Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[The Grand Nudger]

The moment that material stops meaning "stuff," or the moment that stuff stops meaning "things which can be located precisely in time and space, and which occupy a non-zero volume," then the meaning of matter begins to overlap with the meanings of mind, magic or even spirit.  When you stop having good mechanical explanations of how the pieces work, it all starts to sound more like a systematic collection of miracles than a material explanation.  If it soothes you to keep pretending that it's all a big machine, then go ahead.

Material stopped meaning "stuff" as you insist upon it a long time ago, long before QM popped up.  Remind me again, what's the criticism?  That materialism is stuck at billiards balls or that it includes too much of what we've discovered?  

Define material.  Go ahead, I dare you to precisely define what it even means.  My prediction is that you will need to use a catch all: "Material is whatever the stuff I experience is made of."  I suspect that if we discovered we were in the Mind of God, you'd say, "That's fine, those ideas you're talking about. . . that's material."

Now you're objecting to linguistics, not materialism.  I doubt that defining material would help you get passed your roadblock here, particularly since materialism is a position regarding the nature of the world, and material a term that only refers to one portion of that position specifically. That you think some words are used to encompass more things than you find convenient for your endless argument isn't a problem with the position or the definition...it's your problem.

On to the next pointless gripe. Why would "the mind of god" in and of itself speak against materialism? That's yet another unspoken and baseless leap of implication. Is the "mind of god" immaterial? Is it somehow incompatible with a materialist framework? How would you know? So yeah, if we discovered the "mind of god" and it were still explicable from the materialists framework...it would get included. Just like everything else has been. If it weren't, it wouldn't be. This is nothing other than a stunted form of "If you were wrong, then you'd be wrong, but wouldn't admit it!" You know where you can shove that shit, at least until such time as you pony up some "mind of god" for us to study. On that day, that will never come, we can have -that- conversation.