An atheists guide to reality

[Neo-Scholastic]

….many people, when it is suggested to them that say consciousness is an illusion believe that you are implying that it isn't real…It's still very real, only the thing that it appears to be is not real….non-physicalists often trade on this ambiguity to imply that saying that consciousness or meaning is an illusion is saying that there isn't a real phenomenon there; that would be a fiction, not an illusion.

Could you give an example of a mental property that is not what it appears to be?
In my experience, physical monists deconstruct whole mental phenomena, like personal identity and perception, into multiple mental phenomena of more limited scope. By extending this process down the individual neurons, they claim that mental properties disappear altogether. Why not extend the process down to atom, then, quarks, strings and quantum foam? Except for panpsychists, they try to get something for nothing.

….To me, suggesting that value exists in my spirit, a) is invoking a dualist explanation of mind, b) suggests meaning is a thing or a property of a thing, which I deny, and c) is a non-explanation: it's just a shell game to shuttle the problem…to an imaginary entity that just "magically" has the needed properties.

With respect to a) anyone can see that reality has two fundamental features: sensible objects with physical properties and knowing subjects that experience mental properties. Monist theories always end up dismissing consciousness or posit a world of only mental phenomena. Since the former denies the existence of the knowing subject and the latter denies objective reality, I say some form of dualism is currently justified..
With respect to b) the physical monist supports his case with circular reasoning. First, he says mental properties are assigned to physical states by knowing subjects. When asked where knowing subjects come from he says that they are made from mental properties emerging out of physical states.
With respect to c) people predict unseen entities responsible for manifest properties all the time without it raising major objections. Theoretically, there needs to be a particle having the property of conferring mass, the Higgs Boson. Proposing something that can support intentionality isn’t all that much different.

…."It's magic!" and "Goddidit!" both have infinite scope; they can explain anything.

You mean like “emergence”? But actually you are mistaken. God-Did-It does not explain anything in particular; it explains everything in general.

….Another property is explanatory power; how much better we understand the how of the phenomenon as a result of the explanation. These two have almost zero explanatory power…if you can predict a lot of future results based on the how of an explanation, it's a good explanation. Again, these two fail miserably, as they yield basically no predictions.

I fail to see the explanatory power of physical monism. For example, nothing in physical monism predicts the appearance of mental properties. Nor does any physical process appear to require the action of mental properties in order to achieve a specific outcome. To assert that it does begs the question, since both the observable outcomes and the mental properties are already known in advance. Suppose the electrical stimulation of a specific brain area correlates with a specific memory. If people say that the stimulation ‘produced’ the memory then they have already assumed monism. If people say the stimulation ‘allowed’ the memory to appear, dualism was assumed. The manifest phenomena could have resulted within either theory. On the other hand, suppose an MRI shows specific neural activity associated with making a choice, like the experiments of Benjamin Libet. Some say this undermines dualism by showing that choices occur as a physical process before the subject has awareness of having made the choice. Is this finding actual proof of physical monism and/or does it refute all dualist theories? I say, expressing a choice and having awareness of having done so are distinct phenomena. One could easily say that previous conscious choices make future choices habitual, a phenomenon familiar to everyone.

….dualism…introduces more problems than it solves.

Answers often lead to more questions. This is not a serious objection.