Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[bennyboy]

It's not a dirty word.  You know you're an idealist and I know that you're an idealist.  We've had that discussion plenty.  You can safely be an idealist in my presence, lol.  

If you really want to know what position I'd hold to, I'd describe it as a kind of agnostic ambiguism. I think at border conditions, you probably can't really TELL the difference between an idealistic or a material world. All you can do is perceive and try to connect the dots, or to peer through the fog. I think world views, and generalizations in general (lol) represent our attempts to see the forest despite the trees, to abuse a common saying. They don't represent the details of reality, but rather the abstractions we make about them-- and therefore do not really exist per se.

It's not about what I want, it's how -you- frame your position.  If something cant be known it's more accurate to call yourself ignostic about it.  If it's just something you don't know, then fine..agnosticism.  I find your ignostic idealism just as perplexing as you seemed to have picked up on.  If we can't know, we can;t know.  There's no sense in referring to the ways that we know things, about what makes fewer assumptions., or their logical necessities.  Nor, frankly, is there any reason to point to what is evident, another term for our experiences and the root of evidence.  There's no reason at all, in fact, that can pierce what cannot be known.  That's sort of what it means when something -can't be known, rather than when something simply isn't.  

We can't know, you've said so, full stop.

We can know things, but only in context. It's true that in the context of a dude sitting at a desk, there's a candle, a bottle of Windex, and a few other items here. It's true that these are solids and liquids in that context. It's not true that these things even exist at the subatomic level-- there's no "Windex" to be found there. The same goes for more complex things like mind and brain.

Ultimately, we cannot know the prime context, in other words the end-of-the-line framework upon which all else rests. It was once thought to be atoms, then subatomic particles, then QM particles, then. . . who knows? But as we get farther and farther down the line, I predict things will keep flipping and getting turned upside down and inside out, until we reach the obvious conclusion: there IS no end of the line, there IS no chance of establishing reality, EXCEPT IN CONTEXT.

You can call each of these levels "material" if you want, despite that each level will likely follow few of the rules of the ones above it. But if the word is going to be that malleable, materialism isn't even a position-- it's just an ontology-- what is IS, and let's call it "matter." But if this is the case, why bother? Why even have an "-ism" at all?