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Morendil comments on The two insights of materialism - Less Wrong
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Ick. If the universe can be adequately explained by thinking of as arising from graph operations, then I desire to believe that the universe arises from graph operations.
In other words, being a "materialist" does not commit me to thinking of matter as fundamental. Being a materialist commits me to believing that all of my experiences can be adequately explained in the same terms that explain what the ordinary stuff around me consists of - whatever the bottom levels of the explanation turn out to be.
I'd further specify that the bottom levels should not be fundamentally mental (or living). In other words, the bottom levels should resemble bowling balls or water more than it resembles fish or human beings; to look at it another way, we should end up explaining how human-like things are made out of water-like things since all is water, rather than how water-like things are made out of human-like things since all is mind.
This 'specification' seems quite vague and unhelpful. It should be noted that the bottom level could have some mind-like quality without actually being fundamentally mental itself--for instance, a panprotoexperiential reality is one where all entities share some precursors of qualia, but need not have any subjective experience or cognition.
Surely something like Occam's razor comes in here. If we can explain consciousness in terms of our current science then why would we try to change our current science to include a mind-like quality as a fundamental property of matter? Make not sense to me.
First of all, panexperientialism and its variations seek to explain subjective experience, not consciousness. Moreover, we in fact can't explain consciousness. "Consciousness is an emergent property" is hardly a satisfactory explanation.
Do you have a specific comment or series of comments in mind, here?
That's why I prefer the term "philosophical naturalist".
"Physicalist" is the term used in philosophy now for precisely this reason. It just means that you believe the world is composed of whatever our best theory of physics says it is composed of.
Me too. I wanted to address "fear of matter" head on with the term "materialism".
Don't we call whatever is at the bottom matter? It all adds up to normality...
Not in everyday language, for instance we don't think of vacuum as being matter; so the fact that "matter turns out to be vacuum fluctuations" strikes us as surprising.
If we refine our definitions of "materialism" and "matter" appropriately, then sure. But that seems like turning a blind eye to the connotations of the word "matter", and perhaps these connotations will be lurking in the background of our thinking about materialism, and give us a nasty mistake at some inopportune moment.
(And at the everyday scale, we get useful cognitive work out of the matter-vacuum distinction.)
Fair enough. I suppose it'd be more accurate to say that whatever matter is fundamentally, so is everything, which is not at all the same thing as matter is fundamental.
As I suggested in the post, I'm with you. The rest of the sentence you truncated was
Reformulations of the phenomenon "matter" are fine by me.