Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

But...does any evidence exist which points to a non-material explanation for mind?  Do we have any competing theories outside of non-scientific philosophical concepts and hypotheses?  I mean...poking at the materialist explanation of mind to the point where you have actually retreated back into a full-blown solipsism hole is not actually fostering a functional positive argument for any of the possible alternatives.  It's just like a "God of the gaps" argument.  

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.

Is it unreasonable to operate under the assumption that the hypothesis of solipsism is probably NOT an accurate model of reality?  That the world I experience actually, physically exists?  If that is not an unreasonable assumption to make, then I don't see why it would be unreasonable to also assume that other people experience this physical world via a similar mechanism, even if we haven't found a way to perfectly describe it yet.

No, it's not reasonable. I don't mean that it's UN-reasonable, either; I mean that you cannot use reason to arrive at that conclusion. The simple fact is that we are using our experiences to draw inferences about reality. But we do not really know where the experiences come from, why or how. Without being able to establish that our faculties are capable of representing truth, we cannot establish that our inferences represent truth, no matter how much we feel that they do.