One way to test your mother's attitude to science, explanation, and so on, would be to see what she thinks of theories of the mind which sound like nonreductionistic quantum mysticism to you. What would she think of the theory that qualia are in the quantum-gravity transitions of the microtubule, and the soul is a bose-einstein condensate in the brain? I predict that she would find that sort of theory much more agreeable and plausible. I think she's not hostile to reality or to understanding, she's hostile to reductionism that falsifies subjective reality.

People here and elsewhere believe in ordinary reductionist materialism because they think they have to - because they think it is a necessary implication of the scientifically examined world - not because that outlook actually makes sense. For someone who truly believes in an atomistic physical universe, the natural belief is dualism: matter is made of atoms, mind is some other sort of thing. It's only the belief in the causal closure and causal self-sufficiency of atomistic physics that leads people to come up with all the variations of mental materialism: eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, various "identity theories" such as functionalism. A lot of these so-called materialisms are actually dualisms, but they are property dualism rather than substance dualism: the mind is the brain, but it has properties like "being in a certain state of consciousness", which are distinct from, yet somehow correlated with, properties like "being made of atoms arranged in a certain way".

I regard this situation as temporary and contingent. It's the consequence of the limitations of our current science and currently available concepts. I fully expect that new data from biology, new perspectives in physics, and a revival of rigorous studies of subjectivity like transcendental phenomenology, is eventually going to give us a physically monistic account of what the self is, in which consciousness as it is subjectively experienced is regarded as the primary ontological reality of self-states, and the traditional physical description as just an abstracted account, a mathematical black box which does not concern itself with intrinsic properties, only an abstracted causal model. But abstracted causal models are the whole of natural-scientific ontology at the present time, and materialists try to believe that that is the fundamental nature of reality, and the aspect of reality which we experience more or less directly in subjectivity, is some sort of alien overlay.

The folk opposition to reductionist materialism derives to a large degree from people in touch with the nature of subjective experience - even if they can't express its nature with the rigor of a philosopher - and who perceive - again, more intuitively than rigorously - how much of reality is lacking in a strictly "mathematical" or "naturalistic" ontology. In rejecting reductionism, they are getting something right, compared to the brash advocates of materialist triumphalism, who think there's no problem in saying "I'm just a program, and reality is just atoms".

I know it must sound scandalous or bizarre to hear such sentiments on Less Wrong, but this really is the ultimate problem. The natural-scientific thinkers are trying to make models of the mind, but the intuitive skeptics are keeping them honest, and the situation will not be resolved by anything less than a new ontology, which will look in certain respects very "old" and retro, because it will reinstate into existence everything that was swept under the carpet of consciousness in order to construct the physical/computational paradigm of reality. It is very clear that people with a highly developed capacity for thinking abstractly are capable of blinding themselves to vast tracts of reality, in order to reify their abstractions and assert that these abstractions are the whole of reality. It is one particular form of belief projection to which "rationalists" are especially susceptible. And until the enormous task of perceiving and articulating the true ontology, and the way that it fits into science or that science fits into it, has been done, all that the enemies of premature reification can do is to make suggestive statements like this one, hoping that something will strike a chord and reawaken enough prescientific awareness in the listener for them to detach themselves a little from their constructs and "see" what the intuitives see.

Similarly, some part of the rejection of life extension through uploading comes from a rejection of the metaphysic implied. It looks like the uploader is denying reality. Life extension through rejuvenation is much more acceptable for this reason - though even there, the wisdom of the human race says that striving for literal immortality is unhealthy because it's surely impossible, and it's unhealthy to attempt impossibilities because it only sets you up for suffering when the inevitable comes. There are a bunch of other psychological issues here, about how much striving and how much uncertainty is rational, the value of life and the rationality of creating it, and so on, where I think transhumanism is often more in the right than tradition. But I will assert emphatically that the crude reductionisms we have available to us now are radically at odds with the facts of subjective experience, and so therefore they are wrong. It is better to revert to agnosticism about fundamental reality, if that is what it takes to retain awareness of subjectivity, rather than to reify mathematics and develop distorted ideas, so here I do side with your mother.