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David Tresan wrote a truly remarkable commentary to our article on the Pauli-Jung-conjecture and some of its ramifications, a very generous commentary which surely needs no further explanations. We could hardly appreciate more how, with concise insight and the elegance of an experienced writer, he made much of what we wanted to communicate better accessible or even accessible at all. So, nothing remains to be added, really, to this excellent introduction and reflection. However, his metaphor of ‘skiing over rocky terrain with many moguls covered by a smooth surface of snow’ turns out to be so apt that we cannot resist the temptation to expand a bit on it.
The framework of thinking that we reconstructed from the exchange of Pauli and Jung is complex indeed, rocky terrain. And the resulting outline still grossly simplifies many of its more specific features-some difficult, some subtle, some both-for the purpose of endowing the big picture with just enough details to unveil those basic structures, without which enjoyable skiing would be very tough to do. We agree with David Tresan that a big picture with a scope like this is not accidentally metaphysical, it is inevitably metaphysical. Although large parts of the 20th century witnessed an often pejorative connotation with metaphysics, insights into the nature of reality would be impossible without metaphysical assumptions and regulative principles. We thank the editors of the JAP for the opportunity to say some more words about this, emphasizing features that are not so prominent in the original paper and picking up some ideas from Tresan's admirable amplifications.
The Pauli-Jung version of dual-aspect monism merges an ontic monism, which is psychophysically neutral, with an epistemic dualism of the mental and the physical as perspectival aspects of the underlying ontic domain. There are important respects in which this framework differs from neutral monism à la Mach, James, or Russell. In neutral monism, the mental and