The Last Post on this Topic for a While

Darrell says:

Mr. Wright, if I recall rightly, refers to himself as a compatiblist (a determinist who believes in free will – a position that I thought Dr. A held as well, but I am now uncertain) and believes in an “underlying reality” for which BOTH physical and mental descriptions apply while neither is able to do so fully and sufficiently without the other. To provide an analogy, if one person only sees a car crash and another only hears a car crash then neither witness can fully describe the crash. Nor did hearing the crash did cause what the one witness saw anymore than seeing the crash cause what the other witness heard.

I suspect that Mr. Wright is quite possibly a monist, or at least someone that would argue that we are unable to observe what the underlying reality “really” is. If this is so, and I stand ready to be corrected, then the underlying disagreement is what is reality composed of? Do we have access to observing this underlying reality?

Well, well. It will sound snarky, but I have been waiting for two years to see if anyone would actually ask me what I thought on this topic. You are all too shy (or have too much good sense).

The question is exactly what is reality composed of. That is the basic question of ontology. It is a question I have now asked Dr Andreassen an even dozen times to address, and he has now given an answer, which as a curt refusal accompanied by an unconvincing face-saving justification. Enough of him.

The question of whether monism implies an unobservable buried reality, however, is fascinating. My answer would either be a qualified yes or a definite maybe.

Oddly enough, Amelia Windrose in my ORPHANS OF CHAOS trilogy is asked exactly this question, and replies that she believes in monads, but that she cannot explain how the physical dimension of the monad relates to the mental dimension of the monad. It cannot be a physical relationship, like a gravity field, because then a brick would have to have the concept ‘brick’ attracted by gravity and connected to it; it cannot be a symbolic or mental relationship because then the physical brick would have to have the concept ‘brick’ producing or manifesting it the way a mind produces an imagination or a god produces an avatar. So she said the concept was unanswerable.

At the time I made it up, I meant it for a clever bit of science fictional reasoning, but seeing how this conversation is trending, now I am not so sure.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.