Integrative Realism — FAQ
Common questions about Integrative Realism (formally Integrative Dual-Aspect Monism), the philosophical system developed by Michael L. Adix II, MD, in What We Are (2026). For the overview, see What Is Integrative Realism →.
What is Integrative Realism?
Integrative Realism is a metaphysical system holding that reality has a single nature with two inseparable faces — a structural face described by physics, and an intrinsic face that is what consciousness is made of — and that complexity, including mind, arises from simpler constituents through integration. It is built from two axioms and extended across fifteen philosophical domains.
What are the two axioms?
The first, the Dual-Aspect Claim, is that reality has both structural-relational properties, described by physics, and intrinsic properties that are proto-experiential, with neither reducing to the other. The second, the Integration Principle, is that complexity arises from simplicity through progressive integration, with no new fundamental kind of thing introduced along the way.
Who created Integrative Realism?
It was developed by Michael L. Adix II, MD, a neurointerventional surgeon in private practice in Michigan, in the two-volume work What We Are: A Personal Philosophy for the Age of Science (Intrinsic Press, 2026).
Why would a surgeon write metaphysics?
Because the central problem is one the work argues a surgeon meets more directly than most. A neurointerventional surgeon watches consciousness switch off under anesthesia and return when it clears, while the imaging shows only structure and never the experience. That gap between what can be measured and what is lived is the starting point of the system.
Is Integrative Realism the same as panpsychism?
No. Both hold that experience reaches the fundamental level, but panpsychism places micro-subjects there — tiny minds — which creates the "combination problem" of how they would fuse into a single mind. Integrative Realism places only experiential character at the base, not subjects; subjectivity is produced by integration, so there are no small minds to combine.
Is Integrative Realism a form of idealism?
No. Idealism — including Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism — holds that reality is fundamentally mental and that the physical world is appearance within a universal consciousness. Integrative Realism refuses to demote physics to appearance: the structural face is as real as the intrinsic face, and neither is a mere appearance of the other.
Is Integrative Realism physicalism or materialism?
No. It agrees with physicalism that physics describes real structure with cumulative accuracy, but it denies that structure is all there is. It also rejects the stronger claim that consciousness is an illusion, on the grounds that an illusion of consciousness would itself be a conscious experience — so the position cannot be stated without presupposing what it denies.
Is Integrative Realism dualism?
Not in the traditional sense. Substance dualism holds that mind and matter are two different kinds of stuff, which raises the problem of how they interact. Integrative Realism is a monism — one nature with two faces — so there is nothing to interact: there is a single process described in two ways.
How does Integrative Realism relate to Russellian monism?
It descends directly from it. Russellian monism holds that physics describes structure while the intrinsic natures that fill that structure are unknown. Integrative Realism specifies those natures as proto-experiential and proto-temporal, adds the Integration Principle (a principle of change Russell never supplied), distinguishes experiential character from subjectivity, and works the result out across fifteen domains. Its formal name, Integrative Dual-Aspect Monism, marks that lineage.
Is Integrative Realism a form of neutral monism?
It shares an ancestry with neutral monism but is not the same view. Neutral monism posits a single underlying stuff that is in itself neither mental nor physical, with mind and matter as two arrangements of it. Integrative Realism instead holds that the structural and the proto-experiential are both fully real and inseparable — not a neutral third thing beneath them, but two genuine faces of one reality, neither more basic than the other.
How does Integrative Realism relate to Whitehead's process philosophy?
Process philosophy is its closest independent predecessor, and the two converge on a great deal: both reject materialism as a complete metaphysics, both hold that experience reaches the fundamental level, both make integration the central mechanism, both replace enduring substances with patterns sustained through process, and both tie time to that process. They part on one decisive point. For Whitehead, the connections between fundamental elements are themselves experiential — his "prehension"; for Integrative Realism, those connections are structurally real but experientially empty. The difference is settled at the bedside: under anesthesia the field of experience goes out as a whole when structural integration is disrupted, which the dual-aspect view predicts but pervasive prehension does not.
What does "intrinsic face" or "proto-experiential" mean?
The intrinsic face is what physical things are in themselves, as opposed to how they relate to other things — the side that physics, as a science of relations, cannot reach. "Proto-experiential" describes that intrinsic nature: it is in the family of conscious experience but rudimentary, and crucially it has experiential character without being a subject.
Does Integrative Realism solve the hard problem of consciousness?
It reframes the hard problem rather than claiming to solve it. The problem — how experience could arise from non-experiential matter — only arises if you assume matter is purely structural. Integrative Realism denies that assumption, which changes the question to how experiential character integrates into a unified subject, a problem it argues is tractable and no deeper than the ones facing rival views.
What does Integrative Realism say about the self?
The self is real but not a thing. It is a process — a continuously maintained, self-modeling pattern of integration — best pictured as a whirlpool: real as a pattern, inseparable from the medium that sustains it. This is why the self can change across a lifetime and yet remain one self, and why disrupting the brain's physical continuity, as in split-brain cases, divides it.
What does Integrative Realism say about free will?
It defends a compatibilist view: freedom is not the absence of causation but a kind of causation that runs through your own evaluation of your desires. A being that can reflect on its impulses, endorse some and override others, has real and causally effective self-governance. Freedom is therefore a matter of degree, scaling with the depth of that self-reflection.
Can a machine or an AI be conscious under Integrative Realism?
The framework neither rules it in nor out. Consciousness depends on the integration of a proto-experiential nature, not on being made of biological tissue, so machine consciousness is possible in principle. Whether any given system actually achieves it is an empirical question — and a uniquely hard one, because a machine's structure is increasingly open to inspection while its intrinsic face, if it has one, lies beyond third-person measurement.
How is Integrative Realism related to Integrated Information Theory (IIT)?
Integrative Realism regards IIT as the most rigorous structural measure of consciousness available, and as compatible with its own emphasis on integration — but incomplete on its own. IIT identifies real structure without explaining why that structure is accompanied by experience; the Dual-Aspect Claim is meant to supply exactly what such a measure leaves out.
Is Integrative Realism a religion or a spiritual belief?
No. It is a work of secular philosophy that argues from publicly available evidence and reasoning, and it explicitly declines to posit a deity. It does address the questions religion has traditionally owned — meaning, ethics, death — but it derives its answers from its two axioms rather than from faith or revelation.
What is the evidence for Integrative Realism, and where can I read it?
The full case is made in What We Are, Volumes I and II (Intrinsic Press, 2026), where every position is tested against its strongest objections and the conditions under which the system would be false are stated explicitly.
A free scholarly summary, Integrative Realism: A Précis, is available from the link below, on Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20685195, and on PhilArchive.
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