There are basically four metaphysical models,
Or theories,
Of consciousness.
The first is known as Cartesian dualism.
It refers to the French philosopher René Descartes,
Who is most famous for the motto Cagito Ergo Sum,
Or I think,
Therefore I am.
Cartesian dualism states that there's basically two worlds,
Mental and physical,
Or subjective and objective.
This is how most of us think about things most of the time.
When you say my body or my brain,
You're kind of implying that there's a you separate from your body or your brain.
It raises the question,
Though,
How do these two interact?
This is what the philosopher David Chalmers refers to as the hard problem of consciousness.
Descartes thought that it happened in the pineal gland,
This being the one part of the brain that is singular,
That is not duplicated on the left and right hemisphere.
Modern Cartesians are more likely to say that the brain is a kind of radio receiver of consciousness.
The second theory is materialism,
Or physical monism.
This is the basic stance of most physical scientists.
The argument is that the physical world is causally complete and there is no need nor room for a mental agent.
But instead of actually explaining consciousness,
It just explains it away,
Shoving it under the rug.
Because Descartes was right about one thing.
If we can know anything,
It's that we have a subjective experience.
Saying that consciousness is an illusion doesn't explain that there is something preceding that illusion.
The third theory is idealism,
Or mental monism.
This is the stance popularized by the philosopher and bishop George Berkeley.
It may also be applied to some Hindu and Buddhist philosophies.
Though it's questionable how appropriate it is to apply Western philosophical categories to Eastern philosophy.
Either way,
The basic idea is that it is the physical world that is the illusion.
The mental world is all that's real.
This raises a host of problems as well,
Which are generally solved by the introduction of God.
Saying that we exist in a world of God's imagination.
But since God can be anything or everything,
It doesn't explain anything.
The problem that I have with idealism is that the world is too surprising for a mind to have come up with it.
While it's true that 95% of perception is internally generated,
The other 5% does matter.
This brings us to the fourth theory,
Of panpsychism,
Or panprotopsychism.
This theory is also known as neutral monism and property dualism.
Neutral monism because,
Like physical monism and mental monism,
It proposes that there is just one world,
But that it is neither or in between physical and mental,
Or subjective and objective.
This is where the property dualism comes in.
It says that while there is one substance,
That substance has two properties,
A mental and a physical,
Or a subjective and an objective property.
This idea is becoming very popular among philosophers and even some scientists.
By saying that the universe has both mental and physical properties,
It's saying that the universe itself has consciousness embedded within it.
Hence panpsychism.
In other words,
The stuff that makes up the universe is inherently conscious,
Or at least conscious,
Hence panprotopsychism.
