correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that the phrase “independent of minds” is doing most of the work here.

No such phrase exists in my article, nor even in what you quoted. So I don’t know what you mean.

Any time we imagine a mindless scenario and say ‘there would still be two rocks or twoness out there’ or ‘that pattern would remain’ we are already using our own conceptual framework to describe it by drawing boundaries around objects we seem to care about.

I’m sympathetic to this point (I make much of it myself in The God Impossible). But it’s not what’s happening here. We don’t have to model the relevant things in our minds to confirm by premised logic that those things do not require a mind to exist. For example, spacetime and matter-energy are both entirely constructible in logic without reference to their ability to be thought of or imagined. See How All Math Is Real and All Godless Universes Are Mathematical (also of interest: All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable and The Epistemological Endgame).

We cannot step outside our minds to check what reality is like without them. We can only project our concepts into the imagined situation.

Not really. This is why abstract logics work: we don’t have to imagine what any of the terms in a syllogism mean to confirm they are coherent and entail what the syllogism discovers. So we can confirm, for example, that if a geometry were realized, it would behave as discovered, without involving any mind to think any of it. Likewise number theory and any other axiomatic system. Indeed, this is why we can discover so many things about geometric and quantitative structure that are actually not comprehensible or imaginable (like the properties of ten-dimensional hyperspheres or Graham’s number or the complete value of pi).

Reality does not appear to come with ready-made labels.

Indeed, no, it went the other way around (see The Argument from Reason): we evolved a capability of analyzing reality’s properties, sometimes directly (geometry is literally mapped synaptically in the brain and experienced in 1:1 correlation with reality) but sometimes with substitutions (colors don’t exist but more or less work to represent things that do: see Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination).

If there are two rocks on the ground, calling them ‘two’ involves treating them as distinct units.

Indeed. But that is still not arbitrary (I discuss this in A Quick Brief on Identity Theory). There is an objective physical difference between parts of one rock and the two separate rocks (definable in terms of atomic bonds and intervening spaces, and ultimately in terms of a field diagram of the entire space, which shows distinct topographical differences in the field-space between two rocks and two parts of one rock). And that is in fact why we evolved the ability to distinguish them, because we need to distinguish those differences in reality. For instance, we can’t pick up one rock by picking up the other, but we can pick up one part of a rock by picking up the other.

I do not see any literal ‘twoness’ or ‘threeness’ written into the fabric of the world.

I just demonstrated there is. The difference is whatever physical difference we are then charting. We can count things separately based on any arbitrary difference we want to chart. But those differences still do exist. And we can prove it.

Not only can we prove it physically (and reality is, after all, what kicks back: as opposed to what we can change with a mere thought) but we can prove it in systematic logic, which we can independently prove reliable in the theater of the mind (see The Epistemological Endgame), because there all we need confirm is the if-then statement of a model (what is true “if” the model is true), so it doesn’t matter if the model is imagined: if an if-then statement holds for the model, it must hold for any reification of the model, because reifying a model means a 1:1 correlation between reality and model. To get a different outcome, you simply have to change the model or its reification. Which is what the ontology of logic teaches us. I give examples of this in All Godless Universes Are Mathematical (e.g. the laws of hydrostatics) and All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable (e.g. the laws of thermodynamics).

When the system exists, its properties exist. Same as for the properties of a sphere as the properties of a randomizing system of atomic collisions or the forces that cause ships to float.

“Hence numbers are always made up; but the quantities they signify are not.”

Sir, correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that the phrase “independent of minds” is doing most of the work here. When we ask whether a certain pattern in nature would still exist if there were no minds, I’m not sure the question makes sense in the way it’s intended. Any time we imagine a mindless scenario and say ‘there would still be two rocks or twoness out there’ or ‘that pattern would remain’ we are already using our own conceptual framework to describe it by drawing boundaries around objects we seem to care about. We cannot step outside our minds to check what reality is like without them. We can only project our concepts into the imagined situation.

Reality does not appear to come with ready-made labels. We draw boundaries around things in ways that help us organise and predict our experience. If there are two rocks on the ground, calling them ‘two’ involves treating them as distinct units. Why take each rock as a single unit rather than as billions of atoms? That choice reflects how we choose to organise what we observe. I do not see any literal ‘twoness’ or ‘threeness’ written into the fabric of the world. Those seem to arise from the way we group and describe what is there. So I don’t see how they can be mind-independent without me mentally projecting onto the imagined scenario. Even if certain groupings are causally useful or practically stable, that does not necessarily mean that patterns and quantities exist mind independently, but I would be curious if there’s a nice counter argument against this.

I have added the two best to the above article, illustrating that it is common knowledge, and has been repeatedly demonstrated in the philosophical literature, that all three laws of thought (including the Law of Identity) derive from Aristotle and were first formalized into modern form by Leibniz c. 1700 A.D.

Yes. And the same Newton who believed in numerology, prophecy, and alchemy.

Nice, I’ll check out those links!

Thanks!

No. Because I consider it a theoretical dead end. And there has never been any evidence for it.

I have only addressed specific versions of dualism, like supernatural vs. natural objects and properties (see Defining Naturalism, God Impossible, and Specified Complexity) or quantum consciousness or Idealism. Etc.

Dualism by itself is too vague a notion to have a coherent discussion of it either way. You can really only discuss specific proposed models that happen to be dualist in some way. And the most popular version is basically just Casper Theory, i.e., that we have disembodied souls that are not made of any physical material but nevertheless somehow still exist and have powers (to interact with the physical world). Even that often devolves into just another monism (souls have substance like ectoplasm and thus are just another branch of physics) so you have to struggle hard to keep it dualist (and actually have the soul not be just another physical object with its own physics). But then it collapses on the arguments I list above.

More bizarre forms of dualism imagine qualia as some special extra thing that has no mass or energy but somehow has its own physics that cannot be reductively explained by existing physics (which I’ve debunked aplenty, e.g. see the “mind” dropdown category in the right margin) or that all properties are (e.g. essence theory, which I’ve also debunked aplenty, e.g. Thomism: The Bogus Science and Why I Think Theology Is Ridiculous).

So, you’d have to pick a specific theory of dualism (not just “dualism” in the abstract), and then convincingly explain why anyone should even bother writing about it (e.g. there is no point in writing about Casper Theory as it has no evidence and mind-brain physicalism already refutes it). Then maybe I’d do a piece on it. As I have done for so many others.

That said: ectoplasmic Casper Theory simply just is physicalism, just with a different model of mind. So whether it counts as dualism at all is more a matter of semantics. Likewise whether my theory of qualia counts.

But if to count as dualism the second “stuff” has to be something that isn’t just another form of matter and its physics but truly is fundamentally a second thing (like bodiless Casper Theory or essence theory etc.), then that cannot be physicalism. So physicalism isn’t compatible with the narrow conception of dualism; it is in fact the denial of it. But it is compatible with the broad conception, like ectoplasmic Casper Theory, or the idea that properties like qualia explanatorily reduce without remainder to physics, as in those cases calling the result dualism is more just semantics than ontology.

Sweet, Appreciate the response! Any article on pure physicalism and Dualism being compatible?

Thanks!

Just n.b. I side-eye labeling because of the baggage fallacy (the fallacy that if you are an x that therefore you agree with or are committed to y and z, when that is factually or analytically not the case). So, I avoid trigger words like “monism.” People make too many assumptions about what the word does or doesn’t mean or entail, so it’s essentially useless as a discourse term.

But that said, I am in the strictest sense a monist, as I do believe everything is physical or causally derivative of the physical, and because my meta-theory is that “physical” might simply mean “spacetime” and nothing else. But I am not committed to that. I just think it’s going to be the most likely outcome of any completed physics. Likewise my commitment to physicalism can accommodate dualism if one is less strict with the meaning of the word “dualism” (if qualia are logically inevitable outcomes of certain physical systems, one can “semantically” choose to call them a second substance, but that would not be explanatory, i.e. their existence is entailed either way and therefore is not “in need of an explanation”).

So, with all that said, yes: I think it’s just physics all the way down. Logical necessity and possibility included.

Ah, yes! I tot. agree. It’s probably just my ability to sophistically express it properly at this point. So it’s about the relationships and their possibilities or impossibilities. I was thinking that the grounding of LoL was relational not causal as a dependence. So LoL are dependent on the ground – ontology of existence – and all things that can potentially arise from this state. I guess that gets back to forms of Monism.

Thanks!