Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

228 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
tion why we so persistently perceive there to be such things in our lives as
tables, trucks, and tractors; and Cartesian dualism provides no way for two
such unlike substances as mind and matter to interact. That is the appeal of
Russell’s “neutral monism,” a form of pan-psychism that tries to avoid the
logical difficulties that arise when one suggests that tables, rocks, and trees
all have minds. Neutral monism is still vague, but we have seen how such
vagueness could be remedied. An analytical approach to mind reveals that
it is intrinsically holistic.
It also reveals how mind, or at least the building blocks of mind, could
possibly be inherent in everything. It is not impossible to analyze mind; in
fact, the analysis of anything at all is ultimately an analysis of mind: that
is, it is an analysis of our mental representations of reality, not reality itself.
We can think of our minds as analogous to the pixels on the screen of
a computer monitor. More abstractly but in the same vein, we may view
our minds as, to use a term from information theory, a matrix of differences.
There are different types of differences. There are, for instance, spatial
differences: each pixel occupies a unique position on the screen. There
are also qualitative differences (which, on a computer screen, are given
qualitative definitions) such as those of brightness, hue, and intensity. At
any given moment, our minds contain a much more vast matrix of differences:
color, sound, thought, taste, smell, and sensations that have no
name. Of course, the whole universe can be seen as such a matrix of differences.
What distinguishes mind is that the differences are united into a
whole—the whole of our consciousness. Consciousness makes it possible
to say that differences exist. The differences that constitute the matrix of
the universe are not, so far as we know, “aware” of each other, and thus
they do not know that they are actually “different.” Only in the unity of
consciousness can they be set side by side, to reveal that they are different.
White only knows it is white when it finds itself next to black in some
consciousness that can contrast them. So we can infer that the universe
consists of an enormous number of differences and that each of our individual
minds constitutes a tiny subset of those differences, set apart by the
fact that they are bound together in something we call consciousness.
This observation suggests how the logical difficulties of pan-psychism
might be overcome. Part of the appeal of pan-psychism is that it follows
from the assumption, dear to scientists as well as many others, that there is
a single set of rules governing the universe and that everything in it is
composed of the same sort of “stuff.” So if mind exists and arises out of