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Yes. These fundamentals are all covered in Philosophy of The Matrix. BTW I just watched it again last night for about the 14th time.
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 12
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
- Start date
This essay on Baudrillard and The Matrix raises a number of questions and issues that can help us to disambiguate some of Baudrillard's writings and the Matrix film {I gather by now three films, none of which I have seen}. I offer it as a jumping off point for discussion of these cultural artefacts and the verbalizations of Joscha Bach, if anyone is interested in pursuing them here.
Simulacra and Simulation - Baudrillard and The Matrix
In the interests of full disclosure, I confess that I have never been 'postmodern'. But as Bruno Latour makes clear, we have never been modern. Here are two links to his book by the same title:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674948396
We Have Never Been Modern
Simulacra and Simulation - Baudrillard and The Matrix
In the interests of full disclosure, I confess that I have never been 'postmodern'. But as Bruno Latour makes clear, we have never been modern. Here are two links to his book by the same title:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674948396
We Have Never Been Modern
Would you link us to the presentation of the Philosophy of the Matrix? Thanks.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Here are a couple of links to short discussions of philosophy in The Matrix:
www.openculture.com
philosophynow.org
I've seen one and maybe two of the films but I don't remember many details.
The Philosophy of The Matrix: From Plato and Descartes, to Eastern Philosophy
Do you take the red pill or the blue pill?
The Matrix Reloaded | Issue 42 | Philosophy Now
Our movie maestro Thomas Wartenberg plugs himself into The Matrix Reloaded but says that philosophically, it was destined to be dull.
philosophynow.org
I've seen one and maybe two of the films but I don't remember many details.
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
One more:
ndpr.nd.edu
Philosophers Explore The Matrix // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews is an electronic, peer-reviewed journal that publishes timely reviews of scholarly philosophy books.
Thanks for the links. I'm finding Chalmers's paper on the Matrix to be helpful:Here are a couple of links to short discussions of philosophy in The Matrix:
The Philosophy of The Matrix: From Plato and Descartes, to Eastern Philosophy
Do you take the red pill or the blue pill?
The Matrix Reloaded | Issue 42 | Philosophy Now
Our movie maestro Thomas Wartenberg plugs himself into The Matrix Reloaded but says that philosophically, it was destined to be dull.
I've seen one and maybe two of the films but I don't remember many details.
http://consc.net/papers/matrix.pdf
I looked for links on YouTube, but they are fragmented and poorly adapted to YouTube. The thing to do is find a copy of The Ultimate Matrix collection, which includes the clips on DVD or Blu-Ray. It's where I first ran across David Chalmers, a philosopher that @smcder brought to our attention here. I wouldn't however recommend that you get the collection just for the philosophical clips. They are very short and only a companion to the trilogy. A more complete look at the philosophy of The Matrix is:https://www.amazon.com/dp/081269502X/?tag=genesteinbergina
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The shadow of the transcendental: Social cognition in Merleau-Ponty and cognitive science
Shaun Gallagher
Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences
Institute of Simulation and Training
University of Central Florida (USA)
and University of Hertfordshire (UK)
gallaghr@mail.ucf.edu
"'If anything can make plausible Merleau-Ponty’s seemingly paradoxical thesis that human understanding necessarily tends to misunderstand itself, it is, surely, those two particularly rampant forms of logocentric objectivism that today go under the heading of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence.… In their search for the universal algorithm, they represent a kind of innate, genetically programmed disease of the human mind, or, at least, of modernist, Western logocentric consciousness.'
The author of this statement, Gary Madison, was quite familiar with Hubert Dreyfus’s(1972) use of phenomenology in his critique of “good old fashioned artificial intelligence” (GOFAI) -- and of Merleau-Ponty’s role in this. One can see some of the thinking behind this kind of critique in Merleau-Ponty’s Structure of Behavior.
'When one attempts, as I have in The Structure of Behavior, to trace out, on the basis of modern psychology and physiology, the relationships which obtain between the perceiving organism and its milieu one clearly finds that they are not those of an automatic machine which needs an outside agent to set off its pre-established mechanisms” (Merleau-Ponty 1967, 4).
Up until 1991, this had been the only game in town that had anything explicit to say about phenomenology and cognitive science. In 1991 two books changed that. The first, Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, was diametrically opposite to the position that Madison defends, and outlined a quick dismissal of the relevance of phenomenology. The second, however, by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind, was also diametrically opposite to Madison, but in the opposite direction to Dennett, in showing the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of embodiment for cognitive science.
Dennett’s book was capitalizing on a new interest in consciousness that was emerging in cognitive science -- ironically, the very idea that motivated phenomenology, but that many “Continental philosophers” were then deconstructing and running away from as fast as possible. In Continental philosophy, phenomenology and the interest in consciousness was in decline at this time, except among a handful of staunch (or reactionary) defenders like Madison, who, in truth (as one might say), were more concerned to react against poststructuralism than to even consider cognitive science. Madison’s pronouncement was not the result of a large analysis, but only a passing comment.
While Dennett was revitalizing GOFAI with injections of neurotransmitters, and placing his bets on distributed brain processes rather than phenomenology, Varela et al. had already bought into Dreyfus’s critique, and were looking beyond the brain to a new incarnation of cognitive science where Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology would find an important place. In 1991, for a perspective that orients itself to Merleau-Ponty, things were not so simple as either Madison or Dennett thought. . . ."
https://www.academia.edu/2826987/The_shadow_of_the_transcendental_Social_cognition_in_Merleau-Ponty_and_cognitive_science
Shaun Gallagher
Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences
Institute of Simulation and Training
University of Central Florida (USA)
and University of Hertfordshire (UK)
gallaghr@mail.ucf.edu
"'If anything can make plausible Merleau-Ponty’s seemingly paradoxical thesis that human understanding necessarily tends to misunderstand itself, it is, surely, those two particularly rampant forms of logocentric objectivism that today go under the heading of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence.… In their search for the universal algorithm, they represent a kind of innate, genetically programmed disease of the human mind, or, at least, of modernist, Western logocentric consciousness.'
The author of this statement, Gary Madison, was quite familiar with Hubert Dreyfus’s(1972) use of phenomenology in his critique of “good old fashioned artificial intelligence” (GOFAI) -- and of Merleau-Ponty’s role in this. One can see some of the thinking behind this kind of critique in Merleau-Ponty’s Structure of Behavior.
'When one attempts, as I have in The Structure of Behavior, to trace out, on the basis of modern psychology and physiology, the relationships which obtain between the perceiving organism and its milieu one clearly finds that they are not those of an automatic machine which needs an outside agent to set off its pre-established mechanisms” (Merleau-Ponty 1967, 4).
Up until 1991, this had been the only game in town that had anything explicit to say about phenomenology and cognitive science. In 1991 two books changed that. The first, Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, was diametrically opposite to the position that Madison defends, and outlined a quick dismissal of the relevance of phenomenology. The second, however, by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind, was also diametrically opposite to Madison, but in the opposite direction to Dennett, in showing the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of embodiment for cognitive science.
Dennett’s book was capitalizing on a new interest in consciousness that was emerging in cognitive science -- ironically, the very idea that motivated phenomenology, but that many “Continental philosophers” were then deconstructing and running away from as fast as possible. In Continental philosophy, phenomenology and the interest in consciousness was in decline at this time, except among a handful of staunch (or reactionary) defenders like Madison, who, in truth (as one might say), were more concerned to react against poststructuralism than to even consider cognitive science. Madison’s pronouncement was not the result of a large analysis, but only a passing comment.
While Dennett was revitalizing GOFAI with injections of neurotransmitters, and placing his bets on distributed brain processes rather than phenomenology, Varela et al. had already bought into Dreyfus’s critique, and were looking beyond the brain to a new incarnation of cognitive science where Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology would find an important place. In 1991, for a perspective that orients itself to Merleau-Ponty, things were not so simple as either Madison or Dennett thought. . . ."
https://www.academia.edu/2826987/The_shadow_of_the_transcendental_Social_cognition_in_Merleau-Ponty_and_cognitive_science
smcder
Paranormal Adept
This looks quite tasty! I look forward to reading it.
You might find this one interesting as well. The translation is a bit awkward in places, but it seems solidly detailed:
Embodied Subjectivity: The Phenomenological Roots of New Cognitive Science
Edoardo Fugali
Extract: ". . . The flourishing of the embodied/embedded approach in contemporary cognitive science goes hand in hand with the reappraisal of the phenomenological notion of lived body, on the ground of the criticism against both the representationalist attitude and the methodological solipsism of standard cognitive science initiated by H. Dreyfus beginning from the 70s of 20thcentury. From this point of view the interest for the phenomenological philosophy of body was at first guided by Merleau-Ponty, whose approach seemed more attentive than Husserl’s to the bodily-worldly dimension of subjective experience. In this direction goes Dreyfus’s interpretation of Husserl as a forerunner of classical cognitive science, which is based on an account of noema, i.e. intentional content, in terms of a set of syntactic rules that lead the connection of symbolic units in order to produce representations, and on the rejection of the computational-representational approach à la Fodor. Dreyfus justifies the affinity between phenomenology and theory of cognition by referring to the transcendental turn that Husserl’s philosophical pathway undergoes beginning from the publication of the first book of Ideas. In this regard phenomenology is a transcendental theory that posits the conditions of possibil-ity for the intentional relation of a conscious experience to its object in terms of formal combination rules, as in Fodor’s language of thought (Dreyfus (1982); Petitot et al. (1999)). Ten years later Dreyfus has partly modified his interpretation insofar as he admits that Husserl takes into account the role background knowledge plays in human cognition. The program of strong AI fails because computers are not able to act in the world on the basis of such knowledge and restrict themselves to the manipulation of atomistic symbolical representations that are detached from any context. Common sense background knowledge resists every attempt at converting it in an enormous data bank that should include both the representations of states of affairs and the rules for their combination. This is due to the fact that background knowledge is a set of (more or less) implicit beliefs that give rise not to propositional statements, but to a know-how which is primarily oriented to action and involves personal interests, feelings, motivations and in the end our fleshly constitution.
On this view meaning is not limited to the correlation between a representational item and an isolated fact, but arises from an holistic apprehension of the world and depends therefore from the context in which a cognitive agent is situated (Dreyfus 1992, p. XI). Dreyfus is ready to acknowledge that in contrast to AI theorists Husserl underlines the role of expectations in our intelligence, which distinguishes itself as purposeful and context-sensitive activity, whereas the former ones conceive it as passive reception of context-free facts within a pre-constituted database. In Dreyfus’s interpretation noema is not to be understood as a set of basic meanings and rules for their manipulation, but as inner horizon of expectations that delineate, advance, and structure the incoming data, by giving rise to different possible courses of experience which exemplify essential properties of the object. Noema allows therefore a symbolic depiction of all the features we can legitimately expect during the apprehension of a certain type of object and determines its identity: for example, we are able to anticipate the hidden sides of a perceived object that are copresent and affect perception, although not directly presented, and to recognize them as the aspects of the one and same object. In this respect Husserl’s noema exhibits a strong analogy with the concept of frame proposed by Minsky (Dreyfus 1992, pp. 34-35). Frame is a data structure organized as a network of nodes and relations which represents a typical situation and fixes the conditions for its identity (Minsky 1975, p. 212). The horizontal structure of noema allows anticipations, which is precisely what computers lack, since they operate on the basis of a completely defined set of data and rules and are therefore not capable of flexible interactions with the environment (Dreyfus 1992, pp. 240-242).
Husserl is able to recognize the role of holistic and undetermined expectations as far as they are unified in the horizontal structure of noema, but in the final analysis he ascribes exclusively to transcendental consciousness the task of positing and constituting it. In this regard Husserl shares with the AI-theorists the intellectualistic prejudice that form and structure are segregated from concrete experience and prior to it, like a formal set of rules which transcendental consciousness applies to effective situations only in a further step (Dreyfus 1992, p. 248). In other words Husserl pays his debt to rationalism by attributing to mind the role of forming universal representations that refer to every activity domain. It remains true for Husserl that representation is equivalent to a theory that defines context-free features and the principles that govern their relations and this applies also to the background competences that lead our practical interactions with things and other people. In principle the outer horizon of our background knowledge can be represented objectively in its totality within a formalized system of beliefs which are symbolically encoded (Dreyfus 1992, p. XVII; p.65).
At the light of these considerations it is not surprising that Dreyfus gives his preferences to phenomenologists like Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty rather than to Husserl. According to Heidegger human beings are from the very beginning embedded in a world of social and cultural practices which sediment in a shared background knowledge and are not reducible to explicit propositional representations that would objectify them like any worldly thing. The world is structured not as an aggregate of symbols that stand for the correspondent objects, but rather as a network of meanings which we are directed to according to our needs and interests
(Heidegger (1996); Dreyfus (1992, p. 52 and pp. 274-276)). In a more radical fashion Merleau-Ponty has highlighted the circumstance that our experiences belonto a great extent to this background of implicit knowledge. In order to acquire such competencies and to apply them to the corresponding experiential domains we don’t need a transcendental consciousness that stores in itself these meanings and the rules for their possible application prior to every concrete experience. It is the body that plays the role of conferring meaning to the surrounding world and enables us to apprehend perceptual and practical skills (Dreyfus 1992, p. 248). When I acquire a new ability – like for example dancing – during the first phases of learning my movements are slow and awkward and I need to execute them consciously. When at the end I can automatically and smoothly perform the dance figures this happens not because I have applied a pre-given set of rules that now can drift into the unconscious, but because my body has reached the optimal gestalt that allows it to execute the right movements.
This applies also to the learning of a perceptual ability. In order to discriminate a perceptual constancy there is required an ongoing process of coping which involves actions, anticipations and feedback responses, until I reach what Merleau-Ponty calls “maximal grip,” i.e. our ability to master the situation according both to the purpose of the agent and the resources offered by his body and environment (Merleau-Ponty 2002, p. 352). Thus the body enables me to develop practical skills and to recognize perceptual patterns without any need to presuppose an internal model of the movements that are to be performed or the objects that are to be identified. Such a model should specify a prefixed list of features and allow me to compare them with the occurring situation. In fact our ability of interacting with the environment is more flexible, since we don’t need to check for every feature but only to verify if our expectations correspond to the situation which we are coping with (Dreyfus 1992,pp. 248-259).
In other terms Dreyfus denies every relevance to mind and/or brain inner representations, at least as regards both basic components of intelligence, learning, and skillful action. He contrasts once again Husserl’s position with Merleau-Ponty’s one by stressing (erroneously, as we shall see at the end of this contribution) how Husserl identifies intentional content with an internal representation, whereas Merleau-Ponty is able to explain intelligent behaviour without recurring to any sort of representational intermediaries. What is learned or en-acted doesn’t need to be stored anywhere in mind/brain, but is directly presented in an always more and more refined way exhibiting new affordances thanks to past experiences. This process is made possible by the feed-back loop structure of the intentional arc (Merleau-Ponty 2002, p. 182), which in Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenological account of perception and action denotes a basic level of sensorimotor intentionality: in this structure the perceptual, motor, and practical component are reciprocally involved in order for an embodied agent to transcend itself toward the world and to react to its solicitations ( Dreyfus 2002).
In the wake of Dreyfus’s criticism of standard cognitive science and reappraisal of phenomenology, a group of scholars coming from different research fields such as linguistics, biology, neurology, and philosophy has given rise within cognitive science to the sensorimotor and enacted approach (Varela et al. (1991); Clark (1997); O’Regan & Noë (2001); Noë (2004); Thompson (2007)). The core assumption shared by these theorists is that our cognition is not only constrained, but also fundamentally shaped by our bodily structure and the interactions that obtain between organism and environment (Gibbs (2005, pp. 5-6); Rowlands (2010, pp.52-53); . . . ."
https://www.academia.edu/28787764/Embodied_Subjectivity_The_Phenomenological_Roots_of_New_Cognitive_Science
This too:
Merleau-Ponty and Embodied Cognitive Science
Discipline Filosofiche : Merleau-Ponty and the Natural Sciences, 2014
Christopher Pollard
Abstract: What would the Merleau-Ponty of Phenomenology of Perception have thought of the use of his phenomenology in the cognitive sciences? This question raises the issue of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the relationship between the sciences and philosophy, and of what he took the philosophical significance of his phenomenology to be. In this article I suggest an answer to this question through a discussion of certain claims made in connection to the “post-cognitivist” approach to cognitive science by Hubert Dreyfus, Shaun Gallagher and Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. I suggest that these claims are indicative of an appropriation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought that he would have welcomed as innovative science. Despite this, I argue that he would have viewed this use of his work as potentially occluding the full philosophical significance* that he believed his phenomenological investigations to contain.
https://www.academia.edu/12001151/Merleau-Ponty_and_Embodied_Cognitive_Science
{Note*: the full philosophical significance being ontological}
Merleau-Ponty and Embodied Cognitive Science
Discipline Filosofiche : Merleau-Ponty and the Natural Sciences, 2014
Christopher Pollard
Abstract: What would the Merleau-Ponty of Phenomenology of Perception have thought of the use of his phenomenology in the cognitive sciences? This question raises the issue of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the relationship between the sciences and philosophy, and of what he took the philosophical significance of his phenomenology to be. In this article I suggest an answer to this question through a discussion of certain claims made in connection to the “post-cognitivist” approach to cognitive science by Hubert Dreyfus, Shaun Gallagher and Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. I suggest that these claims are indicative of an appropriation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought that he would have welcomed as innovative science. Despite this, I argue that he would have viewed this use of his work as potentially occluding the full philosophical significance* that he believed his phenomenological investigations to contain.
https://www.academia.edu/12001151/Merleau-Ponty_and_Embodied_Cognitive_Science
{Note*: the full philosophical significance being ontological}
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
I offer the following just as an example of how wide open the field of consciousness studies is:
“Rather sensationally, Trinity College Dublinprofessor emeritus David Berman believes the centuries-old debate between dualists (who believe mind and body are separate) and monists (who believe only one type of stuff exists) is based on a misunderstanding.”
Is your ‘true self’ a kind of ghost?
www.irishtimes.com
“Rather sensationally, Trinity College Dublinprofessor emeritus David Berman believes the centuries-old debate between dualists (who believe mind and body are separate) and monists (who believe only one type of stuff exists) is based on a misunderstanding.”
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
@smcder @Constance
What do you think of the author’s premise? That monism/dualism are natural kinds?
It’s interesting. I’m on the fence. I think culture has a greater impact than author acknowledges.
For instance, I never had an “I exist” moment that I recall, but I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household. I was taught from a young age that I had a soul and was created by god, was a unique being, no one else like me, would live forever in heaven or hell, etc. I never had a chance to have the “I exist” moment bc it was given to me.
I do agree with the author that we can’t assume all minds are alike. But something else which we may have already covered is how seemingly normal people can hold very extreme views.
Many people are naive realists and this can really effect their thinking about the nature of consciousness. Some don’t even think of phenomenal consciousness when they refer to consciousness. They may just mean self-awareness.
I did have two aha kind of moments which are worth mentioning here:
One day at school, I had this kind of meta social awareness about me and my classmates. It was after a holiday break and we were all entering the school and going to home rooms. And it was like “here we all are doing what we do.” It made me smile for some reason. And I recall literally kicking one of my classmates in the butt, and he was not amused. I guess it was kind of like I stepped back from the herd and observed our collective behavior objectively for a moment, if that makes sense.
Then another time several years, I was at a basketball game in a large gymnasium. I occurred to me how “ludicrous” the b-ball game was with throwing a ball through a hoop, uniforms, rules, etc. I realized that at any minute everyone in attendance could rush the floor and chaos could erupt. Etc. I realized how fragile all the unspoken social contracts we collectively have are or could be. It was a terrifying moment.
I too find Berman's premise interesting. I think exploring it here might expand the scope of our own ideas about consciousness, the MBP, and the influence of cultural presuppositions on ways of thinking about self, mind, and world that we've encountered along the way here. I'm pondering the few statements by Berman regarding monist and dualist frameworks of thinking and would like to read more by him on this thesis in one of his multitude of papers. There are more than forty pages of citations of his papers at philpapers, so we might have to search all the titles (usually no abstracts provided) to find a substantive development of Berman's thesis. Or we might succeed more quickly in a google search.
In looking for information about Berman's work I came across a lengthy blog/paper referring in detail to Berman's three-way typology of philosophers of consciousness and mind and going on to analyze Daniel Dennett's approach as shaped early in his life by studying with and following Quine. The title of this blog/paper is "Dennett and the typical mind fallacy," and can be read here:
Dennett and the typical mind fallacy
Interestingly, Dennett had to struggle against the influence of his father and the expectations of his family that he would pursue an academic career in the Humanities, which seems to parallel in some respects your own experience in breaking away from the constraints of a heavily religious family background and not having in your childhood the 'aha' kind of moment Berman writes about. I didn't have such an 'aha' moment in my childhood or youth either, perhaps because I grew up in a Catholic family and went to Catholic schools before university and felt the world had been well-explained to me along with my place in it. As I mentioned earlier in this group, my 'aha' moment came around age 22 when I became aware of the operation of my reflective cogito breaking in upon my formerly prereflectively accustomed sense of being integrated with the physical world around me as developed in my childhood. This occurred years before I studied phenomenological philosophy in graduate school. I've never taken a dualistic perspective up to the present moment and don't sense or see a mind-body problem. (But you all know how weird I am.) I think your description of your two 'aha' moments are most interesting and illustrate how much earlier you felt the need to stand back critically from what you had thus far taken for granted/accepted under the influences of family and school habits of thought and behavior:
This should be helpful concerning Husserl's epoche:
"It’s Always About the Epoché"
James Morley
Abstract: To honor Giorgi’s contributions to psychological research methodology, this essay strives to elucidate a key component of phenomenological methodology (the epoché), which is too often taken for granted, misunderstood, or neglected in qualitative research and the secondary literature. It calls for a renewed appreciation of the epoché and the phenomenological reduction in light of current scholarship that restores Husserl’s understanding of transcendental subjectivity as always an embodied subjectivity adhered to the lifeworld – not at all a transcendentalism. Furthermore the essay comments on how mundane versions of the epoché permeate everyday life and how the methodological epoché shares elements in common with contemplative meditation traditions across cultures. The essay concludes with an affirmation of the epoché as more than an intellectual operation, but as an action involving the entirety of the person in the manner of an ethos.
https://www.academia.edu/4096059/Its_Always_About_the_Epoche?email_work_card=view-paper
.
"It’s Always About the Epoché"
James Morley
Abstract: To honor Giorgi’s contributions to psychological research methodology, this essay strives to elucidate a key component of phenomenological methodology (the epoché), which is too often taken for granted, misunderstood, or neglected in qualitative research and the secondary literature. It calls for a renewed appreciation of the epoché and the phenomenological reduction in light of current scholarship that restores Husserl’s understanding of transcendental subjectivity as always an embodied subjectivity adhered to the lifeworld – not at all a transcendentalism. Furthermore the essay comments on how mundane versions of the epoché permeate everyday life and how the methodological epoché shares elements in common with contemplative meditation traditions across cultures. The essay concludes with an affirmation of the epoché as more than an intellectual operation, but as an action involving the entirety of the person in the manner of an ethos.
https://www.academia.edu/4096059/Its_Always_About_the_Epoche?email_work_card=view-paper
.
I'm still looking for more on Berman's hypothesis that monism and dualism are 'natural kinds' of senses of the relationship between mind and world. No luck yet, but the following Wikipedia page on Monism might help us think about monism in more than one way and thereby get at what Berman is talking about.
Monism - Wikipedia
Monism - Wikipedia
Crash Course Philosophy - Personal Identity
There's a whole series of these fun little clips
There's a whole series of these fun little clips