Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

An invocation of solipsism, not a criticism of materialism specifically, and completely self defeating with regards to your criticisms -of- materialism.  How do you know that it's medium is "ideas"...what did you use to figure that out...your subjective agency?  What happened to the black box, how do you know that there -is- a medium to begin with? Why would a medium be required? What does medium mean outside of a material context?

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."

You're arguing against the existence of the universe, not the composition of it's constituent parts.  

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.

We don't expect to see the relationships in QM, our eyes do not have that ability, and in fact seeing that would violate everything we know about human beings, and their material abilities.  We do see what happens at our scale of interaction.  Where a table is as solid to a being of our size and our composition, and to -our- eyes...as anything.  I;m not sure why this would even surprise you. Our eyes aren't meant to perform QM experiements, they're for keeping us from running into tables....which is an ability that none of us would require if tables were ethereal, non solid non-things.

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

More like "everything that's ever hit og in the head has been material", isn't it? I guess you couldn't bullshit your way around that one though, so I understand why you chose your own phrasing.

These statements above are all arguments you've tried before.........seeing them again an again is to watch fundy idealist apologia being peddled, regardless of how often it's dismantled. As apologia goes, it's fucking ridiculous.