Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

This is like discussing a God of the Gaps. How did you arrive at, as someone else already noted, that ideas exist?

I don't need to arrive at it. "Idea" is a label for the forms, shapes, etc. that I experience. No discovery is required.

As an addendum: Our brains are just as material as the stuff it experiences. Ideas only exists as the neural connections that make up that structure in our brains. It's so physical indeed, that we can measure them as part-and-parcel of the universe with fMRI, disrupting areas of the brain with electrodes and what other tools neurologists have at their disposal. We just call them "ideas" as placeholders of the material.

You are way ahead of yourself. You are listing a bunch of experiences-- that of looking at fMRI machines, that of maybe designing them, that of listening to a professor tell you things you didn't know about science. Literally 100% of anything you think, feel or know is composed of ideas.