We often hold strong intuitions about what is fundamental (“A is obviously more fundamental than B”), but sometimes, on second thought, a reversal of that judgement suggests itself (“ah, it’s after all possible that B is more fundamental than A!”). Such a change of perspective can yield fruitful new insights, as the example of noncommutative geometry demonstrates. Here I propose that we should consider a similar reversal in our understanding of the relation between the “mind” and the “world”, and take the idea seriously that some notion of the former is more fundamental than the latter. I argue that such a view, if properly analyzed, leads to a surprising kind of “strange loop”: even though it is ultimately more fundamental, the mind can still consistently be regarded as causally supervening on the world. This novel perspective might help to clarify some conceptual problems in the foundations of physics.
Markus P Mueller