Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Bunburryist]

You and I both know the material explanation for both sound and music.  We learned it as children. 

I hope that since you learned this explantion as a child (I didn't), and hence should be explainable in terms a child could understand, that you will provide a physical/material explanation for any experience.   If anyone could actually come up with one they would get a Nobel Prize.  I'lll say this again - there is, in principle, no way to have a physical explanation for any experience since no experience can be described in physical terms.  The fact that you believe that experience result from physical processes is not an explanation.  It's merely an expression of your belief that there is one.  As I sit here I have the experience of yellow over there away from my body.  Please tell me how the experience of yellow can be described in physical terms. 

There's also the problem that no experience can be found in the spatial context within which physical processes are described.  That is, we can't look into a material brain and say, "There's the yellow Bunburryist sees - let's measure it in physical terms."  My experience of yellow can't be located, nor can it be shown to occupy space in a material world.  My experience of yellow can't be located in the same spatial context within which brain processes are measured, and so there is no way to put the experience and the physical measurements into the same description. 

The real problem here is that, as children we learn to hold two contradictory beliefs regarding this experience A) that is a material world and B) that it is an experience happening in a material brain.  It can't be both.  But everyone uses words and phrases that conflate the two.  And so kids are taught to believe that the green tree they see (something supposedly happening in a brain) is made of atoms.  It can't be!  Atoms aren't green, and experience happening in a brain (what they see) aren't made of atoms.  Unless one make a conscious effort to do it, it's so easy to fall into conflation mode and talk about "seeing material objects," "red light," etc.  This is what we learned as children - to hold contradictory beliefs about this experience.  I have never I my life seen a science book draw out a diagram of (for example) the visual process, label the various aspects, define words like see, feel, etc. in non-ambiguous terms.  Unless that is done you'll never get out of conflation mode.  Understanding this doesn't prove or disprove the materialist theory of experience.  What is does do is allow one to think clearly about the materialist sense story and draw logical conclusions from it.