Abstract
This thesis explores various responses to the mind body problem, including physicalism, panpsychism, idealism and neutral monism. I argue that none of these theories successfully resolves the mind-body problem in their current formulations. I therefore introduce the concept of ‘hyperdimensional neutral monism’ as an elaboration and exploration of neutral monism. Neutral monism states that there is a single type of neutral, ontologically primary ultimate, which both the physical and the mental supervene on (Banks, 2010). Hyperdimensional neutral monism (HNM) states that these ultimates exist in a more-than-4-dimensional realm and that the physical world of spacetime is a 4-dimensional aspect of this realm. Consciousness is the protrusion of spacetime into more than four dimensions. In order to explain these concepts, I utilize an aquatic metaphor of vortices appearing within a physical ocean. I compare HNM to panqualityism, which is another version of neutral monism (Coleman, 2014, 2016), and cosmopsychism (Shani, 2015, 2018) which relies on a similar aquatic metaphor. I argue that HNM is a viable means of addressing the mind-body problem and the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996, 2015, 2017, 2019).