Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

Eh?  Are you joking, or serious?

Why do you ask? Materialism, as a notion of reality, doesn't add immaterial  things. It only states the obvious of what we can discover: that it is fundamentally material.

Okay let's try it out.  I open my eyes, see a dog, remember the word "dog," say dog.  So far so good. I have a label for my experience, but haven't asserted anything beyond that label-- I've made no assumptions, even about the dog existing independent of my experience of it.

Next I say-- a dog is a material object, part of a universe which consists of ONLY material objects, and nothing else. I also am a material object, an object which happens to have the capacity for subjective awareness.

Problem-- how do I know?  100%, and let's not dice words here-- absolutely 100% of all I discover or know, is discovered or known through subjective agency.  Subjective agency works in the medium of IDEAS, which means that all you know is a collection of ideas.  You have not, in fact, discovered that there IS a universe, or that it is "fundamentally material."  What you have discovered is that many of your experiences are coherent, and that certain rules apply to them.

To go from a reality in which everything is subjective, and to then posit that all of reality is objective, is adding a HUGE, really a staggeringly huge, additional "notion of reality."

Okay let's look to science, since that is our best work in categorizing and working with our experiences.  Does it tell us that reality is consistent with how we experience it?  Nope.  Since we do not perceive QM particles, but rather forms, colors, etc., our best science is not consistent with the idea that our perceptions are a reliable determiner of what is real anyway.  It turns out that the desk in front of me is 99.9999999999999% empty space, and the .000000000001% of not-space is squirrely, ambiguous, and impossible to discuss except in terms of mathematical ideas.

Short version: "Og hit with club.  Club feel hard.  So universe all hard club-stuff" is a non-sequitur.