Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

An invocation of solipsism, not a criticism of materialism specifically, and completely self defeating.  How do you know that it's medium is "ideas"...what did you use to figure that out...your subjective agency? 

"Idea" isn't something you figure out. It's a label for the things I think about. I imagine a red fire truck-- it has form, shape, etc. Both the fire truck and its various properties are ideas.

You're arguing against the existence of the universe, not the composition of it's constituent parts.  

Nope. I'm just arguing against your interpretations of the massive collection of experiences and ideas we call the universe.

We don't expect to see the relationships in QM, our eyes do not have that ability, and in fact seeing that would violate everything we know about human beings, and their material abilities.  We do see what happens at our scale of interaction.  Where a table is as solid to a being of our size and our composition, and to -our- eyes...as anything.  

As you experience it, the table is a representation of the properties of something-- its shape, color, texture and so on. There's a word for that, and it's not "material." It's "idea." We don't know much, but we DO know for sure that there's nothing existent in the universe with those properties, since there's no such thing as, for example, brown matter.

Short version: "Og hit with club.  Club feel hard.  So universe all hard club-stuff" is a non-sequitur.

More like "everything that's ever hit og in the head has been material", isn't it?

No, it's not like that. That begs the question, and unnecessarily so. Og only needs to know that clubs hurt, and that stuff gets crushed when he hits it. He doesn't have to posit anything beyond the experiential facts, like assumptions about an underlying framework.