I’m not sure what you mean. I assume (?) you are talking about this sentence, which doesn’t have the word “concede” in it:

He admits physicalism is “prima facie more easily reconcilable with [empirical] facts than idealism.” He mentions, and concedes, mind-brain correlation, shared universe, mind-independent physical laws, and atomic and particle physics.

This is not a single sentence I am referring to. It’s an entire section in his study where he very plainly says these specific things are “more easily reconcilable” with the facts than idealism, and that is why he needs to develop an elaborate alternative way of arguing idealism is a better explanation. This is literally the justification for his entire study.

One can characterize that ensuing argument as insisting that secunda facie idealism better explains the facts; but that’s why I said prima facie—because that’s exactly what he said. This is a direct quote from Kastrup (I’ll leave the endnote markers in so you can see this is a copy and paste from Kastrup):

despite the formidable unresolved problems of both physicalism [6–10] and bottom-up panpsychism [11–13], these two ontologies are prima facie more easily reconcilable with the four facts than idealism.

I then explain why Kastrup’s secunda facie case fails in the article here that you are commenting on.

The facts of consciousness are predicted by physicalism, and better so than idealism, which struggles to explain the vast array of oddities in the facts of mind-brain physicalism, whereas physicalism requires no epicycles at all to do that. Likewise that the world operates “independent of personal volition” and consistently from inobvious “subatomic particles” and is “the same” for everyone (while what differs is solely confined to individual minds apart from all external realities, even of their body and brain).

So it is the sentence “physicalism is simply an apophatic declaration of faith in something which by definition could not possibly exist” that is obviously false and just some nonsense dogma one must chant at oneself a thousand times to trick yourself into believing it.

But this phrase has exactly the opposite meaning, as Bernardo has elaborated countless times. Given our cradle to grave physicalist conditioning, ON FIRST IMPRESSION (prima facie, in other words – without thinking carefully and setting aside our physicalist biases and conditioning) it may seem (however erroneous it is in fact) that physicalist predictions are more easily conceded. But with just a little further reflection, it becomes irrefutably obvious that NONE of these are actually predicted by physicalism!

This is obvious upon even minimal reflection, as physicalism is simply an apophatic declaration of faith in something which by definition could not possibly exist.

Examples of philosophers who have come to a similar conclusion include Nicholas Rescher, The Riddle of Existence: An Essay in Idealistic Metaphysics (1984); Peter Van Inwagen, “Why Is There Anything at All?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1996); Bede Rundle, Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (2004); Sean Carroll, “Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?” The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics (2021).

See also several chapters in Tyron Goldschmidt, ed., The Puzzle of Existence: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? (2013), especially “The Probabilistic Explanation of Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing” by Matthew Kotzen,

On the question of “ontologically self-existent physical stuff,” there are many theories in physics being tested, but the one I think has the best case for it philosophically is that all “stuff” is actually knotted spacetime, e.g. quarks are just knotted fluctuations in a multidemensional Calabi-Yau space (hence my article I just linked on superstring theory). So only spacetime is “self-existent.” Everything else is emergent (including the structure of spacetime itself).

Which actually makes sense. Because spacetime is the only thing that does not need a place and time to exist (it is place and time), whereas everything else can’t exist without there first being a place and time for it to exist at. So we should expect spacetime to be fundamental and everything else emergent.

As for how or why spacetime would exist, that is actually a logically necessary outcome of there being nothing to decide what would exist. One way to put it is: for nothing to stay nothing (or to be what would exist at all) is to select from all possible things that can exist the singular permutation of a zero point of spacetime (since you can’t have anything less than zero space and time).

But the probability of selecting that (when nothing exists to pick that over all alternative things that can exist) is infinity to one against. The probability is infinity to one in favor that some spacetime will exist, if what exists is not decided by any design or law. So spacetime necessarily exists. Or, more precisely, it is logically necessarily the case that the probability that a spacetime will exist is infinity to one.

This is covered in the Lincoln-Wasser link, which starts with its scientific basis. But that breadcrumbs to my detailed logical demonstration in The Problem with Nothing.

after the fact description posing as an explanation

It is, rather, an identity relation.

For example, any correct description of a triangle entails all the laws of trigonometry. No extra thing needs to be added. It’s not like you can ever have a triangle that disobeys or ignores the laws of trig. The laws of trig simply are a description of triangles. And in result, we can deduce “laws” about what is true or false about triangles or what they can or can’t do or what properties they can or can’t manifest.

This is why I cited my article on Thermodynamics as a walk-through example of this.

But the most common example is inverse square laws: that is simply a description of radiation into three dimensional space. So any unimpeded radiation into a three dimensional space will obey inverse square laws (hence, all the laws of force in modern physics, for all the forces, gravity on down) because inverse square laws describe what unimpeded radiation into a three dimensional space always necessarily looks like. It’s simply an inalienable fact of any such geometry.

There is therefore no “explanation” needed for any of these things. They are self-explaining. Because the geometry explains it. And the geometry exhausts all there is about it.

This sounds to me like after the fact description posing as an explanation, but I’m happy to leave it at that, since there is no possibility of any empirical evidence for some kind of ontologically self-existent “physical stuff.”

Physicalism is well defined and has an abundant peer reviewed literature. See my article My Monthly Recommendation: Understanding Physicalism as a Philosophy for a start.

I actually developed that definition of it. It originated in print in Sense and Goodness without God in 2005 and broadcast it in Free Inquiry in 2010 and it was first used in the formal literature by Yonatan Fishman in 2009, citing me; but I had been circulating it among philosophers online since 2003; and Yudkowski reformulated it in terms of information theory around 2012 (see Defining Naturalism: The Definitive Account).

Your question is more in the subject of cosmology than the idealism-realism debate that this article is on. But it’s a good question.

It comes down to the ontology of physical law. And there are different theories of that within the physicalist community. But the dominant view is that geometry dictates all laws. In other words, there is no actual such thing as just “a law of physics.” There is simply a description of the geometry of a space, which we write down in the form of laws.

As such there is never any condition where there is something and no laws governing it. The laws governing it are entailed by the geometry it has, and to exist it must have some geometry (that is indeed what it means to say something exists on physicalism). The objective of scientists is simply to work out which geometries realize which laws and how (there are popular proposals being tested).

Hempel’s Dilemma conflates sentences (written in a language) with propositions (the cognitive content, or hypothetical or actual physical model, that a sentence refers to). So possibly you need to get up to speed on that distinction first.

But assuming we’re up to speed on that, your question is, rather, what physical laws describe a proper nothing-state (not a split second later, but the state itself).

Of course that assumes there ever was one of those (cosmologists admit there might never have been; everything could be past-eternal). So we’re already in a hypothesis (presuming, as yet unknown, that such a nothing-state ever existed to describe correctly). But assuming (ex hypothesi) that that’s true, the description is logically entailed (the thing itself entails a description).

I have explored the consequences of that many times here, but the best place to start is with an actual peer reviewed effort that lines up with mine, Lincoln-Wasser Cosmology. That then links to my discussions of the role of logical necessity and how law-bound universes are an inevitable outcome of any lawless nothing-state, simply by virtue of randomized geometries. See for example my discussion of thermodynamics and All Universes Are Mathematical.

After catching up on all that, for a more “meta” discussion of the question of the origin of “unformities” (a catch-all inclusive of all geometries and theories of physical law) see my discussion of the Argument from Uniformities.

Once you’re up on all that the conclusion follows:

For a chaos to stay a total chaos is the least probable outcome when outcomes are randomly selected; and when no law governs what is selected, only random outcomes are possible.

Getting a total chaos is like rolling dice a thousand times and never getting patterns—that’s actually a signal the dice are not rolling randomly, and thus requires laws or design (which cannot exist when nothing does), because randomness necessarily generates uniformities. To get none is almost impossible. What we should expect then is a chaos with some accidentally emergent order. And that’s what we observe (the Big Bang distribution of initial conditions was chaotic with just a few emergent consistencies producing all observed order, as per the Wong-Hazen Thesis).

There’s something I don’t understand though – the relationship of physicalism and order.

There are different theories about the laws of physics; some say they were present at the ‘moment” of the Big Bang.

One interesting theory I came across was that it was several trillionths of a second during which there was pure chaos, then order appeared.

Now, I’ve been having difficulty getting clear on a definition of physicalism that isn’t hampered by Hempel’s dilemma. I spoke with a tenured philosophy professor recently who has a book on physicalism coming out later this year. He said that it is rare that it is clearly defined, and it is also rare that a large group of philosophers will agree on much of anything!

But he said generally speaking, a safe definition that is not affected by Hempel’s dilemma is simply that “whatever is fundamental is not mental.”

So here’s where I’m confused – if you assume a non conscious, non intelligent, fundamental reality, wouldn’t your expectation during those few trillionths of second be that chaos would continue?

Which is all elaborate tinfoil-hat epicycle building, skipping all the actual empirical science a real philosopher would have to do to get to any such result.

It’s rather like saying that layered fossils are compatible with Young Earth Creationism because everything sank to different levels in the Great Flood that covered the Earth. Sure, that’s an internally coherent notion. But it’s wildly convoluted (and thus massively violates Ockham’s Razor), is actually refuted by tons of empirical evidence the apologist is ignoring, and is based on no actual scientific methodology: it’s just an armchair just-so story, not a testable hypothesis they actually ran reliable tests on to confirm before asserting.

Kastrup is behaving exactly like that. Which is why he is a pseudophilosopher.

That’s a tu quoque fallacy. It ignores the difference between true and false statements. Real philosophy exists in true statements. Pseudophilosophy hides behind false ones.