Does uh, the state of the speaker's brain count as a feature of the world? Or do I have to be a dualist to vote?

Hey sorry about the very late response! I do acknowledge that the question can be rather flexibly interpreted, and depends on a lot of philosophical jargon-agreement which even philosophers would not agree upon. It's tough to package something clear in a question like this.

I guess I want to know if they have 'propositional value.' So are they descriptively truth-apt. If you say something IS valuable, or wrong, are you describing a feature of the world that 'is the case' or are you merely expressing a bundle of emotions? Are you asserting something falsifiable, or are you merely a process of chemicals being witnessed?

I would say there is no necessary dividing line between dualism and nondualism here. Certain features of the world might be mind-dependent, yet still objectively exist under forms of dualism.

So if I say apples are valuable, some people would say it 'is the case' that apples are valuable because us conscious beings like them, we depend on them for energy and good taste or whatever. The pleasure (of survival, of acquiring energy, of eating an apple) is mind-dependent, but in this case is a feature of the world accurately conveyed via the word 'valuable'. This person believes the world of value is an objective, ontologically existent world. . . . . . . . . .it is part of reality. You could prove it false by showing that minds do NOT value apples––or indeed, that values produce suffering. (though here again i would say suffering exists in the value realm, and is real).

Or someone could say it's no feature of the world because describing something as 'valuable' has no truth-aptness. It is a mere expression of emotion. It cannot be proven false. Value appears only in minds, and insomuch as we exit those minds to convey opinions about 'value' or desire, we are divorcing value from the equation and merely communicating information. The information conveyed is that of emotion/opinion that exists in the isolated mind. It is a collection of particles exiting your mouth, entering my ears, producing a certain chemistry in response . . . . but it does not relate in any way to some domain of 'correctness' or incorrectness.

As sort of a pragmatist, I think I believe truth is measured in terms of use. So if what you MEAN to convey by 'valuable' successfully enters my mind and produces a successful response (ie we agree or disagree on something, and move forward through the world in the way we want) we say that the attempt at truth was successful.

No idea if any of that made sense. I don't feel I expressed it very well.


TLDR:

I guess the summary is that, as far as I can understand, certain people seem to view value as objective, and existing outside the human mind. Perhaps in some divinely-ordained way. Like there would be 'goodness' somehow embodied by god, without any actual created beings to experience it. I don't see how this is coherent.

There is another group which seems to view value as a real thing, but mind-dependent. So like all phenomenology, the phenomenology of value appears only in the conscious space, and pertains only to things which are consciously experienced. So an electron is not really 'good' unless it is part of an arrangement of particles producing something like a beautiful love story, or a wonderful piece of music. Once experienced though, it exists in phenomenological space and can pertain to value. Our value propositions either reflect or fail to reflect this reality, and are therefore truth-apt.

There is another group which views everything as a sort of ongoing process of experience. These people look at natural law, observe that everything seems to be mere information processing or whatever, and says that propositions are merely expressions that form a part of this experience. A proposition that describes something external (like a mathematical tautology) can be true, but the experience itself of value (or redness, or wistfulness) cannot be 'true' or false. It merely is.