Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Neo-Scholastic]

This raises an interesting question. Are all aspects of reality quantifiable?

That's the gambit. It could be wrong, but the evidence points in that direction.

I see it more as your interpretation of what counts for evidence. You seem to shoo away observations about things that cannot be locally quantified, like utterances. For example, installation art is based entirely on the non-local nature of aesthetic experience. Understanding it as a phenomena requires a type of inquiry that goes well beyond observations of stimuli/responses. What it is about cannot be explained by describing in terms of bottom-up processes. Instead people must look at top-down processes, as well.

If efficient cause is defined by temporal succession, then your position makes perfect sense. At the same time that Humean causality comes at great cost, i.e. it creates an infinite regress of intermediate causes. That is exactly the same objection reductionists consider a damning flaw of substance dualism.

You're too cryptic for me to make out here. What reductionist objection are you referring to?

The interaction problem, i.e. that if material substances and mental substances have entirely different natures then they cannot interact without appealing to a third substance that in turn requires a fourth and fifth intermediating substance, and so on and so forth. Similarly, if A is considered the cause of B because B habitually follows A and if only events qualify as causes, then either B follows A for no reason at all or there is an intermediate cause C...and so on and so forth.