Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[The Grand Nudger]

The idea that qm is a materialist explanation makes the assumption that reality is a material world, and therefor any legitimate explanation must be, by definition,  in materialist terms.  This is exactly what I started this tread about in the first place - two ways of thinking about materialism in relation to the idea of a material world.  Perhaps there is something I should start out with . . .

It doesn't.  That QM is a materialistic explanation is an effect of the method used to generate it.  Whether or not we live in material world is irrelevant to the nature of QM as an explanation.  We may not, QM may be wrong.

I don't know about you, but I don't experience "material world."  (Of course, I've beating this dead horse enough in this thread, so why not once more.  Even within the context of materialist sense story, what I experience is something happening in a brain in a material world, so I can't experience "material world" or "a material world.")  "Material world" is a label, a phrase, we use to talk about what we DO experience - which is colors, sensations, space, thoughts, etc.  So "material world" as a reality is not self-evident and we don't experience it - it is an idea.

Is there a difference between what happens in a brain, and a "material world"?  Is an idea somehow immaterial?  

Now the question is - what is the relationship between physical science as an descriptive system  and the idea of a material world?  I have found two fundamentally different ways to think about it.

1.  There is an objective spatial reality of which "material world" is an accurate description, and physical science is a system we use to describe, create models of, and make predictions in that reality.
2.  "Material world" and the spatial conception we have of such a world is a mistaken, non- and pre-scientific worldview which physical science is explaining away.

We've definitely been explaining away many misconceptions we had...though materialsim isn't one of them....at least not from science.  Methodological materialism is foundational to it.  There may be some x, currently undiscovered and un-described out there..that finally explains away materialism (whatever that would mean, however we found it..just assuming we did) but science dosn;t describe or address it.  It doesn't even make the assumption that it exists.  

What is left of the idea of a material world after science has gotten a hold of it?  Matter, in any "stuff" concept is gone.  Space, in the sense of a "container" that sits there (Newtonian space) is gone, as space, in physical terms, is inseparable from the "matter" aspect of This Experience.  Time, in the Newtonian sense of a rate at which reality "goes" is gone.  There is, physically speaking, nothing left of the idea of a spatial world that sits there, with stuff in it, and that "happens" in some objective time frame.

That you think matter is gone is more than likely an issue of you not knowing what the term meant.  It's a catch-all.  All of these ideas that you've just described don;t seem to be gone at all.  I have a container in front of me, holding water, and water in a different form.  It will, given time, all be water in one form.  Will further discovery alter that?

Yet, because of the Simple Realist worldview implicit in the language we learn to think with, we still learn, as children, to structure our conceptions we use to think about This Experience in terms of our being "things in a world." 

Because that is both an adequate description of our experience, and of the mountains and mountains of evidence that tells us whether or not our experience is accurate.  It isn't, always, ofc, but in that particular it appears to be.  

This Experience can't be such a world, we can neither experience nor locate such a world, and physical science has theorized away any common sense conception of it.  So why do we need it?  We only "need" it for one reason.  There is only one role which the idea of such a world performs.  And what is that?  It is to have a "material world" in which there are "things called brains" that people want to believe their experiences happen in.  They want to have a concept , something they can visualize and hold in their minds; an idea they can hold up and say, "Here is where my mind and experience happens.  It happens 'right here' in this thing I call my brain."  It allows them to believe that all that happens, all describable aspects of This Experience, are describable in their "material world."  That is the only remaining role for the idea of an objective material world.  It plays no meaningful scientific role.  It is an obsolete paradigm in which some people - most people - try to imagine a physically described reality (along with everything we actually experience) which cannot be conceived or describe in that paradigm.

Another long, "can't be this" objection.  Science has hardly done away with a "common sense" conception..but so what if it did?   It would seem that we have this material world as a concept because it is accurate, and we have the notion that our experiences happen in our brain because all available evidence points to that conclusion, without a single observation to the contrary.  To say that materialism plays no meaningful scientific role is to say that the foundational metrics of what can be called science plays no role.  Science is, fundamentally, methodologically materialist.  

Just as some people just "can't do" without a God to make sense of this life, so it seems to me that some people just "can't do" without their conception of themselves as being living things in a material world.   They need something they can point to and say, "I know what kind of thing I am.  I am a living thing in a material world.  This (pointing to one's head) is where my experience happens.  This experience I learn to call "the world," along with my experiences I call "mind," are the result of things happening in time and space in this object (brain).  (Golly gee whiz - maybe it's even a biological computer - wouldn't that be cool!)"  After all the times science has shown us that our conceptions of reality are mistaken, why is it so hard to do the same with us, as experiencing beings?  What's so hard about admitting that we don't know what we are; we don't know what kind of reality underlies This Experience we learn to call "the world"; we don't understand the relationship between this aspect of This Experience we learn to call "the brain" and This Experience as a whole?

I'm not sure anyone "needs" this concept..you;d have to be more specific...it certainly seems to help us to avoid death, lo..., but it's not like anyone has much of a choice.  We appear to be living beings in a material world.  Not only is this our experience, all available evidence points to this conclusion and there isn't a single dissenting observation.  It's not difficult, at all, to imagine that we could be wrong...it's much more difficult to demonstrate that we are.  The case is compelling and thorough, on that count.  Whether or not one feels confident that we know the reality underlying our experience is a simple issue of where one places ones confidence, and the justification they offer for it.  I'm confident in both the evidence we have, and the method we used to generate it.  It provides me with propositions that I can at least test for soundness...so that a good means of inference isn;t wasted on a bad proposition.......or endless imagining.