Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[The Grand Nudger]

Reality is there. We have to describe it somehow. The best way to describe it is as physical and/or material.

Ideas are real, too, are they not.  And describing them in terms of particular brain arrangements or function is not only impossible, it would be pointless.  We talk about experiences in subjective terms all the time.

There you go again, calling something impossible, and then pointless.....while you do it to your very own thoughts.  Your ideas, ironically even on -this- issue..are obviously transferable and now sit as another form of physical arrangement being spooled out by the functions of yet another machine.  It will happen three times, at least, just for us to be able to discuss them.  First on your pc, then on the server, then on my pc.  Clearly, ideas can be described by physical arrangements and functions.  

There's nothing wrong with how we describe these things.  However, the source attribution we make about the SOURCE of the experiences we are describing is not only unprovable, it is unnecessary either to the process of description, or of doing good science.  We don't have to cling to an outdated billiard-balls view of reality in order to have an interest in reality and in its investigation.

Who do you think it is that's clinging to billiards balls?  You, or materialists? That's a pretty constant criticism -of- materialism you realize (from idealists, no less)? That it's incorporated so many things and gone so far -from- billiards balls. That we, as it's been put in thread, discover something and call it material. People point out that qm, for example...despite being thoroughly materialistic...is not at all like the billiards balls of yore (and high school physics). I can;t figure out what the problem is. That materialism has come to incorporate new discoveries and refined data, that;s it;s become too inclusive...or that it;s hanging on some centuries old description - that it's stagnant. They can't both be true.