Are contradictions in things or between things?
Is an event nothing but the realisation of a contradiction,
its consequences developing in logical progression as a process in time?
or is every process, and thus every sum of processes or things, naturally free of any internal contradiction?
Is contradiction only to be found at the distinction and boundary between two things,
thus any and every two things, thus every individual and every part and every aspect? – Cartesian Atomism?
two kinds of dualism: a second attempt at adequately expressing the distinction that I attempted to express in entry 25.
The first kind of dualism is a conceptual distinction: it simply says that if something exists, it is either material or mental and not both – and that these two categories are valid/adequate/complete.
The second kind of dualism is a statement of existence of things from both categories of the aforementioned distinction, so of [some] things that are mental and of [some]things that are material. In other words that some of the things that exist/are real are material and others are mental – that both categories are non-empty, thus of course also implying the validity/adequacy of the two concepts.
I want to make it clear that these are two very different statements, made on different levels.
The first kind of dualism is an idea about two ontological concepts as concepts. So, one could say, an idea about cosmology/ontology, a position in meta-cosmology, and in philosophical ontology.
While the second kind of dualism is an idea about entities/objects – a statement that uses two [pre-existing] ontological concepts as predicates/categories to state the existence/reality of certain sets of entities. So one could say the second kind of dualism is a position in cosmology or maybe in applied ontology: it is a determination made about the entities found in the language/culture of that thinker’s environment/tradition. Namely, it is the determination that some of the things of the thinker’s world that exist are material/non-mental, while other things of the thinker’s world that exist are non-material, mental.
Again, in the first meaning, dualism is a general statement made on the philosophical level, about all concepts, regardless of their domain of reference, especially regardless of whether their extension is non-empty. So, in this meaning, the distinction between dualist and non-dualist or monist is made in a philosophical/thought situation where neither the existence and non-existence of any entities is assumed, nor a particular [meta-]categorization of concepts into those for mental, non-material entities and those for material, non-mental entities. Here, dualism is itself a [meta]-categorization/taxonomy of ontological concepts – it takes all ontological concepts and places each in one of the two categories. This is philosophy.
In the second meaning, dualism is a general statement made about entities that one takes to exist/be real, i.e. the universe or reality: that the entities that exist/make up reality fall into two distinct, fundamental categories, so that some of the entities that exist/are real are non-conscious, non-mental, and extended and others of the entities that exist/are real have the opposite set of properties, namely they are non-material, mental entities. It is doubtful whether this is philosophy.
Now, it should be clear that the second kind of dualism implies/pre-supposes the first, while the inverse is not the case. Significantly, one can hold dualism of the first kind while rejecting dualism of the second kind. (!) For example, one can be a dualist of the first kind [, accepting the material-mental categorization, ] and be a materialist, meaning that all the things one sees as existing/being real fall into the material category. In fact, this is normal for materialism: it is one of the options within a dualist conceptual framework – it is a dualist ontology/cosmology(which one?).
Furthermore, philosophical monism rejects the first kind of dualism, not just the second.
The law of entropy is only a special case of a [more general] law of sustainability – the law that unsustainable structures will dissipate/disappear/disintegrate: Entropy is the law of sustainability applied to a certain level [or set of levels] of the cosmos…
And in this context, the essence of nature* is the [process of] production of sustainable** structures at ever-higher levels [of the cosmos].
*nature here seen as an non-boundaried part – or better aspect – of the cosmos & of the cosmological process. I.e. I’m not using a conception of nature that implies a boundary between the natural and unnatural.
**’sustainable’ here roughly meaning that a process re-produces or repeats itself without depleting its conditions of/for existence