Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[The Grand Nudger]

Is your experience of qualia just an assumption?  If not, then stop.  The science is science regardless of whether or not you appreciate or agree with it's conclusions.  It's fine to be opposed to them, it's ludicrous to argue that they are not what they are.  

Science is the process of observation and inference.  You cannot observe someone's qualia.

So you claim.

Therefore, the "science" of qualia isn't that.  It's actually the science of material correlates TO qualia: brain function, reports of experiences, facial expression, etc.  I know that you will just define "qualia" as "the brain function of experience," but that begs the question.  Conflation of terms isn't science, it's just conflation.

I'm sorry, the best evidence we have suggests this is the case.  You think it's question begging, it's not, but it wouldn't matter if it were....because it's -still- the suggestion of the best evidence we have.  

The problem is that science doesn't require you to take a stance on the ultimate nature of reality in order to do it.  Whether we're in the Mind of God, or the Matrix, or a BIJ, or a real material monism, science is the process of making observations and drawing inferences.

I don't take any such stance, nor do the vast majority of materialists.  I take a stance only on what we know, what we have detcted, and what we have detected is sufficient as an explanation for.  I take an ancillary position, not directly related to the subject, about unecessary and unevidenced assumptions whose soundness cannot, in any known way, be determined......but that would be a different discussion, eh?

Yay!  This thread is apparently about me.  I revel in your obsession with what I think or feel.  Let's hug it out!

I like hugs, deal.  

Science is about making observations and drawing inferences.

Which is what we've done, regardless of whether or not you find them convenient, amenable, or satisfying.

You cannot see the magical unicorn in my dreams; you can see only the brain functions involved, and ask me in the morning what they mean.  You might eventually learn that when certain neural chains light up, that means I'm dreaming about unicorns.

You say we can do science of the mind.  I say we do science on neural correlates, given philosophical assumptions about the nature of brain and mind.  However, in a philosophical argument about the nature of mind, this isn't going to get you very far unless everyone agrees to those same philosophical assumptions.

It's not even that you're wrong.  It's that you are willing to make assumptions that are not even necessary to make.

The irony is strong, here.