Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Sal]

Okay let's try it out.  I open my eyes, see a dog, remember the word "dog," say dog.  So far so good.  I have a label for my experience, but haven't asserted anything beyond that label-- I've made no assumptions, even about the dog existing independent of my experience of it.

And? As long as we can agree on that "dog" is a placeholder for what makes up a dog, then there's nothing particularly special about using such designations.

Next I say-- a dog is a material object, part of a universe which consists of ONLY material objects, and nothing else.  I also am a material object, an object which happens to have the capacity for subjective awareness.

And why stop there? Aren't you a part of the universe? A material thing, no doubt a complex structure - but yet material.

Problem-- how do I know?  100%, and let's not dice words here-- absolutely 100% of all I discover or know, is discovered or known through subjective agency.  Subjective agency works in the medium of IDEAS, which means that all you know is a collection of ideas.  You have not, in fact, discovered that there IS a universe, or that it is "fundamentally material."  What you have discovered is that many of your experiences are coherent, and that certain rules apply to them.

This is like discussing a God of the Gaps. How did you arrive at, as someone else already noted, that ideas exist?

Only thing special about subjectivity is the limited worldview it entails, IMO, since it offers up only to relegate ideas as the stop-gap between the physical ... something whatchamacallit and the mind that perceives whatchamacallit.

To go from a reality in which everything is subjective, and to then posit that all of reality is objective, is adding a HUGE, really a staggeringly huge, additional "notion of reality."

Reality is only subjective, insofar in our ability to unravel it. The only real string here is the mind<->senses<->material connection where the mind is the so-called subjective thing experiencing the material.

Okay let's look to science, since that is our best work in categorizing and working with our experiences.  Does it tell us that reality is consistent with how we experience it?  Nope.  Since we do not perceive QM particles, but rather forms, colors, etc., our best science is not consistent with the idea that our perceptions are a reliable determiner of what is real anyway.  It turns out that the desk in front of me is 99.9999999999999% empty space, and the .000000000001% of not-space is squirrely, ambiguous, and impossible to discuss except in terms of mathematical ideas.

Just because we're limited in our perception of reality doesn't make it any less real. Yes, we're only experiencing a very limited and provisional part of what's out there through our immediate senses and ability of our brains, doesn't mean we can't grasp a better understanding of reality through the tools of science.

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

Is it now? It's entirely a reference to someones experience with a club and their conclusion thereof. You don't have to like it.

The Large Hadron Collider is just us using very sophisticated "clubs", or as a theoretical physicist friend of mine likes to put it: "hitting shit with shit" and what we can conclude from such experiments.

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As an addendum: Our brains are just as material as the stuff it experiences. Ideas only exists as the neural connections that make up that structure in our brains. It's so physical indeed, that we can measure them as part-and-parcel of the universe with fMRI, disrupting areas of the brain with electrodes and what other tools neurologists have at their disposal. We just call them "ideas" as placeholders of the material.