Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

As predicted, you ask about materialism, and then immediately default to mind.  Just to be clear, you don't care whether or not anything, or indeed -everything- else is explained via materialism...it's just this one thing?   You mean non-science papers, because science can't even study qualia, right?  Remind me.  

Mind isn't a little thing. It's literally everything for us. So yeah, this one issue matters that much. But look, bring even the kind of "non-science" papers I'm talking about; frankly, I'll be surprised if you can find ANY serious scientific paper that will touch the issue of qualia with a 10-foot pole. Seriously-- I've tried to find any scientific commentary on qualia; I've tried to find research papers about it; I've spent tens of minutes googling various things like "scientific definition of qualia" or "scientific qualia experiments," and it is very hard to come up with anything.

I suspect it's because scientists, like me, are perfectly aware that you can't objectively study the nature of subjectivity.

You mean bring some non-science, and not about materialism, about qualia, then we can move forward?  I doubt that fulfilling this criteria as asked will work, since it's already been done..and hasn't moved the chains for you.  You think that qualias the special sauce.  It;s the one and only example, and you;ve flatly decided that science can;t study it, that anything that purports to study is is just a bunch of assumptions, and that the entire body of materialism is nothing more than a philosophical choice.

I'd prefer science to non-science, but you and I both know that qualia is neither a thing nor an observable property of things. It's the major shortcoming of the material world view, and anyone who wants to make positive assertions about reality in favor of materialism will have to have a very good answer to the question of mind. So far, the one thing that we ALL observe, all the time-- the experience of ideas-- is so poorly explained that the current material view of reality must be considered seriously incomplete.

But I'll keep asking-- do you have any actual science to support your position? If not, then why are you a materialist? What about your experience is so compelling that you are willing actually to DEFINE ALL OF REALITY, to put it all in a single box and to claim that nothing we know of may rest outside that box? How is this a better position than "I don't know"?