Seeing red

[emjay]

But to be honest I can't understand how you can 'subsume' materialism either, given that where theories of psychology and neuroscience are concerned, they directly affect the content and nature of your experience - you can rely on them to make predictions about your experience, but they rely on materialistic assumptions.

They rely on objective assumptions more than material ones-- that is, that there is something outside your own mind, and that you are interacting with it.  However, let's say we're in the Matrix or the Mind of God.  Given that our experiences are consistent, and that there are some experiences which are so consistent across time that we consider them to represent "objects," would this now be a material universe, or wouldn't it?

I'd argue that however compelling our experiences are, without knowing where they come from or why, Matrix denizens or Mind of God denizens would infer from experiential consistency that there was a "material" reality, though really there is not guaranteed to be anything of the sort.  So while their beliefs represent a pragmatic organization of their experiences, they are STILL ideas, as is everything they experience.

Okay, I get that.

I know you say later that they don't have anything to say about the actual existence of subjective experience - why or how it exists - but nonetheless they still do have a lot to say about what you experience given that you can experience. It seems to me that if you accept the findings of materialistic theories of psychology and neuroscience - to whatever extent you do - then you have to be relying on materialism to some extent, and therefore to deny materialism seems like circular logic.

Not really.  The brain, a microscope, an fMRI machine. . . they are all so far as any of us knows, just highly consistent experiences.  Whatever is "out there" or not, it's not really disputed by anyone, even the staunchest materialist, that the universe at the point of experience is a mental representation.  So while you might feel that you're using things to establish rules about the physical universe, when you forget that the use of things is ALWAYS an experience, you are missing out on the real circle-- using mind to establish a system by which to validate its own source.  This is a nasty circle indeed, not really that different than that of the Bible and God mutually establishing each other's veracity.

Okay, I'm getting that It reminds me of an argument CS Lewis put forward in the book Miracles, which I didn't get then either:

Thus a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: 'If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.' (Possible Worlds)

Is it that argument, or similar, that you're putting forward here? I'm really sorry but I have trouble understanding these sorts of logical arguments, even if that does make me as thick as a plank. I just can't get my head around what we call in Mafia games, WIFOMs: Wine In Front Of Me, and that's what these sorts of arguments seem like to me.