Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Neo-Scholastic]

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I believe the tenacity of materialism/physicalism has very little to do with sound metaphysics or contemporary scientific confirmation; but rather, the lingering influence of post-Enlightenment industrial culture. In Western societies, people habitually rely on the metaphors of machine production and interchangeable parts to make sense of themselves and the world around them.

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I think the argument from explanatory success and a tendency toward empiricist epistemology have more to do with the prevalence of mind/body physicalism here. The machine metaphor is obviously outdated to any one with a passing familiarity with contemporary cognitive and neuroscience.

The theoretical models work until they don't. Newtonian physics is extraordinarily successful for ordinary scales. Nevertheless it doesn't tell the whole story at extremely small and extremely large scales. Nearly all the materialist/physicalist theories of mind are based on 18th century physics and they haven't delivered. That approach has been a dismal failure for well over 100 years and yet the various proponents of materialist/physicalist monism continue to issue the promissory note that a solution will be forth-coming...someday, maybe. I would note that idealistic monism suffers from a similar problem in reverse.