One of the main historical differences between eastern and western philosophy is that western embraces dualism and eastern philosophy denies dualism on a fundemental level.
Now by allowing dualism western philosophy was allowed to schism into religion, science, metaphysics, Alchemy etc. wheres this was not allowed by eastern philosophy. This has ment western science has blossomed with thinkers from newton to freud.
But here comes an interesting question, although dualism is very useful to be able to describe different parts of philosophy well, and thus make much progress in different areas, is dualism still fundementally a fallacy? It could be that in any attept to describe something to a useful extent means describing it in an incomplete way. This is a two way criticism; on one hand eastern philosoph was right to point out that dualism is fundementally wrong but on the other hand it failed to see its usefulness for describing reality.
What conclusions can we bring from this in light of the knowledge that western science has brought us? It would seem to many people that due to a scientific understanding that there is no room for metaphysics in our enlightened age. But what if the line between metaphysics and physics was never drawn? What if the mind/body dualism was never assumed. Sure its useful to talk about the body without acknowleging the mind but to assume the two are fundementally seperate is wrong.
I think the problem here is that we have moved from assuming both metaphysics and physics exist seperatly to assuming only physics exists. Where in actual fact it is just that metaphysics is physics. Let me be more explict metaphysics means ‘beyond’ or ‘outside of the scope of’ physics but it also refers to many ideas and concepts very well defined in western philosophy. What we need to understand is that all these ideas and concepts are not nonsense because due to our new understandings only the physical world exists but that these ideas and concepts are a part of the physical world.
This means that our actually understanding of what it means for something to be ‘physical’ must change. Because now physics is not dual to anything. Everything is now physics. (Remember ‘physics’ is just a word philosophy should be able to change the meaning of a word. Here we could come up with a new word or use a better suited worrd than ‘physics’. Physics seems to imply a dualism but here we want to put an end to that)
Its a subtlity here we are because in a way its similar to materialism in which only the material world exists. The difference is that we have actually have one world that exists that can be described as the material world i.e. like the old dualist physical world. But that description would always be incomplete.
It would be wrong to say that modern physics proves this argument with such strange phenomena as the wavefuction collapse between quantum physics’ wave description of matter and classical macroscopic observables. But it certainly hints at something. I think its safe to say that quantum physics still has no satisfactory philosophical description so to draw conclusions is wrong.
What I believe is need is actually to use different language to describe physics. By this I mean how we talk about the actual equations themselves. The equations are what they are(provided they are correct) but the manner in whic we talk about them must change if we are to make Physics ‘mean all that there is’.
To understand what I’m getting at here I need to make a very important point. Non-dualist physics should be able to explain how the mind/brain(where mind/brain are one thing in the correct non-dualist description) works. (I’m not saying this should be our best way to describe how the mind works; just that it should in theory be able to. We can in theory describe how a car works via relativistic quantum field theory its just easyer to talk about it via classical mechanics.) Dualist classicalphysics language only ever describes particles feeling forces from other particles and moving as a result thus all we describe are motions of particles in space dictated by fields, which themselves vary acording to time and space. This descriptive language could never describe a the fact that some matter actually experiences what things are like; yet our minds do exactually that.
Conscious experience must be a holostic effect in a physical description. By this i mean it is not a property of a single atom but all the atoms of the brain together…
Ok i’ll write more later…comments would be appreciated…also my grammer sucks…will edit soon.