Agnostic approach using scientific basis of perception to challenge physicalists

[donsalmon]

The British poet Owen Barfield has a brief passage in a book of essays on "the coming tragedy of materialism" in which he - to my mind - sums up the simplest, most fundamental challenge to physicalism:


in the very small area of types of knowledge that modern science generally allows, there are only two fundamental types of knowing:


1. Conscious experience, which is direct, and qualitative

2. Inferences from conscious experience, which is by definition indirect, and quantitative. In other words, abstract.


My approach, for many years, to talking with skeptics, is to avoid overarching philosophic views. I offer neither dualism, idealism, qualified non dualism nor any form of non dualism. I'm only interested in a few things:

(a) use ONLY knowledge that is universally accepted among scientists. Generally, i like to use the neuroscience of perception that is taught to 11 to 13 year old children in middle school.

(b) Show that - as Bernardo has pointed out in "Materialism is baloney" and several other books and essays - according to materialism, the entire EXPERIENCED world is constructed by our brains. The experiential percept "brain" is also a construction.

(c) Any purely mind independent "external" world is purely an inference. Such inferences include laws of nature, electricity, light waves, magnetism, matter, energy, electrons, gravity and much more.

(d) Another way of stating (b) is that there is no phenomenon we could ever point to that would definitively prove whether we are dreaming or awake.

(e) given the above - and in particular, the fact that virtually every scientific experiment conducted in the past 400 years could have been conducted in an extended dream, the question of whether Reality is ultimately matter or mental is unresolvable by means of scientific evidence.

This means that science is perfectly compatible with any ontological view.

Once this is established (it's really very easy to do, but most physicalists are too frightened even to get this far) then it is finally time to ask: Given the lack of evidence for any ontological view, and given what we know, what view makes sense of the majority of the data?

Once you understand all of the above, you also realize that there is not - and can never be - a single piece of evidence that can establish a physicalist view, or even the existence of something purely physical, and NOTHINg makes sense from a physicalist view.

Comments and criticism and rebuttals are most welcome.

[donsalmon]

Here is what I think is the single best approach to challenging materialists.

Please note that he starts by talking about the fundamentals of physics in terms of "particles' - please don't let this lead you to reject it; he revisits this at the end.