One could say that we employ a correspondence theory of truth, for all practical purposes, along with a coherence

theory of knowledge, in order to realize various values. Such an epistemology might be considered realist, pragmatic, semiotic, axiological and fallibilist. It would integrally relate descriptive (what's that?), evaluative (what's that to us?), normative (what's the best way to aquire/avoid that?) and interpretive (how does all this fit?) methods (or questions of reality) in any attempts to enhance its modeling power of reality and thereby augment its value-realizations. That seems to be what we were gifted by evolution - mostly fast & frugal heuristics that are weakly truth-indicative, not so much with robustly truth-conducive syllogisms as powered by successful descriptions, infallible interpretations and fallacy-free logic (and as claimed by naive realists).

Many pseudo-riddles present as paradox only because they are grounded in the false dichotomies of epistemological and ontological dualisms, like the confusion between logical & efficient causation, essentialism & nominalism, structuralism & functionalism, substance & process, realism & idealism, rationalism & empiricism. They do seem to hint at the need to retrieve those ghostly formal and final causations to better describe reality and dissolve such paradoxes?

Perhaps this is something we can do, however, without (necessarily) denying physicalism, which requires more categories?

Common sense tells us that there must be some type of formal and final causations and we can intuit their operations in our daily lives, precisely as a result of our mental activities? But we have tended to overinvest in those intuitions, imagining ghosts in machines or suggesting consciousness as a primitive alongside space, time, mass and energy. Modern semiotic science has thus retrieved both a minimalist logos and telos, nothing as robust as a Cartesian ghost in a machine but something clearly seen, for example, in Baldwinian evolution and the putative coevolution of language and the human brain.

Physicalism is emergentist and nondual, both epistemologically and ontologically. Emergent identities are irreducibly triadic, which is to recognize that their physicalist 1) possibilities are always modal, never merely logical, thus always instantiated in 2) actualities, which are governed by 3) probabilities, not necessities. Its emergent identities are nonstrict and temporally asymmetrical (internally related to their past but externally related to their future), which means that they can simultaneously be both newly emergent identities as well as probabilities of identities yet to emerge. (An acorn is not an oak tree nor will it necessarily enjoy a future as an oak, but all oaks were, in the past, acorns with different probabilities of becoming a tree.) Emergent identities are influenced by formal-like causes 1

via top-down donations of constraints in the form of initial, boundary and limit conditions, as well as by final-like causes via top-down donations of freedom in the form of autopoiesis (self-organizing), agency and autonomy, all without any violations of physical causal closure.

As an emergent reality, consciousness experiences both constraints and freedom and it, in turn, effects its own top-down causations on other realities without any violation of physical causal closure; hence, it is not objectively meaningless (not epiphenomenal?) but clearly physically efficacious. Because emergent reality exhibits a great deal of freedom, it is not deterministic but fairly open-ended, albeit within the constraints of its various initial, boundary and limit conditions. It makes no sense to logically map that which is not modally possible onto a map that is necessarily going to be either incomplete or inconsistent. That doesn't disprove physicalism; it simply demonstrates Godel's theorems.

I'm not suggesting that physicalism is the only tautology consistent with an emergentist reality. In my view, though, it's the most taut.