time, who saw no logical connection between Marxism as a theory of social development

and any particular view of epistemology or metaphysical questions. Terry Eagleton, in his recent book on subject materialism, puts the matter simply and unapologetically. Historical materialism is not an ontological affair. It does not assert that everything is made out of matter. End quote. In fact, Mayville throughout this text argues that Marx himself was not a metaphysical materialist, and that this was imposed later on by the development of Ingalls and then of Lerner, linen. And so to kind of really just make sure we understand all of what's going on here,

Mayville very helpfully ends the last section of this essay by restating his key claims. He writes that, quote, to review, the key claims here are threefold and negative. One, contrary to prevailing opinion, Marxist and not, metaphysical materialism cannot account for human consciousness. Two, contrary to a contrarian wing of radical materialist theory, consciousness exists. And three, contrary to folk Marxism, Marxist historical materialism need not be, and in Marxist writing, is not, and given one and two, cannot be predicated on metaphysical materialism. End quote. It is up to us, Mayville insists, to decide how to respond to this problem. Perhaps there are other materialist answers that haven't been developed.

Perhaps dualism can be salvaged in some way, or perhaps we should explore other options. Mayville doesn't say we have to make a specific move. And strangely, Mayville does not spend a lot of time at the end of the essay, offering much of a solution himself. The final section of the essay makes it quite clear that his sympathies lie with idealism, though. He rejects the idea that idealism is inherently prone to irrational and reaction as another folk Marxist provocation, and goes so far as to quote Terry Eagleton, who writes,

It is worth noting that historical materialists need not be atheist, though many of of them are curiously ignorant of that fact, end quote. And according to Mayville in this section, Marx himself was an atheist less on some sort of metaphysical ground, but more on an ethical ground. And Mayville thus ends this essay with this gesture towards materialism and a final two paragraphs that I'll quote in full, because I think they are fairly scandalous in a way that is somewhat fun at least. So Mayville finishes by writing that quote, but with that in mind, and remembering also Chalmers' wry observation of the implausibility of all conceivable options to make sense of consciousness, one thing is undeniable. Once you've argued your way out of an ontologically materialist universe,

of the many varieties of metaphysical idealism on offer, theism is probably not the most unlikely. Of course, it also raises its own manifold problems, not least of all, theodicy, evil, But of all of Richard's alarming things, perhaps that's the most so, is that Theism also, in fact, solves an awful lot of problems that most other variants of idealism retain, and it does so almost definitionally by Fiat. End quote. And this is how Mayville ends this essay with this rather provocative gesture for a Marxist towards the possibility that a theistic idealism may be the solution there. So again, hopefully this is a comprehensible summary. of Mayville's argument and what he's doing here. But to kind of, you know, put it forth, this is my best attempt at trying to package this in a way

that I think our listeners will be able to kind of digest and engage with. Yeah, that was a really great summary. And again, you can go and read the full essay. I think it's worth a read if you're interested in this at all. There's so many things to say. You know, let me just, actually, let me do a couple things, and then I'll do a TLD summary of Mieville

just to kind of reiterate what you said. One, you know, this vague gesture towards the possibility of theism, it shouldn't be written off, you know, immediately without thinking. But, of course, it has its own problems, and I think he gestures at it, which is just like, okay, you're positing the possibility of a God as, like, one of the least unlikely options or something like that. And then the question is, well, then, you know, what becomes, what creates God? How can we make sense of this? How could we ever know that? Is it just a, you know, Kierkegaardian leap of faith to believe that something outside the natural order, exists and then the question of how that outside supernatural entity came to be, what is the

causal chain that led to it, what realm does it exist in? These are all, of course, incredibly difficult questions that perhaps are just totally unanswerable, hence the Kierkegaardian need for a leap of faith. But, you know, that's a common problem within theism in general. The hard problem, and I want people just kind of really, you know, some of you will already know what this is, and Allison did a great job explaining it, but just to reiterate the problem here is how does objective matter, atoms in their organization, you know, ostensibly dead stuff, atoms like rocks and leaves of grass, their unthinking, dead, inanimate objects.

How do you take a bunch of inanimate objects and organize them in such a way that they give rise to subjectivity, to interiority, to the feeling of what it's like to be alive, the inner sense of a consciousness? You know, this genuinely is a difficult problem that is, you know, being wrestled with here. And I just want to kind of like reiterate the the genuine difficulty of that problem before, you know, exploring some of the theories. Allison touched on several, but there are several more theories of how to try to solve this problem. And I think the problem itself is worth grappling with. It is sort of deeply counterintuitive how that could be the case.

And yet it clearly is. the other thing I wanted to say is a lot of the materialist elements and you know Marxist materialism itself is arising in this post-industrial scientific age and you know you have to understand materialism in various forms have existed deep into the ancient world of course but modern scientific materialism I would argue is sort of a almost a de facto position of science itself not philosophy but if you're coming to it from a scientist perspective, what is science? Well, science is at the base of it is a third part, is a search for a third person objectivity, right? It's, it sort of can't deal really with subjectivity. And so a lot of these materialist and scientifically minded philosophical approaches to consciousness want to do something that is just sort of implicit in the scientific method itself, which is just try to take subjectivity and this problem. of consciousness and reduce it to what science can actually grapple with.

Reduce it to neuroscience. Reduce it to some form of physicalism or materialism. And that very well may be a product of just the scientific gaze itself. Right. Once you adopt the scientific lens, subjectivity is something that third person objectivity can't penetrate. And so the obvious move would be a way to find a way to reduce it to what science can deal with, which is objective.

material naturalistic reality. So you can understand how the problem itself sort of emerges out of that, how materialism and modern scientific materialism manifests in a historical materialist sense at a very certain time in the development of the human productive forces of society in which you have the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution shaping people's thoughts. And Darwin and Nietzsche and Freud and Marx are all these figures that are arising in that context. And, you know, putting out their unique sciences and philosophies in that context where to be taken seriously is to have a sort of scientific approach to things in general. You know, and but at the same time, science and that third person objectivity, that can be

limited, right? Science is a methodology for understanding objective reality and so insofar as we possibly can. And obviously, it's amazing. It's a great tool. But perhaps there are limitations to it, things that cannot even be given. to investigate or even attempt to investigate because of the basic premises of science itself, which, as a side note, why you always need philosophy. And any scientist that tells you that science will usurp the need for philosophy is already

assuming philosophical stuff. But I really liked that, you know, whatever our position ends up being, I really liked that Terry Eagleton quote, that historical materialism is not an ontological affair. It does not assert that everything is made out of matter. And whether you agree with that or not, I think that is a defensible position that opens up the door to these genuinely meaningful debates. That there doesn't have to be a one-to-one automatic embrace of reductive materialism, scientific materialism, necessarily that we can't have that debate and that historical materialism itself is still true. And that's something I said up front and something obviously we're going to maintain throughout this entire conversation. that we're all of us involved in this conversation, including the other authors we're going to talk to, are certainly, you know, Marxists and as such are holding out the, are all defending historical materialism as a mode of social and historical analysis. It's this other aspect and this relation that we are, once again, sort of wrestling with. And with the historical materialism, as you were talking, I kind of was thinking about it, regardless of what is true ontologically and metaphysically, regardless of quote unquote, what came first or what is,

primary mind or matter, et cetera. The evolution of Earth and the evolution of the human species is a sort of matter first affair, right? The solar system formed through dead matter and natural laws of gravity, you know, these disks shaping into spheres, the development of obviously like chemistry and that jump from chemistry into biology, still a pretty mysterious leap in and of itself. But you can see why analyzing human and earth-centered history, starts with matter and and and why we would want to start that inquiry with a materialist assumption regardless of what is actually true ontologically metaphysically right we could we could live in a universe we can't even comprehend we could live in a multiverse there could be different

dimensions that we can't account for all of those things are sort of huge question marks but still historical materialism would make sense and start and being a materialist with regards to the evolution of humanity and ultimately our societies and our own history i think is a defensible position regardless of what ends up being true about the nature of the cosmos and the universe and the underlying reality that manifests at all. So those are just some thoughts up front. And I just want to do a TLDR version of Mieville, just to reiterate the wonderful summary that you gave Allison. So I'm maximizing for accessibility here, and I'm trying to take these ideas and put them into one paragraph summaries, and so we'll see if I succeed or not.

But what I have here is just summarizing what Allison just summarized. Mieville is rejecting what he calls folk Marxism, right? The lazy inherited assumption that because Marxism is materialist in the historical sense, it must also be committed to a full-blown metaphysical materialism where matter is the ultimate stuff of reality and where consciousness is simply what brains organize or nervous systems organize in a certain way produce or do. His point is not that Marxist should stop. caring about material conditions or class struggle or science or history, not at all. His point is that none of those things by themselves explain why there is subjective experience at all. Why pain

hurts, why red appears as red, why there is something it is like to be you and like to be me. He thinks Marxist appeals to like labor and evolution and emergence and dialectics. They can describe the conditions under which consciousness develops, but they cannot and they do not solve the hard problem of consciousness itself. So Mieville's position is a kind of consciousness realism against reductive materialism, right? And consciousness, you know, and what I mean by consciousness realism is that consciousness is real, it's irreducible, and it's philosophically troubling. It's a genuine issue that we have to solve. It's not something you can hand wave away or reduce to something else. And because metaphysical materialism cannot account for it, Marxist should be open to non-materialist

metaphysics, including idealism and perhaps even theism, without imagining that this automatically means political reaction or the abandonment of Marxism as such. And regardless of what you think about his gesturing towards idealism and theism, he's not really fully committing to those things, as far as I can tell. He's just opening the door that these things are not off limits and the political implications are not, as many Marxists might automatically assume some form of political reaction or some form of revisionism and an abandonment of Marxism as such. And I think on that point, I want to go along with him. I want to say, yes, that is more or less true. I'm more or less in agreement with that. I don't actually go into the idealism realm. I kind of reject that

turn. And the theism is so full of its own problems, I don't even want to go there. But his basic critique of folk Marxism and his basic separation of those two problems, that you could still be historical materialist without necessarily being a metaphysical materialist, I think those are legitimate. I'll say that. Does that sound right to you? Yeah. Yeah, I think that summary is really good.

And yeah, I think I feel quite similarly. I think on the one hand, the distinction between metaphysical and methodological materialism, whether or not one likes it is just an distinction or distinction that I think a lot of Marxists have already been operating with, right? Like, if you think about the Frankfurt School and then, like, critical theory approaches to Marxism, I think they're already just working on that assumption, right? That is already kind of a distinction that is baked in, you know, often quite explicitly there. And so I think if you are concerned that Mayville is suggesting some new thing by saying there could be a distinction between

materialism as the method of social investigation and materialism as metaphysics, it's not a new suggestion. Marxism has been operating that way for quite some time, I think, and this is a very old and ongoing debate where you could kind of put sart and angles in conversation with each other, even, I think, and see some of those tensions occurring. So I don't think that there's a radical position there that needs to be rejected. And I do think that folk Marxism is a real problem, right? Like, I do think to a certain degree, there's, you know, he uses the word faith several times. This just like faith that materialism can explain all of this without an actual exploration or engagement of it. And I think I personally want to find a way to salvage metaphysical materialism,

maybe because I like a nice parsimonious view of the world where my methodology and my metaphysics, you know, play very nicely with each other. But I do think that it is fair to say that a lot of Marxists have not done such clear work trying to save that metaphysical materialism. And the folk Marxism phenomena, I think, is quite real and I think is quite worth rejecting, because I do think we need to be thorough about these questions. And so in that sense, regardless of where I land on Mayville's gestures towards the end, I'm very thankful for this essay. I think this essay is like opening a debate that it is good for Marxists to have

that should not dominate all of what we do. There are obviously way more crucial things to be working on. But this debate has a place, I think, and is worthwhile to engage in. And I'm glad to see more Marxists actually responding and kind of getting into it. I think for me, I tend to find idealism harder to accept, but there are iterations of idealism that I think I could see how they nicely solve some of what Mayville wants. But I do think the Theism side of it is where I would really depart. I think the gesture towards Theism is much bigger problem, perhaps, than the one line he states about the problem of evil.

There's a lot more that comes with Theism than that. But again, I don't think Mayville is saying at the end of this, like the solution is to be a theistic idealist, so much as perhaps that is one of possible solution. And I think that is a thing we're throwing out there for us to debate. And as we get into some of the responses, we will see how people have picked up on that. And I think truly generative ways that are making Marxists be clearer about what our metaphysics or our lack of metaphysics are. So I'm quite thankful for the essay, if nothing else. Totally. It's a really essential, I think, intervention. And I think one of the political implications, I'm pretty sure that Mieville states this explicitly, one of the political implications of this folk Marxism is a sort of lazy dogmatism.

And a sort of unthinking doctrinairism that just copy and paste beliefs that you actually haven't thought through or wrestled with the complexities of. And that's always a problem within Marxism. And there's something anti-dialectical about all forms of dogmatism. So I think that intervention is incredibly important. With the theism question as well, this is why I love Spinoza so much is because Spinoza really does this amazing move of God or nature, basically saying it's the same thing in his radical philosophy of imminence. So what I mean by imminence is that, you know, you can call it God. We can talk in that language. We can talk about nature.

We can talk in that language. Saving science and I believe mysticism and the language is employed in both of them. Without, without, you know, sort of positing or having to deal with the idea that there's a supernatural realm, that there's something outside of the natural world, right? Spinoza is very naturalist. He got called an atheist, I think in large part because there's this denial of some transcendent. realm wherein a God might exist outside of the natural order. But when God is nature and nature is God, it's imminent. It's right here. It's you and me. Our consciousness is an expression of it. Our body is an expression of it. When you look out your window and see that cardinal flitting between

the pines, that's an expression of it. When you look up and are awed at the Milky Way, that's an expression of it. It's all God, which is to say it's all nature. And there's something beautiful about that, that sidesteps and really, I think ultimately resolves all the problems of positing a supernatural entity. So I think we're always in Spinoza's bag with that one. But if you have anything else to say you can, but then I just kind of want to go through some of these main theories in the philosophy of mind, which will be revisiting some of the ones you mentioned and mentioning a few others. But I think this is a clarifying aspect of the conversation. So if you're still kind of lost, this next section, we're kind of going to revisit some. We're going to revisit

some core things and hopefully bring you along. Yeah, go ahead and jump right in. All right. So here's some, you know, basic, this is the terrain of what we could call philosophy of mind, these different theories about it. We'll start with the two obvious ones we've already been discussing, materialism and idealism. And this is not me projecting my opinions on what these definitions mean. This is me collating and collecting and sort of making as objective as possible these definitions without any of my personal bias. So, and, you know, all of those. of these categories have subcategories that's taken for granted. So materialism. Materialism is the view that matter, nature, or physical reality is primary and that mind or consciousness arises

from depends on or is ultimately an expression of material processes. So in simple terms, matter comes first, mind is secondary, but natural, right? It's not spooky. It's not supernatural. It's not supernatural, it is a natural product of the organization of matter. And there are obviously different kinds of materialism. A crude or reductive materialism says something like consciousness is nothing but brain activity. A richer dialectical materialism would say that consciousness is a real emergent, social historical, practical phenomena rooted in material nature, not floating above it, etc. There's different forms of materialism. We'll touch on some of them in a second. But that's a broad category for a set of philosophies that basically say matter is primary matter comes first okay

then there is idealism many Marxists will understand Hegelian idealism and Marx turning Hegel on his head that's one form of idealism if anybody has philosophy experience you'll remember Berkeley extreme idealism where everything is literally in the mind of God and you know when you turn it when I when I when you walk away from your kitchen that that kitchen table is still there because God is perceiving it. I mean, this is Berkeley and idealism. That's the extreme form of it. So zooming out a little bit, just idealism in its broad strokes is the view that mind, consciousness, spirit, idea, or, you know, personal interior experience is somehow more fundamental or more primary than matter. In its stronger forms, the material world is dependent on mind or

is somehow an appearance within consciousness. perhaps God's consciousness, right? So in simplest terms, just the inversion of materialism, really, mind comes first, and matter is derivative. And like I said, there's many forms of idealism. Some are subjective, where reality depends on individual minds. Others are objective or absolute, where reality is the expression of a larger rational, spiritual, or mental principle. And so, you know, for Marxist idealism here is usually the major enemy, and that's, I think, what makes Mieville's essay kind of provocative because it reverses the real relation between being and consciousness. Instead of seeing consciousness as arising from life, labor, social relations,

and material conditions, idealism treats consciousness, ideas, or spirit as the driving basis of reality. Mieville sidesteps the hard version of this criticism by simply separating the two. That's saying that you can maintain a historical materialism, but that idealism at the level of metaphysics and ontology could still be true. And that's kind of how he, he solves that particular problem. All right. So you have materialism and you have idealism. Now let's get into some, maybe the other major version would be a dualism. And then we'll get into some of the subcategories. So what is dualism? Many people will be familiar with Renee Descartes, right? Dualism is the view that mind and matter are fundamentally different kinds of things or in the philosophical

jargon, different substances. The classic version is, of course, Cartesian dualism associated with Rene Descartes. The body is extended physical substance while the mind is thinking non-extended substance. And in simple terms, mind and matter are two separate realities. Two different substances, two different types of things. So whereas materialism wants to say materialism is first and mind emerges from it and idealism wants to say mind is first and matter somehow arises from mind or spirit or whatever, dualism says, says these are actually two separate things. But the problem for dualism and the problem for Rene Descartes immediately became the interaction problem. If mind and matter are two different things,

two different substances, how do they affect each other? How do they causally relate to one another? How does an immaterial thought cause a physical arm to move, etc.? And Descartes has a bunch of weird ideas, including the pineal gland, which, you know, interestingly is still taken forward in like these new agey woo-woo forms of belief where they take the, this Cartesian idea, it all comes down to the pineal gland. You've got to decalcify it. That actually goes back to the cart, which is funny. So that's kind of dualism.

And I think materialism, idealism, and dualism, pretty much the major players here. I think monism is another one. We'll get into that in a second. So let's go to some other theories of philosophy of mind. And again, this is just trying to really help you orient yourself to the terrain of what we're dealing with in some of the predominant ways in which deep thinking people have tried to solve this particular problem. And Allison mentioned panpsychism. Panpsychism is the view that mind, experience, or proto-consciousness is actually a fundamental feature of reality of the cosmos itself.

It's present in some basic form throughout nature. So in simple terms, mind-like qualities go all the way down. So a pan-psychist does, uh, psychist does not usually claim that rocks think, right, or that electrons have opinions. Rather, the claim is that the basic constituents of reality may have some primitive experiential aspect and complex consciousness emerges from more complex organizations of these basic experiential properties. So it's not that, you know, a rock has a full on subjective experience like a higher form of organized being like a human being or even an animal or even a plant but that perhaps there is some atomistic you know what the atom is to matter perhaps there is that for consciousness and that it is present in everything so there i don't know if this claim would be as strong as to say

there is something it is like to be a rock but maybe in some very elementary sense that that's true which is really hard to think about and envision. There's a whole bunch of debates within panpsychism. But okay, that's a genuine argument on the table. And I think David Chalmers, who introduced the hard problem, is some form of a pan psychic. Is that right? Right.

I think sympathetic to it, at least. Sympathetic to it, yeah. Philosophers are often like, you know, they want to hedge their bets and stuff like that, which is totally fine. Okay, so we got that down. Now we're going to get into neutral monism. So we talked about matter and mind, materialism, idealism. We talk about dualism, right?

These are two different substances. Monism is almost an inverted dualism or the elimination of the duality altogether. Neutral monism is the view that mind and matter are not two separate substances like dualism would say, nor is one simply reducible to the other like materialism or idealism would say. instead both mind and matter are expressions aspects or organizations of a more basic underlying reality that is itself neither strictly mental nor strictly physical some third underlying thing from which both of them arise so in simple terms mind and matter are two expressions of one deeper reality and this is some version of this is what spinoza is saying right spinoza totally disregard or destroys Cartesian dualism.

He does not become a materialist or an idealist. He advances in a very unique way that some version of this neutral monism, that there is just one substance, which can be understood, as he says, as God or nature, underlying reality, the ground of all reality, and that mind and matter are not mind and body in the instance of a human being, are not separate substances. They are different attributes or expressions of this,

same underlying singular reality. So in this version of the world, you know, you get mind and matter consciousness and the material as two expressions of some third underlying more fundamental reality. What that underlying reality is, that's a problem. You know, Spinoza again calls it God or nature. Hard to explain what that is. In Spinoza's world, there also could be other attributes that the human constitution doesn't have access to, you know, different attributes of God or nature that we can't

access or don't experience, perhaps, which complicates the picture enormously. But that's a neutral monism. Why is it neutral? It's not taking a side over what's primary. It's not saying mind or matter is primary. That's the neutrality of it. And why is it monist? It's because it's singular. It's unifying. It says there's one thing underneath the seeming differences, the seeming dualities. and that ultimate reality gives rise to this seeming dualities and the differences. Neutral monism. Okay. So I got a couple more here.

Stick with me. But I mean, I think this in and of itself isn't interesting. And you can perhaps, if you don't have a thought out position on this, you know, you'll naturally be more sympathetic to one or the other, be skeptical of one more than the other. And I think that's an interesting and worthwhile thing to explore in your own, you know, sort of positionality. But a couple more of these theories. The next one, and Alison mentioned this one as well, is emergentism. So emergentism is the view that consciousness arises from matter once matter reaches certain levels of organization and complexity. Mind is not a separate substance, but it is also not simply reducible to its parts. This is a more complicated version of materialism, right? And in simple terms, matter becomes mind under certain conditions. So mind emerges from mind.

matter structured and organized in a certain way. If you can if you can organize matter in a in a specific way like let's say into the nervous system of a human being, you will get a certain type of mind that emerges out of that out of that material organization and that that material structure. And this this seems you know, this seems pretty reasonable. I think a lot of people might immediately kind of like this. And a common example as that are used to sort of bolster this argument that Allison mentioned is water, right? Hydrogen and oxygen do not individually have wetness, but when organized in a certain way, wetness seems to emerge. It emerges. It's an emergent product of the underlying reality of those two things. And so likewise, the argument goes,

neurons may not individually be conscious, but when organized into nervous systems, perception, feeling, thought, and self-awareness may emerge. And I would argue to add the point to this and to help people understand this, I think this is the idea behind conscious AI, that, okay, we're not dealing in biological organics. We're dealing in silicone and microchips. But if emergentism is real, if mind is actually just a product that emerges when material is organized in a very certain way, there's no reason that it has to be synapses and electrons and the human brain or the mushy gray white matter that we call the human brain, we could do that with sufficient complexity with, you know, non-biological material.

In this case, yeah, silicon and its adjacent materials. That still hasn't been completed yet. Maybe it's just like we're nowhere close to being able to organize that silicon and microchips in such a way that it could, in such a complex way that it could give rise to some sort of consciousness, but perhaps we can down the road, right? So a lot of the AI discussion, I think, assumes a certain sort of emergentism without ever naming it, which is just, you know, food for thought. Yeah. You mentioned a limitivism.

This is one of my least favorite positions. It just kind of waves away the fact that, like, consciousness and subjectivity or even a real problem to agree with. And it's, like, ultra reductive to neuroscience itself. You know, this is like the position of, like, a neuroscientist who's like, like, I'm. I study the brains all day. Obviously, materialism is true. And all the things that we think are hard about the hard problem of consciousness and quality and subjectivity. It really is just a product of our own confusion.

And once we master neuroscience, all those things will sort of disappear like the fog and mist that they actually are. And this has always been the hardest for me to wrestle with. It just seems so hostile to our basic experience as consciousness. Yeah. But you know, there's lots of very smart people who argue for it. I believe Daniel Dennett himself has some version, is an advocate of some version of this. And Daniel Dennett's work is fascinating and philosophically rich and, you know, inspirational to me at a certain part in my intellectual development. Certainly worth reading. But yeah, that position is a hardcore form of reductive materialism and reductive physicalism, really. All right. I don't want to bore people too much longer. We'll do one or two more. This next one is epiphenomenalism. And I think it's kind of similar to emergentism, but different. Epiphenomenalism is the view that consciousness is produced by physical processes, but does not itself have causal power. So the brain causes consciousness, but consciousness does not cause anything in return. So in simple terms, mind is a byproduct, not an active force. So this is sort of a, a weak emergentism, whereas, like, yes, the mind consciousness emerges via these physical processes, but it is, you know, as the classic metaphor goes, what steam is to a train, right? The ultimately ephemeral, non-causal byproduct of deeper physical processes.

So the argument here would be that consciousness does not actually affect behavior. We have conscious experience. It's an emergent property of physical processes, but that consciousness itself does not have any causal relationship with the material world. Which, again, is pretty counterintuitive because we think, you know, we have an idea, I think a thought, reach for this glass, go out and accomplish this goal. I have to do this and this and this if I want to achieve this. So I'm thinking, strategizing, plotting, that I'm going out in the world.

You know, if I can convince you of some other idea, let's say you're a liberal and I convince you to become a Marxist and you go out and organize. Well, you know, didn't the conscious experience of me critically analyzing and changing my ideas have a causal impact in the way I live my life or instead of voting blue no matter who I'm actually going out and organizing in my community as just one example of many. So, you know, it's a counterintuitive, but again, there's a whole sort of canon of work that pushes epiphenomenalism in various ways. All of these categories, have their subcategories and their unique forms of emphasis and articulation by different philosophers and thinkers. So that I think wraps up the major theories. Alison, do you have any

thoughts at all on any of that? Yeah, no, I think those were really exceptional summaries. And I think like one of the things that I want to point to you is like if you're not familiar with this debate, it's kind of staggering how many approaches there are to it, right? Like how much time has been spent on this question. And one of the things. that I think Mayville says in this essay is like for some people they hear the hard problem of consciousness and it just kind of doesn't register as a problem at all right and I certainly had that experience I think the first time I ever encountered it I kind of was like okay I don't particularly find this that frustrating and something that I need to spend that much time on and just

sort of moved on and it's only later that I've started to think there's like some weight to the problem. And so I think, you know, one response that one could have to this whole conversation is, this doesn't really feel like a problem to me. And I think that's fair to a certain degree. There really are just some people I've talked to who I think will never really feel like this is a true problem. But I do think the vast array of literature across specializations where people are dipping into analytic philosophy, neuroscience, all of these different fields, and are writing out all these different schools ought to at least point slightly to the fact that maybe there is a real problem here, right? That people are devoting their lives to coming up with an answer to from all of

these various fields. I really do think the broad kind of scope of the debate does point to sort of the fact that this does land for some people and really does seem worth wrestling with. Then the other thing that I think is interesting when you look at all these theories is that some of them sound very non-common sense, right? I find pan-psychism to be very hard to make sense of in a common-sense way. I write epiphenomenalism very hard to make sense of. And like Berkeley and idealism, certainly, I find very hard to make sense of. But I would suggest if you are interested in this question at all, reading those perspectives, I think I was forced to read Berkeley in grad school and found it much more systematic and compelling than I would have anticipated. And I

I've recently been diving into some of the pan-psychism literature, and it was also found the same thing there. I think there's a vibrant and lively philosophical debate to be had here. And again, I think, like, you might look at this and ask why does this matter? And perhaps it doesn't. There's a point in this essay where Mayville basically says, like, all of these questions are irrelevant to whether or not I can go do Palestinian solidarity activism, right? That might just be totally separate.

But I do think that Brett gestured towards the other political import, which is like the dogmatism. ought we to assume dogmatically that we have a worldview that has the answers to all of this, or should we interrogate that? And I think there's a certain reflex that we can build in ourselves by choosing to engage in these interrogations that can feel hyper-technical and abstract, that becomes very practical for then engaging the world in more concrete ways, and most importantly, I think for Marx, for engaging the world in ways we might want to change it. The world is a complex place, and if we want to change it, we probably do have to understand it. Marx in the 11th D.C. on Freuerbach does not reject interpreting the world. He says that it is merely not the end of philosophy, the interpretations necessary in order for the change to be effectuated. So I would just say that, again, a lot of definitions here, a lot of different ideas. People are going to have their sympathies to different ones. But this is a, I think, quite beautiful and vibrant field in philosophy that might have import from making us think better about reality and wanting to transform it. So it's kind of a pitch after that summary, I guess.

Yeah, and aside from that, I'm just, I'm a human being that's just curious about reality, right? We're endowed with this with this high level of consciousness and self-awareness that we can actually reflect on the biggest mysteries that our brains can possibly come up with and handle. Like, why do we exist? Why does the universe exist? Why does consciousness exist? What is the relationship here? You know, these are just deeply, deeply mysterious aspects of the cosmos and our place within it. And just as a, all other ideas aside, just as a human being, I find it a fascinating field of like contemplation and speculation, even if it never and perhaps never can lead to any seriously hard conclusions. That's what philosophy is about. Philosophy, you can never actually get to a solid answer. It specifically deals with questions that do not have answers and that cannot, you know, be attained through the scientific method because of its own limitations. So yeah, just as a human being, I find this stuff absolutely fascinating, and you're experiencing consciousness right now. We are in the mystery. We are the mystery.

If you're at all interested in your own, you know, if you're at all interested in self-knowledge and understanding yourself and your own life and your own rich interior life, these questions, I think, will inevitably in one way or another come up. And all of these major theories, while they have, you know, philosophical rigor and intensity to them and can be kind of hard to wrap your mind around, there often are. not always, but often are folk versions of these ideas. I just mentioned the folk understanding of emergentism that is really, you know, saturating like the AI, the very idea of generalized AI or conscious AI, the idea that you can download your brain into a computer, what does that assume about consciousness itself? A lot of these idealist strains are very, very common. You know, people's vision boards and people's idea that I just need to think positive thoughts and manifesting. these are new agey and woo-woo ways in which idealism is just totally assumed.

And so there are actual implications for how we engage with the world that stem from these. And if they're unexamined, I just think that that's the sort of problem, right? Like, for self-knowledge of nothing else. Like, I want to examine these questions that are core to my experience in the cosmos. And when you don't, when you look away from them, when you don't even know that they exist, that these arguments exist, you can kind of just easily and lazily fall into, you know, some passive form of them. That is, that is ultimately unthinking and all the worse for it. So that's, that's another pitch for taking this stuff seriously. Yeah, exactly. Go ahead. Oh, go ahead. No, you. I was saying, that's precisely what

Mayville means by folk Marxism, right? Is the passive form of Marxist thought on that. And that might be worth avoiding. Totally. And the last thing I'll say on this point is that I'm so interested in Buddhism, in large part because it is this phenomenological approach to our own subjectivity. It is a fucking systematic approach to one's own consciousness and to get to the bottom of it. And what is left when the personality and the ego and the constant compulsive stream of thinking that we're all immersed in? What is left when that stuff clears away? you know and then you what you are faced with is like just raw pure consciousness itself whoa and then and then ultimately in higher forms of Buddhist enlightenment or whatever it is this total identification not with the

content of consciousness the ego thoughts feelings that come and go but with consciousness itself with pure awareness itself and that is a that is not only phenomenological investigation which is worth it but it's radically transformative it transforms and elevate your consciousness by engaging in that phenomenological inquiry and direct investigation, which is fascinating. And I think the people that want to hand wave consciousness away, it's really hard for me to imagine they've ever engaged with Buddhism or meditation. Right. Because that is like, no, it's here.

It's here. And when you sit down and meditate, you are directly engaging with precisely that. Yeah. No, it forces you to face it head on. Exactly. Exactly. All right. Well, having said all of that.

I think there are, I don't know if there are more, are there more essay responses to Mieville? These are the two that I've seen so far. I suspect there might be a few that I've missed and I suspect there are more coming, but these are the two that I have seen. Okay. And these are great in their own way and they take totally different positions and they're basically all from a Marxist perspective responding to Mieaville's argument and essay, criticizing Mieaville and then offering up their own solution to the problem or their own way of approaching the problem. And so this first one, these are going to be very quick. We're not going to do a whole Miaville summary of them because it would just take us too far

field. It would be too difficult to do. It would make this episode six hours long. So I'm just going to give a brief paragraph form summary. And I hope I do these two essays justice in these summaries. But again, we're linking to them in the show notes. You can go and wrestle with the full arguments yourselves afterwards. words. But the first one I'm going to briefly summarize is it titled, Their Materialism and

ours. Minds, Matter, and Marxism from Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim. And this was just put out June 16th, 2026, so literally a couple days ago. This is cutting edge, like, debates. This is happening in real time. And it's posted on salvage. I believe the same exact outlet that Meaville posted his original essay in. So that is the next one we're going to cover very quickly. And the way that I would overarchingly describe their position is a rationalist dialectical materialism. And hopefully this quick summary will make a little bit sense of that. So Fluss and Frim are rejecting Mieville's

move from the mystery of consciousness toward idealism, theism, or metaphysical humility. For them, that move concedes far too much. They argue that Marxism is not merely a theory of history that can remain agnostic about reality as such. It actually requires a materialist ontology because the whole Marxist project depends on the claim that consciousness is shaped by nature, embodiment, social relations, and material conditions. So as an aside, here, they're actually disagreeing with Terry Eagleton. They're saying it is important that ontology matches historical materialism. We must be materialists in both sense of the word or we lose something

by abandoning ontological and metaphysical materialism. But their materialism is not crude, reductive physicalism, right? They are not saying that the mind is just gray matter in motion. Their position is a rationalist dialectical materialism, drawing heavily from Spinoza, Hegel, Engels, and Lenin. Matter for them is actually not dead inanimate stuff. Matter is intelligible, meaning you can comprehend it. You can actually understand it. Lawful is, it sort of unfolds according to natural laws, which are also intelligible. And a self-developing nature.

Consciousness is not a supernatural interruption into the world, but nature becoming capable of knowing itself through complex forms, of organized matter. So where Mieville sees consciousness as a rupture in materialism, fluss and frim see it as a reason to deepen materialism, to understand mind as an emergent

power of nature itself, and to defend Marxism as a politics grounded, ultimately, in the sort of rational intelligibility of the real. And this is very hegelian in its emphasis on reason and rationality,

on its insistence that the cosmos and nature, the universe is intelligible to us, that because we are the universe, which is matter in motion, because our consciousness is a product of the material organization of the cosmos itself, that allows us to render the cosmos intelligible. So it does not retreat into a sort of epistemological nihilism or an agnosticism. It asserts that we can understand the world and that we are the universe experiencing itself and that materialism it kind of gets wobbly for me here

but they're still materialists but they're coming to it through an absolute idealism I don't know that's where I kind of I lose it a little bit and Allison I'm wondering if you have any insights there yeah yeah the essay is fascinating and if anyone is interested

Mayville wrote a response to this essay basically saying you are not materialists. So that is one possible option. They do this very fascinating move, I think, where they try to argue that Hegel and Spinoza read through Hegel are sort of always already materialists, right? That like absolute idealism was always already materialism. And in this sense, they kind of just restate Spinozen and Hegelian like deductions for the rationality of the universe. they don't really modify them beyond Hegel. And then there's this very strange section, which is just titled Absolute Idealism Equals Materialism, which I really love is a section name, in which they attempt to make an argument that this is always already materialist.

I have like two and a half paragraphs pulled from this where they make this argument I can read if you think it would be helpful for it. Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, so they write, quote, this finally is the key difference between a rationalist pantheist like Spinoza and an idealist theist position. The shining forth of nature, the existence of modally distinct things, is never a choice or a brute contingent fact, nor even a matter of inborn generosity or love, but rather follows from infinite nature itself. And materialism is just this plenum, a separation of finite things distinct in themselves and extorting. and external to one another, yet all conditioned by the same intelligible laws. This is, again, different from the dubious solutions to the hard problems discussed above.

The rationalist worldview is not the same, for example, as panpsychism or vitalism. The latter, imagine wholly without evidence, that even sand is sentient and that all material things actually have hidden conscious thoughts or experiences. Panpsychism is just another sort of fiat explanation. It is wishing something to be true that does not solve. a theoretical utility. The rationalist does not beg the question this way. They start with the evidence.

In fact, better than empirical evidence. The rationalist starts with the apodictic fact that we possess some knowledge, some certainly true idea. In this way, the rationalist refuses to account for the hard problem before first tackling the fundamental problem of philosophy. This later question is the true starting point of all subsequent queries. Is the real rational? Only once we answer this fundamental question about the ultimate intelligibility of the world,

do any of the narrower questions about minds, bodies, qualia, and moods become answerable. End quote. There's a lot in there. But I think the main thing that they're doing is this move where they say materialism is this plenum, a separation of finite things distinct in themselves and external to one another, yet all conditioned by the same intelligible laws. So they're trying to make this argument that, again, like Spinoza, Haygel is already a materialist because you can derive this separation of infinite things

that are distinct but governed by rationality. And I think it's a very clever move, but I think a fair response and I think you're kind of gesturing towards that is like, is that what people mean when they say materialism? It's not clear to me that that is what materialism means in this debate. And so this essay, I think, is a fun read and I would recommend reading it. But it feels to me, like, they are rejecting a kind of like interventionist theism that they believe that Mayville has adopted in favor of like a Spinozist pantheism. But that might just be two competing idealisms rather than a materialist rejection of Mayville's position here. That's kind of, I think, the tricky part. Does that make sense at all? Yeah, no, it is. And it's,

again, it's very difficult. And I don't have much more to say because I feel like if I try to keep explaining their position, I'll butcher it further and not be fair to it. Sure. So really the only way to resolve this particular confusion is for you to go read it yourself and see what you can pull out of it. I am skeptical of the rationalism and the emphasis on reason that nature itself is intelligible ultimately to our minds, which is just nature itself, organizing itself to understand itself, which I do like that aspect of it. I do like the dialectical materialism aspect. I'm skeptical of the rationalist aspect. Perhaps that skepticism, you know, is kind of rooted ultimately in my Buddhist framework,

which is very skeptical of conceptual knowledge even as such, and thus the intelligibility of the real, as they put it, of reality itself. But again, I'm willing to admit that I might not understand their full argumentation, and perhaps they could, in a real conversation, could enlighten me further on that. But fascinating move no matter what, and I respect it. can I point to one thing that I do think is valuable in this essay though that I think is like fairly clear at least. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, you know, the one thing I will say is like I think this essay does hit in a weird way though at the sense in which like metaphysics might matter. Right. Because they do make this interesting argument that like socialism in the Marxist framework, which claims to be scientific socialism, they use the term, can predict the future, which might be overstating the case. But certainly, like, Marxist scientific socialism does claim to have predicted value and through experimentation in the world be able to formulate tactics and strategies for intervening in a way that requires some prediction. And they do kind of, I think, in a useful way in this essay say, like, if at the end of Mayville's essay, he's gesturing towards a God who just kind of solves everything by fiat, that is kind of weirdly incompatible with Marxism, right? Like a world where God just wills things into existence and intervenes based purely on divine whims probably is incompatible with scientific socialism. And I don't think that that's necessarily the view that Mayville is defending, but it is a stark example of why, like, some metaphysics might actually be incompatible with Marxism in a useful way. And that is kind of what I really liked as a takeaway from this essay.

It puts some of the political stake back into it, I think. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do like that part as well. Another way that I try to sum this up in like a sentence is that, you know, mind can emerge from matter because matter, I think they're what they're saying is like matter is not irrational stuff. Matter is intelligible nature. And mind is one of the higher forms that that matter or that nature takes. So it is really interesting. It is Spinoza and that we are the universe waking up to itself.

And it has this sort of historicity and this evolutionary unfolding process, which is very hoagy. Galian that's like over time reality becomes more and more understood and intelligible as it itself sort of develops dialectically to higher forms of consciousness and self-understanding. So again, very interesting. It's one of those ones that I could only read once and I think two, three, five reads could drive some of those points of, you know, deeper home for me. I didn't have time. For sure.

All right. So there's one more here that is taking a third position that. sort of is not, is responding to Mieville, but is not at all what Fluss and Frimm are arguing for. And that is, what's the article called? Do you have it on hand? Yeah, naturalized dialectics, a response to Mayville's beyond folk Marxism. Right, by Joshua Nicholas Panetta. So my summary of this, and Allison, tell me if you think this is getting close to it. Panetta is rejecting the shared assumption that the debate has to be framed as a grand metaphysical choice between matter, mind, or some awkward dual

between the two. He thinks Mieville is right to criticize crude physicalism, but wrong to revive substance metaphysics as the terrain on which consciousness has to be explained. For Panetta, the problem is not that matter cannot explain mind. The problem is that we are asking philosophy to provide one master ontology, right? One thing that explains everything in a sort of singular vocabulary, an overarching narrative, if you will. His alternative is what he calls naturalized dialectics, a non-reductive scientific naturalism that accepts different levels of explanation. In this point, I'm really sympathetic to, right? There's the biological explanation of reality, the psychological explanation of reality,

the social level, the historical level, the ethical level, we could go on. And he does this without reducing them all to brain chemistry or dissolving them into some sort of idealism. He says consciousness is real, embodied, emergent, and historically formed. But that does not make it supernatural, nor doesn't make it metaphysical or metaphysically spooky. So finally, for Panetta Dialectics is not a mystical law of reality or even a total metaphysical system. It is the practical work of relating distinct but interconnected forms of explanation within one natural world. So, you know, totally rejecting any form of supernaturalism, doubling down on scientific naturalism.

and really I think the best move here is this total refusal to reduce sort of one way to talk about is dimensions or layers of analysis. That we can look at the world through the psychological lens. We can look at the world through the historical lens. We can look at it through the biological lens and we don't have to try to nest one inside of another to gain some sort of clarity that this is just a sort of dynamic web of layers of analysis that we can look at and that's okay. Does that sound right to you?

Yeah, I think that's a really good summary, right? This essay is like interesting because it solves the problem by basically just saying like the desire for a unified fundamental metaphysics is flawed, right? Like philosophically, that's a losing game. And it I think, yeah, makes this clever argument about levels of science and then like scopes of scientific explanation. And I think really there's this section that I thought was really cool where it goes beyond even just saying like, you know, there's the biological and then there's the psychological. but even within a field of science like physics, the explanations might not be unified across different levels. So like in physics, quantum physics does not play nicely with our explanations for macro physical phenomena. But that doesn't mean that we then have to like build this

spooky metaphysical solution to unify them because science is always operating at these different levels and these different explanatory levels. And when science wants to do kind of like, what's a speculative ontology, like saying, do atoms exist and throwing out those ideas there, they're always for solving a problem within a given scope or within a given situation, rather than building a fundamental metaphysics. And so this essay just says, like, that's kind of a losing game to begin with, right? It sort of rejects the very, like, philosophical assumptions on which Mayville is operating here. And I think this is a more kind of sophisticated response. You would also have to be a very, like, philosophical assumptions on which Mayville is

to reject the other essay completely, the, what is it, Fluss and Frim essay on the basis of this one, since they're also trying to do that kind of more fundamental metaphysics. And while Fluss and Frem kind of like take Hegel and affirm Hegel and this sort of like teleology in Hegel that the world is fundamentally structured according to rationality, this essay inspector that is really interestingly rejects that. And it actually, I think, does an interesting job saying that this is actually precisely a part of Hegel that Marx and Ingalls rejected, and that Marx and Ingalls set dialectics free from that sort of teleology and put it back into the forces of the classes struggling within history in this fascinating way. So to me, this essay feels much more easy to fit

within Marxism than the other essay, perhaps. And I think offers an interesting response to Mayville that I hope he will respond to as well. I really, really enjoyed this essay. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the back and force between these figures. I didn't even know that Mieville responded to Fluss and Frim, so that's really cool off to read that next. But yeah, I mean, you know, I like Panetta's approach is really interesting. It really does walk away from both of the previous two essays as basic moves in a really interesting way. But I feel like for us, and, you know, maybe I'm speaking for myself, but I think also for you is that we kind of do want to talk about ontology. We kind of do want metaphysics still, you know.

Yeah. And what he's saying is. is like, yeah, and what he's kind of saying is like, we, we can like coordinate different layers of explanation and like in this web of different layers and kind of coordinate them together. And that's cool and probably productive in a various way as well, but I'm just not as willing to like walk away from metaphysics and ontology altogether. Yeah. Perhaps that's a personality problem. I don't know.

No, I think maybe in my case as well, I just am a fucking nerd for this type of philosophy. Exactly. I find it fun to engage in. And he makes a good case, I think, against that sort of metaphysics. But ultimately, my sympathy leans towards the idea that we can pull off some sort of metaphysics or ontology that is not folk Marxism. You know, I think that's a worthwhile endeavor. Absolutely. So I have my own sort of position that I wrote down to articulate as best as I can.

It's been something that has been bubbling, I think behind the scenes in a lot of my work from our episodes on Spinoza to like the sort of Marxist and Buddhist synthesis I've been working at. Some of this is sort of implicit at a more elementary level in my upcoming book. I don't get into the philosophy of all this, but I am sort of arguing for something that has relevance in this terrain. And so while I was preparing for this and I read Mieville's argument and the counterarguments, I wanted to be like, you know, this vague sort of position that I have that I have for a long time called, you know, dialectical monism. Um, can I actually come? kind of put that into into language here and make it a precise argument, not a full essay,

but like a paragraph or two, uh, advancing something that I think is, is not identical with any three of the, of the essays that we've discussed so far, nor is it neatly reducible to any of the, the main categories of the philosophy of mind, though, perhaps, you know, you could see it as, as a, as a, which it is, is a form of monism. So I would be sort of in that camp, um, which, you know, perhaps from a more rigidly materialist perspective that itself could be criticized, but it is what it is. So I wrote this down. I'm going to read it in an attempt to articulate as precisely as I can this position, and then, you know, you can let me know what you think of it, be critical of it where I mess up. And, you know, again, if I put this into an essay form and

actually flesh this out and put that out into the world, you know, of course there would be, and this is just the nature of philosophy, a million angles from which to attack or criticize or be skeptical or point out certain assumptions, and that's the beauty of philosophy. There's never any, like, never in the history of philosophy, does everybody stop and say, hey, that person is right. They figured it out. You figured it out.

Yeah. That's just not in the nature of the field itself. Right. To its credit. So, okay. Yeah. This is obviously Marxist and Buddhist inspired as everything, you know, I say is. And there's a bit of non-duality here.

But the basic position is, I would call it, dialectical monism. So, I am rejecting both crude materialism and metaphysical idealism. I do not think consciousness can be waved away as just brain activity, as if subjective experience, right, awareness, suffering, interiority, subjectivity are philosophically unimportant. I do not believe that. But I also do not think that the mystery of consciousness pushes us, as I said earlier, towards supernaturalism, theism, and certainly not the abandonment of Marxism. So my position is a dialectical monism,

sort of transformed or shifted by the Buddhist conception of dependent origination. So to explain that further, mind and matter are not separate substances, nor is one reducible to the other. That's just straightforward monism. They are co-arizing expressions of one dynamic, unfolding, relational reality. driven forward by contradiction between and within themselves.

So with Spinoza, I do think that this underlying reality can be called God or nature, so long as God is not understood as a supernatural person outside or above the world, but rather in Spinoza's, you know, taking Spinoza's lead here, as the mysterious, imminent, self-organizing activity of the universe itself. So where I depart from Spinoza, though, is that I understand, this reality not as a static substance, a hidden metaphysical object beneath imperances or like an ultimate ground in the ordinary sense. And that was kind of, you know, Spinoza's version of this. But I understand it dialectically. And, you know, as an aside, Hegel, deeply influenced by Spinoza,

does a similar move, right? He takes Spinoza's static eternalism and dialecticizes it, puts it in motion, puts it in history. And so I'm certainly, you know, as most Marxists are Hegelian in that sense. So dialectically is a process of emergence, contradiction, interdependence, transformation. It is empty, and this is important, I think, in the Buddhist sense. And what I'm getting at here is the problem with monism, as I articulated earlier, is it is gesturing towards some third, more fundamental reality from which mind and matter emerge. but that creates an automatic problem.

Even if you're not going supernatural with it, you're positing some deeper, more real, more foundational thing, substance, whatever, and then that itself is rarely explained. And perhaps it's utterly impossible to explain that things, but knows it calls it God or nature, this deeper reality. But I think with the Buddhist conception of emptiness,

we can de-essentialize that, right? And emptiness in the Buddhist sense is like there's no fixed essence to things. It's the core of no self. That what you take to be a static, stable self within yourself is actually an illusion. And what you are is this continually unfolding and hyperconditioned process, right? You are a process. You're not a thing. And that's true for all things.

Everything is essenseless. It emerges in radical imminent relation. with everything else. So how do you solve the Spinoza problem of some mysterious substance underneath reality? You just say it's not there at all. And that's what in Buddhism is called the groundless ground, an interdependent totality without a fixed essence. Everything exists only through relations and conditioning, interdependence, etc. This is where dependent origination really becomes central for me. Consciousness does not arise from organized brain matter in some simplistic physicalist or epiphenomenal way. It arises dependently through the body, the nervous system,

language, you know, and in the historical materialist realm, labor, society, history, suffering, memory, desire, etc. The world itself, practice, being in the world. Consciousness arises from kind of that radical interdependence of all of those things. So there is no, like in all things in Buddhism, there is no mind in and of itself, but there is also no matter in and of itself, right? These concepts that we want to take out of their relational web of interdependence and sort of reify as a fixed essence,

a fixed thing that we can then put in contradiction to one another and try to explain which one proceeds which, you know, which is more pristine. primary, et cetera, that itself, I think, is a mistake of conceptualization, especially if by matter we mean some isolated, self-sufficient stuff existing apart from consciousness. So matter two is relational, dynamic, conditioned, and ultimately empty of an essence. In this sense, emptiness protects me in my position from three errors at once. If I articulated the emptiness thing itself well enough, it will protect me from three errors.

Crude materialism because consciousness is not reduced to dead matter under this view. It protects me from idealism because consciousness is not made primary or treated as the source of reality. And I think it defends me against static spinozism because the one substance is not a frozen metaphysical block or some secret third thing beneath mind and matter, but rather is itself a dynamic unfolding web of dependent arising. That's all there is. This is where Marxism and Buddhism meet for me. Marxism keeps consciousness rooted in nature, history, class, and material conditions. Buddhism gives us a rigorous phenomenology of mind and suffering and emptiness. Together, they allow us to totally affirm nature, science, and historical materialism,

while also taking consciousness and suffering, interiority, subjectivity itself, with full seriousness, all without needing to nest one inside the other or explain one in terms of the other. The mystery of consciousness does not lead us out of matter-first materialism or into a mind-first idealism, categories that in this debate are often reified into distinct abstractions that confuse more than they clarify. Rather, the mystery of consciousness leads us into a deeper, non-dual, dialectical understanding of mind, matter, and the universe. So if you can kind of imagine a spider web unattached from anything, sort of, you know, sort of forming itself in a world. way. That's getting close to some sort of visual analogy to what I'm arguing for, that there is no ultimate ground to reality. There's still a monism there. The process unfolds historically and

dialectically, but it is totally processual, totally relational, totally rooted in causes and conditions and interdependence and is not ultimately rooted in any single thing or any other substance. Does that make sense? And what are your initial thoughts on that? Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. And I think, yeah, I'd love for you to write a whole book. Just this question, frankly, I would certainly read it. I think a couple of thoughts up top. So, yeah, to a very large degree, this is what I find compelling in Buddhism, is what you're gesturing at towards here.

Because this is where I think Buddhism, if it is doing a monism, which I think you are arguing towards, is doing a very different kind of monism than, say, like, monist Hinduism, right? And so sorry listeners for tapping into yet another thing. But I think contrasting what you're doing with like Advata Vedanta, for example, right? In Edveta Vedanta, I think there is a monism that has that kind of static mind as foundational, right? Atman and Brahman are identical to each other. And really what it comes down to is finding that thing. And I think in most articulations of this form of Hinduism I've heard, they are kind of, it is sort of unmoving, right? like, Atman is kind of this stable, eternalistic thing.

And Buddhism, I think, does do this interesting thing with Anata and with emptiness of just getting rid of that, right? And instead, you have this chain of dependence that goes kind of infinitely back. And so I do think I like that in a lot of ways. And I think the comparison in my mind, at least, the compare and contrast with the Advata Vedanta schools, is helpful for seeing some of what is novel about this argument, I think. And so for anyone who has that reference point, maybe that would be a helpful kind of idea as well. And then, yeah, I think emptiness is one of those things that's very tricky, I think, because I think usually when Buddhists talk about it, I have a hard time understanding what they're talking about.

But to gesture towards an example that I found very helpful that I think might get at some of this is in his commentary on the Heart Sutra, Tickna Hahn has this section where he says, just like look at this piece of paper that these words are printed on. And I want you to find where the paper itself is. And he says, what you actually find is that if you look for the essence of the paper in the paper, you will not find it. It is empty of an essence and of a stable and unchained. essence. And in fact, when you look very closely into the paper, what you will find is a whole chain of causality. The paper comes from the tree, which is watered by the rain, which is part of the physical cycles of the earth, all the way back. And where one might expect in essence, there is an emptiness. And where that emptiness is, this is not like a nihilism. There's this

chain of relational other things stretching backwards. And I think, you know, hopefully that's a useful and not a misinterpretation of emptiness. But that is kind of the thing that helped me conceptualize the idea somewhat. And that feels so resonant with Engels to me, right? Because in my mind, Ingalls is rejecting precisely the idea of essence. Things are not eternal. They are not unchanging. They do not have an essence that is platonically projected out into matter from some other realm. Things are in a constant state of flux and changed relationally in terms of external contradictions and in terms of their internal contradictions. And to me, that feels so resonant with Buddhism. I even just had like a comrade the other day who is much more well-versed

in Buddhism than me. Be like, is there a reason that these just aren't doing the same thing ontologically, like dialectics in Buddhism? And it does feel like they are. So I don't have very many like concerns in that sense. I think that the, you know, the monism that you're trying to argue for makes a lot of sense to me and I think is a useful way of looking at the world. I think the problem that I have with it potentially that I don't think is insurmountable is still like emergence to a certain degree, which is that like even if ultimately there are no essences, it does feel phenomenologically. Like there is something different between consciousness and matter between the mind and the body.

And in terms of like dependent origination, I find it very easy to understand. the recycling of matter in birth and death and that movement. But what does that look like and mean in terms of, you know, consciousness is a question. And I think as I've taken a deeper dive into Buddhism, I do find that some Buddhists, I think, sneak in a little bit of dualism sometimes. This is like Stephen Batchelor's very big concern with a lot of Buddhism, is that he thinks it sneaks Atman back in and does the dualism. And I don't think that has to be the case, but I think some explanation of like,

why of consciousness still needs to get unpacked a little bit. And you give a very short summary here, so I wouldn't expect you to like have the entire why. But I'd be interested in hearing this framework taken to try to like deal with that question specifically and see what that answer might look like. I don't know if any of that is helpful. This are just kind of the thoughts of the top of my head. No, it is helpful. And I don't have a thought out answer to that that problem in particular. You're kind of reasserting that the problem still exists and isn't necessarily explained. Yeah. And that's that's probably, you know, that's probably true. There is this duality in Buddhism of like there's the relative and the absolute. So things can be talked about on the

relative level and then can be talked about in the non-dual absolute level, which can sometimes lead to various forms of confusion, although Buddhism itself arising out of Hinduism within India, kind of takes on a lot of that baggage in a very similar way that Christianity sort of emerges out of ruptures from, but is also an interesting continuation of Jewish. Judaism and, you know, Islam as an Abrahamic religion as well. So these things kind of evolve out of each other. There's a reaction to them, a rupture from them, and then a caring forward of them. And then as Buddhism spreads, it emphasizes different things, right? Zen Buddhism is different than, you know, Theravada Buddhism from, from, you know, Burmese teachers, which is different than Tibetan Buddhism.

So they all have, you know, which is also in every religion. You have Shia and Sufism and, you know, you have Protestantism and Catholicism and all these differences. sort of exists. So there is no, perhaps there is no single one Buddhist answer and Buddhists themselves debate quite a bit. But one of the things that came to mind is I was thinking about how to articulate this position, which, you know, plenty of points to apply pressure to is this, you know, core statement from the Heart Sutra, that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. So, so, you know, form here includes everything, the material and the mind, right? all concrete phenomena, bodies, objects, thoughts, mountains, brains, societies, consciousness, everything that appears as a definite thing, is form.

And then emptiness means that just none of those things possess an independent, fixed, or self-existing essence. They only exist, as I said, through causes, conditions, relations to one another, etc. So form is emptiness, emptiness is form. When we look at the phenomenal world, we're seeing things. that's all empty, right, in this sense. And emptiness itself is not some third thing underlying all form. It is form.

It is the, you know, form is the way emptiness expresses itself, which sounds counterintuitive and in a relative level of discourse it is, as so much in these traditions are seemingly, you know, totally contradictory to one another. But from an absolute perspective, it sort of makes sense. But again, this is one of the more nuanced and debated concepts. within Buddhism. And for some people, like Slavo-Ijizek, I think, criticizes Buddhism as fundamentally nihilistic

for reasons that are adjacent to this idea. And the picture that I, the visualization that, if I can articulate this in real time, that emerges from what I understand Buddhism to be, is like, and this is the emphasis on the present moment, it's the only thing that exists, that there is no past, there is no future, there's this cascading,

unfolding mystery so far beyond our ability to conceptualize that you can't even face it or experience it without first dropping your attempt to understand it at all. And people that can get into that meditative state of letting go of all compulsive inner dialogue being radically and fully and completely in the present, they articulate a sort of radical ignorance that I don't know what this is. I don't know what the fuck is happening. I don't know what I am. And you'll hear that time and time again all through the centuries and millennia of Buddhists who have more or less accomplished what could be crudely called enlightenment or awakening or non-dual perspective is they are from a phenomenological path, not from a third-person objective scientific approach from going deeply inward. You end up at this place of just radical mystery once again.

And so emptiness is like there is no thing that you can dig down to and find. It is just this sort of in mid-air, you know, for lack of a better term, constant cascade of change. And the cosmos itself is just this rushing river of energy with little eddies forming into material. And, you know, that could even be seen as idealism almost. I guess E equals MC squared kind of bridges that gap of energy. and mass and material, but that there's just this mysterious cosmic flow of this energy that concentrates itself into the phenomenological world, into form, into all the things that we see, but that itself is a constantly spilling forward, constantly unfolding a process that is fundamentally

mysterious, always in flux, never getting anywhere, never necessarily going anywhere. And upon your death, all that has really happened is that the particular eddy of that energy soup that gave rise to you or what you thought was you, that dissipates back into the hole. And so there actually was no separation ever to begin with. Separation is an illusion of thinking there's a fixed essence that you call you, you know, behind your eyes, between your ears, looking out at a world that is separate from you, that is ultimately all washed away. And there's some resonance with that in science. if you go down to, you know, the level of like, what's the deepest level we can understand the of reality unfolding? You're getting like quarks and atoms and things like that. And it is just this fucking soup, this like sort of soup of energy.

And so science itself kind of comes to that conclusion as well. And there seems to be just sort of an epistemological brick wall that we hit. Right. That you can't ever get beneath that. We are inside the thing. and to fully, if it's even possible to fully understand it, we would have to stand outside of it, which is just totally impossible,

and is itself just a delusion and a concept. It's not actually a real position that one could take, even theoretically. Right. Yeah, no, I think I'm very sympathetic to your perspective, and I think it is interesting, right? What is so fascinating thing when you come to this with, like, some experience with Buddhism, at least, is it does, I think, clarify for me,

the extent to which like why this debate matters a little bit. Because I think you mentioned this earlier, like, I feel like the limitivism in the face of Buddhism is just impossible. Right. Like once you have undertaken like even basic meditation practice, like the purely reductionist approaches that want to make consciousness go away become, I think, very non-viable. And so I think there's like a huge value to the Buddhist intervention on that like

phenomenological level itself of like you can go investigate. and encounter consciousness, right, in a really fascinating way. And I think, yeah, you know, it's interesting your response that, like, I'm kind of insisting the problem is still a problem in your framework. And maybe it isn't, which is always kind of what is tricky, as I've tried to look at the various answers. I feel like you can always kind of insist, like, ah, the problem is still a problem. There's still the question of emergence.

And you can kind of throw that at panpsychism, at materialism. You can even kind of throw it at some of the versions of idealism. And there is maybe a point at which this is sort of unanswerable on a certain level in which you can always find another epistemic gap that you can point to. And so I do think, like, me offering that, you know, I think emergence may still be a question here is almost a thing you could throw at any theory, right? That is kind of the difficulty. But I don't know. It's an interesting question. I would be very interested to hear you write at this at more length.

I know your book you said maybe isn't getting as directly into this, but is certainly drawing on this as a foundation, I would assume. But I would be interested to hear more. Yeah, and I think the thing that has prevented me so far from doing them, and the thing that gives me hesitation is just the intimidation of trying to. Because once you start making these theories, you really have to deal with, you have to anticipate all the possible angles. Yeah.

You know, and that's a lot of work. That's a lot of like reading the entire philosophy of mind sort of stuff. sure yeah it still could be where you know a lot of times in philosophy it's not that you've read every single thing and you're resolving once and for all uh you know all the tensions and the contradictions but it's like hey i'm throwing this out there as an intervention wrestle with this and of course people do yes you know of course people do but like that's actually the role of a philosopher is like to think more and deeply and to make weird interventions and even if you don't believe it yourself be like you know this is this is a path that could be taken

And what do you think of this? And then other people come and they hit it from angles you didn't anticipate. And then things move forward like that, right? So I mean, yeah. No, very much. And I think it's, in my experience, diving into it, I think this is a fairly good-natured philosophical debate, right? Like, I do think it is one of those ones where, like, you have to get very speculative with it. And I think in a lot of the responses that I've read between people, there's a lot of good faith.

Like, I understand that you are also throwing something at the wall in the face of this very, difficult problem, right? And you're going to write some stuff that sounds crazy. I'm going to write some stuff that sounds crazy. And we're just going to kind of like try it. You know, Philip Goff is kind of like the panpsychist who I think embodies this best. If you ever watch an interview with him, he's just like the most jobeal philosopher I've ever seen, honestly, so happy about just like everyone's attempts that's speculating about this. And so I think that hopefully can like reduce some of the intimidation. And I think like, you know, I said this earlier in the episode. I think Mayville is doing this awesome thing here. Like, again, I maybe have sounded critical

of Mayville, and I think I may be critical of some of the moves he makes. But I'm so fucking thankful he wrote that essay and invited Marxists to intervene and step into this field and try to wrestle with these questions, because I think it is just like a very good-natured opening salvo to what is now producing these pretty fascinating and complex essays. And it takes bravery and I think, a certain amount of, yeah, just like intellectual courage to kind of write the maybe I'm not a materialist essay to kick it off. You know, I'm very thankful for his willingness to do that. Could not agree more. I love it. It's great. I love all of the different versions of these arguments and the different essays that people will put forward. I think it is generative. It is productive.

It's fascinating. It puts like pressure on a lot of unexamined stuff within Marxism that is worth examining and wrestling with, even if it is hard, ultimately to reach a conclusion and in philosophy, and specifically in philosophy of mind, like, as I said earlier, there is no real way to fucking solve this problem. There is no definitive piece of evidence. I think even science itself will never be able to, like, fully settle some of these questions. Maybe, maybe the hard problem is chipped away at. Maybe we come to deeper and deeper understanding of consciousness. Can we ever get past the brick wall of the Big Bang? Can we ever know the foundation beneath reality itself or what came before it or how it was produced or will that always remain by definition speculative?

It doesn't mean we shouldn't wrestle with it. It doesn't mean that we can't think about it and increasingly clear, you know, clear-sighted and wide-eyed ways. But perhaps some of these things will never ever, by their very nature, be able to be understood by perhaps any intelligence in the cosmos. and maybe that's just a brute fact of the world we have to live in. And I think the Buddhist have an interesting move here, which is, aside from all the Buddhist philosophy, I just vomit it up. They would just say, drop all this. And just, it is Buddhism at the end of the day, even though there's a whole, like, you know, libraries full of Buddhist philosophy and all this. And Buddhist psychology and all this, Buddhism at the end of the day is a radical phenomenology of imminence.

It says, what is it like to be? here completely, totally now without any delusions of separation with a radical, absolute, non-dual perspective, and just to be in this as it's unfolding, as it's happening without any attempt to separate yourself through conceptualization. I mean, the whole point of co-ons and Zen Buddhism is precisely to frustrate the intellect that wants to understand. And so if you take seriously the idea that, you know, some of these things are irresolvable, will never be able to resolve them, there's another move you can make, which is just letting go of conceptualization itself. And meditation is precisely a systematic process by which you train your mind to do precisely that.

And you don't ever come to a conclusion about any of this stuff. You've given up the search to answer these questions at all. And there's a certain sort of peace and perhaps a certain sort of truth that can be revealed by taking that particular path of, again, radical phenomenology of imminence within, you know, Buddhist meditation as a practice. So I think that's always out there, especially to the Western mind, the Western philosophical mind, you know, the Western scientific mind. I don't mean to, you know, participate in these silly simplistic dualities of East and West, but you know what I mean by that. This hyper-rational, starting with Aristotle and Plato and this attempt to use words and understand, there's a path. there and it gets you somewhere gets you in really interesting places you can build rockets and

science and medicine um but there's a whole other path that the east i think has really um formalized in ways that western traditions haven't and are sometimes completely oblivious of that just take a whole different path which is often very counterintuitive to the scientist and to the philosopher not that they're unimportant not that what they're doing isn't meaningful or generative but just that there is this radically different thing you can do that just drops the whole charade together and immerses itself in the mystery of the unfolding, right? Yeah. I'm glad you said that to you because literally last night I was talking about this problem with one of my comrades who's a Buddhist. And they were just like, yeah, it's a very interesting question.

I think perhaps the amount that you're worried about it is just folly. You should consider that as a possibility. Maybe the universe is conscious, does it really matter? I did appreciate that reframing. Absolutely. But of course, both are important, right? Yes, absolutely. You got to do both.

You can't just retreat from all attempts to understand either. Yeah. Well, yeah, okay. Do you have any other thoughts on this? Or do you think we did a decent job of trying to cover this difficult terrain? Yeah, I hope we did a decent job. I think, you know, we've gone very broad about what the debate is so far, you know, both in philosophy more broadly and the debate. in the debate following Mayville's piece.

And yeah, I just hope that at least some subset of our listeners find this useful and interesting. Again, if you just really don't think this matters, it's not going to hurt me at all. If you just skip this episode, you know, like it maybe it's just one of those topics that is not for everyone. But I think for those who are interested in the philosophical sides of Marxism, hopefully this gives you a little bit to chew on. And maybe even to like start to do some of the speculative work that I think Mayville is demanding

that we take on. It would be cool if this inspired. people to think about this a little bit more. That's sort of my hope with it at least. Absolutely. I agree with you. I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. And, you know, we did our best to sort of articulate this debate, get people thinking about it, not for everybody, but I still, it's deeply within my sort of wheelhouse of interest.

And it's challenging as in the way that philosophy always, always is. But I hope people find this generative, get something out of it. And then just start examining sort of your own assumptions and like, you know, does this tension really exist? is it important to resolve? What do I actually think about these questions? And that in of itself, I think, is a productive way to continue your own intellectual development, your own development of your knowledge of self,

and just broadening your horizons of understanding and wrestling with, you know, some of the deepest questions our species has ever asked. And at the end of the day, that's my love of philosophy, is that it is asking some of the deepest, most impossible questions that the human mind can possibly generate. generate and actually trying to work through them. And that's why I have a deep love abiding and lifelong for philosophy. And I always light up whenever I get to engage with it. So this has been fun. Perfect. All right. With that said, love and solidarity. Talk to you soon.