Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

You do understand that, to a materialist, there is no difference between an idea and material? That the sort of ambiguity which you perceive there to be between the two, real or imagined in any specific instance, is moot point in that context?  OFC our world views are abstractions we make about reality.  Who thinks otherwise?  We judge the value and accuracy our our abstractions by how well they perform their assigned tasks.  The abstraction of materialism has been exceedingly fruitful.  It's either approaching accuracy, or we're almost unfathomably lucky.  Your call.  Ultimately it could turn out to be the latter...wouldn't be the first time.  

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.

I'm not sure why you think things disappear at a subatomic level.  Why does windex suddenly become not-windex in your estimation?  Windex is simply the name for a collection of matter.  It's there, and it's windex, if you scale up or down in your resolution (otherwise...what are you looking at, again?).  

Ultimately, we cannot know the prime context, in other words the end-of-the-line framework upon which all else rests.

A bold claim.  You're going to need much, much more to support it than "we were wrong before".  

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.

What do you think that would imply or establish if it were the case, particularly in context.  Atoms, material.  Subatomic particles, material.  QM particles....material.  It's simply the nature of reductivist methods to continually seek out that which underlies the presently considered resolution, the thing you call context for whatever reason.  We may keep finding underlying this and that's, we may not.  Those we've found thusfar are incorporated into the materialist model, as the materialist model was used to discover them.  

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?

Very small things like flies can make use of van der wal's force.  They can walk on the ceiling.  Elephants can't.  Why would you expect "the rules" for all collections of matter at every resolution to be the same...it isn't even the same in your top level macro experience.  I'm not sure what this is taken to indicate.  

The word -is- and has always been that malleable - cheifly because is describes a general phenomena. When asking ourselves the question "what is all this stuff made out of" it's useful to frame it in general terms. We're looking to describe alot of stuff, alot of different..even wildly disparate stuff, right?  We would expect some stuff to be different from some other stuff - hell..that;s sort of bound up in our very notion of this stuff and that stuff. But you're going to need to make up your mind.  Is materialism stuck with billiards balls or is it too malleable?  Would you prefer that it -didn't- accept and modify itself in the light of new discoveries over the centuries in which it's been productively employed to pierce that fog you were talking about up top? Can you see why such an approach wouldn't appeal to a materialist?