Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Bunburryist]

No, just the weird shit you and others believe about qm.  Like, for example..it;s some sort of evidence that materialism is insufficient, despite being a materialists explanation in the first place, or that it suggests idealism...again by giving you a materialists explanation.  That, in short..... it rules in magic, or rules out matter.

The idea that qm is a materialist explanation makes the assumption that reality is a material world, and therefor any legitimate explanation must be, by definition,  in materialist terms.  This is exactly what I started this tread about in the first place - two ways of thinking about materialism in relation to the idea of a material world.  Perhaps there is something I should start out with . . .

I don't know about you, but I don't experience "material world."  (Of course, I've beating this dead horse enough in this thread, so why not once more.  Even within the context of materialist sense story, what I experience is something happening in a brain in a material world, so I can't experience "material world" or "a material world.")  "Material world" is a label, a phrase, we use to talk about what we DO experience - which is colors, sensations, space, thoughts, etc.  So "material world" as a reality is not self-evident and we don't experience it - it is an idea.

Now the question is - what is the relationship between physical science as an descriptive system and the idea of a material world?  I have found two fundamentally different ways to think about it.

1.  There is an objective spatial reality of which "material world" is an accurate description, and physical science is a system we use to describe, create models of, and make predictions in that reality.
2.  "Material world" and the spatial conception we have of such a world is a mistaken, non- and pre-scientific worldview which physical science is explaining away.

What is left of the idea of a material world after science has gotten a hold of it?  Matter, in any "stuff" concept is gone.  Space, in the sense of a "container" that sits there (Newtonian space) is gone, as space, in physical terms, is inseparable from the "matter" aspect of This Experience.  Time, in the Newtonian sense of a rate at which reality "goes" is gone.  There is, physically speaking, nothing left of the idea of a spatial world that sits there, with stuff in it, and that "happens" in some objective time frame.

Yet, because of the Simple Realist worldview implicit in the language we learn to think with, we still learn, as children, to structure our conceptions we use to think about This Experience in terms of our being "things in a world."  This Experience can't be such a world, we can neither experience nor locate such a world, and physical science has theorized away any common sense conception of it.  So why do we need it?  We only "need" it for one reason.  Other than as a useful "handy" worldview to work in (as we do with Newtonian physics), there is only one role which the idea of such a world performs.  And what is that?  It is to have a "material world" in which there are "things called brains" that people want to believe their experiences happen in.  They want to have a concept , something they can visualize and hold in their minds; an idea they can hold up and say, "Here is where my mind and experience happens.  It happens 'right here' in this thing I call my brain."  It allows them to believe that all that happens, all describable aspects of This Experience, are describable in their "material world."  That is the only remaining role for the idea of an objective material world.  It plays no meaningful scientific role.  It is an obsolete paradigm in which some people - most people - try to imagine a physically described reality (along with everything we actually experience) which cannot be conceived or describe in that paradigm.

Just as some people just "can't do" without a God to make sense of this life, so it seems to me that some people just "can't do" without their conception of themselves as being living things in a material world.   They need something they can point to and say, "I know what kind of thing I am.  I am a living thing in a material world.  This (pointing to one's head) is where my experience happens.  This experience I learn to call "the world," along with my experiences I call "mind," are the result of things happening in time and space in this object (brain).  (Golly gee whiz - maybe it's even a biological computer - wouldn't that be cool!)"  After all the times science has shown us that our conceptions of reality are mistaken, why is it so hard to do the same with us, as experiencing beings?  What's so hard about admitting that we don't know what we are; we don't know what kind of reality underlies This Experience we learn to call "the world"; we don't understand the relationship between this aspect of This Experience we learn to call "the brain" and This Experience as a whole?