Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

Idealism is a good alternative to materialism.  So is good, old fashioned, "I don't know" agnosticism.  The fact is that 100% of things we experience, whatever might really be behind them, are experiences only.  There are not experiences which are movies, or tables, or whatever.
Saying "We don't know, and I don't believe we can" is only a God of the gaps argument if you are making an assertion, and attempting to use the lack of knowledge as positive support for it.  Saying, "I don't think that you can know what you claim to know" isn't a God of the gaps argument-- it's just skepticism.

But isn't philosophical idealism as much of an asserted position as materialism by the same metrics?  I'm perfectly comfortable with, "I don't know" as an answer to how the brain generates qualia.  I'm also comfortable with the idea that because our existence is experiential in nature, we will probably never have "access" to absolute truths.  But, it doesn't sound like you're simply saying:  "I don't know/we can't know".  It sounds like you're saying "we can't know, therefore materialism is eliminated as a possibility."  I don't understand how you reached that conclusion, unless I am simply misunderstanding what materialism actually is.  (Philosophy is not my niche, lol)

I've never argued that materialism isn't a possibility. My argument is that the material monist world view is unprovable and unnecessary (a la the OP). It's a philosophical choice, not the inevitable result of observation and careful inquiry.

You said:  

The fact is that 100% of things we experience, whatever might really be behind them, are experiences only.

How do you KNOW this "fact"?  That doesn't sound like an agnostic position on the nature of reality at all.

Eh? How do I know that experiences are only experiences, and not tables? I'm not sure how to process that question.

You really feel that way?  That we can't trust our faculties to give us at the very least a rudimentary representation of truth?  That we can't even come close?  I mean...why even bother with the scientific method at all at that point?  Why bother trying to learn about ANYTHING if we're just blindly bumping around in a dark sea with a broken compass?  How do you get out of bed every day with that mentality?!  [emoji39]

Because the sense of meaning and the knowledge of truth aren't the same thing. If I send flowers to a girl, and she kisses me, I don't much care if she's "really, really" there as a physically monist object or as an idea in the Matrix. In that context, I'm fine with whatever it is being whatever it is. The experience of it is sufficient.

So in context, we can say things are true simply because they're coherent in that context. In the context of my mundane life, I really did send flowers to a girl, rather than a potato to a monkey. But to go from this context to assertions that 100% of reality consists of stuff as I normally experience it it is a mistake.