Why I'm not a Physicalist - Four reasons for Rejecting the Faith

In case anyone missed it here's the article:

Why I am not a Physicalist: Four Reasons for Rejecting the Faith

If one accepts, as even Papineau suggests, that there exists what the logician Frege called “the third realm”[16] (beyond physicality and mentality) of objective truths—such as the truth of modus ponens, the properties of Pi, the Pythagorean theorem, or the Form of Beauty—truths that exist whether or not they are discovered, meaning that they are in essence neither mental nor physical (as there can be no neural correlates of non-existent mental events), then it implies that their existence has an effect upon the physical through their discovery. For example, the discovery of the golden ratio had an effect upon the bodies of its discoverers in terms of their expression of it, and subsequently upon mathematics, aesthetics, architecture, and upon me in writing this essay. Thus the existence of such universal truths implies the falsity of one of physicalism’s key tenets: the causal closure of the physical. Universals crack open the causal closure principle of physicalism, which is to say they crack open physicalism itself.

Of course, a physicalist could deny the existence of such universals, such objective truths. But in doing so, he would destroy the underlying assumptions of his position and thus succumb to inconsistency regardless. If physicalism considers itself to be a logical position, it must maintain the underlying truths of the laws of logic, such as the law of non-contradiction, formal fallacies, and so on. But these laws are not the laws of physics, which as such can be established through empirical observation or through modelling. Thus emerges another predicament for physicalism: the dilemma of logical objectivity. On the one side, if the laws of logic are to be considered objective—that is, they are true for all—then they must exist in a non-temporal, non-physical third realm that has causal influence upon the physical, thereby annulling the causal closure principle and, in turn, physicalism. On the other side, if the laws of logic are considered to be not objective, then physicalism cannot claim to be objectively logical. Either way, physicalism falters.