Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

You assume that dogs are numerically distinct as a kind of thing within an apparently seamless reality. It is a tacit assumption that people make unconsciously.

That our experience provides this compelling picture of numerically distinct things in an apparently seamless reality is an experience which cannot be denied, not an assumption.  That our experiences or senses are referent to some reality, some x, is.  Once someone starts to tell us about what that reality is made of -even if what they think it's made of is ideas-, ofc, they themselves have briskly walked past that objection, anb can no longer apply it as an objection to an opposed viewpoint.

Simple mechanics, right?

As to that contention, that it's made of ideas, or that all we have are ideas. A thermometer seems to be measuring something, seems to be doing something...so unless it's having an idea - unless it's doing ideas, unless it's measuring ideas....idk what we're talking about. That would -have- to be what it was doing, if the universe was made of ideas...but idk whether or not an idealist wants to live in a universe made out of ideas that can be had, done, -and measured- by a thermometer.....chiefly, since some idealists argue for idealism by saying that we can't measure them, and that we have nothing but them.

/shrugs