Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Bunburryist]

I hope that since you learned this explantion as a child (I didn't), 

Yes, you did, which is why I'm no more interested in humoring you than him, and why I snipped that lengthy response (and hey, I know about writing long forum posts, I appreciate the effort if nothing else). 

I won;t do this.  I respect myself, and I respect -you-, more than that.  I invite anyone who desires it, now, who feels the need.......  to dogpile in on this fucking debasement of human integrity.  Nows the time.  Here's the gotcha quotemine, here's the moment that someone -flatly- refuses to indulge you, refuses to play.  Sound, fucking sound..is not an immaterialist black box.  That is -all- I have to say about that.

You're doing it again - using one word (sound) to refer to two fundamentally different things - conflating vibrations in air (something describable in physical terms) and the experience of sound (which cannot be described in physical terms).  It's just like "red light."  Air vibrations and the "brain-experience" we call "sound" don't even exist in the same place in "the" material world.  In the sense story for sound, air vibrations propagate through air outside of the brain, and the experience is supposed to happen in the brain.  The actual experience of sound within the context of the sense story, has absolutely nothing to do with air vibrations.  Just as the experience of color that is supposed to happen in the brain has nothing to do with light (which ceases to have anything to do with it once it transforms the shape of molecules in the retina), so air vibration has nothing to do with the experience of sound happening in the brain.

These observations are themselves in no way anti-materialist.  I really don't understand why people who supposedly believe in the "scientific" theory of the senses either can not or will not acknowledge these basic ideas regarding the theory of the senses they supposedly believe in.  In a way, I hold the scientific establishment responsible for this perennial problem.  They tell us (through science education) that this is how we are supposed to see, hear, etc., yet they don't develop a systematic description of it.  It really makes me wonder if they are, on some level, trying real hard to steer clear of the conclusions these clarifications make clear - that this experience we call "the material world" simply cannot, if the materialist sense story is right, be a material world.