How certain is materialism/physicalism as a description of ultimate reality?

I will use the historical Jesus issue to offer a dichotomy.I mentioned that I read a book, awhile (kinda far) back, on the historical Jesus, which I liked a bit more than the rest.It was a book by Dale Allison.It is titled Jesus of Nazareth Millenarian Prophet
(I struggle to remember many details)I liked his views on the views of what type of Jew Jesus was, though surely not in all details. Allison feels the Sermon on The Mount was written after 70 CE, and people here would say, "They made it up".Richard Carrier likes Allison. I just found that out days ago. Liberal Christian theology and historical scholarship tends to find the Sermon on the Mount to be historical (it is always complicated, though).Secular historians write articles (and any "historical" book is actually divided into ARTICLES, the presentation is not as unified & sweeping as traders might assume), in historical studies, granting the historicity of the Sermon On The Mount.I read the Allison history book, without knowing or caring about his religion or any details.It turns out he is (per my Google search, days ago) a Christian who wrote a book defending the resurrection.EvC is packed with posters who are - veritable - uncritically minded, the unscientific mindset is the reason for being totally clueless about history and the nature of scientific studies.I also make mistakes, but they are perhaps due to an over compartmentalization, I dunno?NOW A SUPER DIRECT ANSWERMiracles and creation and the supernatural are part of the metaphysical sphere of debate.They just are.

I'm afraid I can't tell what you're on about. This is the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on Metaphysics:

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Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental structure of reality. It is traditionally seen as the study of mind-independent features of reality but some modern theorists understand it as an inquiry into the conceptual schemes that underlie human thought and experience.

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Is that consistent with what you'd like to discuss?--Percy

That would be related to "soul" & "spirit"-intellect issues.Continuity of consciousness after biological death, type issues.Sometimes, I have seen a scientific issue describing a " 'hard problem' of consciousness"I did not say I was discussing anything, however.

Uh, okay. Have fun.--Percy

Why does it need to be me?I will just answer that I don't know.I will link to a study. From 2022I have two books by Riger Penrose from around 35 years ago.The Emperor's New Clothes and a followup.There was just a big study, and it tested the metaphysical with the physical

What study are you linking to?

Really? It looks entirely materialistic to me.

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Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) is a theory which postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons, rather than the view that it is a product of connections between neurons. The mechanism is held to be a quantum process called objective reduction that is orchestrated by cellular structures called microtubules. It is proposed that the theory may answer the hard problem of consciousness and provide a mechanism for free will.[1] The hypothesis was first put forward in the early 1990s by Nobel laureate for physics, Roger Penrose, and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff. The hypothesis combines approaches from molecular biology, neuroscience, pharmacology, philosophy, quantum information theory, and quantum gravity.[2][3]
Orchestrated objective reduction - Wikipedia

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Perhaps you meant deterministic instead of materialistic?Also, Orch OR has a big hill to climb. Humans have constructed quantum computers, but in order to get them to work they have to chill the actual qubits down to near absolute zero, and even then they are only stable for the tiniest fractions of a second. The quantum effects proposed by Orch OR need to occur at moist and hot body temperatures, and survive wave function collapse for big fractions of a second. Just from a physics point of view (again, to the eyes of a non-physicist who happens to be a scientist), it doesn't look very doable. LSD altering brain chemistry doesn't seem to help your idea. Materialism is tough to beat from a pragmatic point of view. I view metaphysics, religion, and philosophy as being the realms of the more subjective or spiritual side of humans. If humans were 100% objective we wouldn't be human, IMHO. Many have been explained by common, everyday physics. You also need to be explain why these other dimensions would not be materialistic. I agree. Humans are a pretty amazing mix of objectivity and subjectivity. For the pragmatic and objective, materialism seems the way to go.

I wouldn't call it hypothetical, at least in the scientific meaning of the word. A hypothesis in science is a testable and falsifiable explanation for observations. Metaphysics is a set of untestable and unfalsifiable axioms. Those two concepts don't appear to play well together.

You were correct. None of my questions were addressed.

And even if they had been addressed, no one could understand anything he said anyway.

This thread led me to bastardize a joke about engineers.Q: What's the difference between an introverted and extroverted philosopher?A: The extroverted philosopher stares at your navel.[for the joke about software engineers, replace "philosopher" with "software engineer" and "navel" with "shoes"]

I noted that this topic was moved from the Coffee House to the "Is It Science" thread...perhaps to distinguish faith and belief from philosophy in general.Now I am going to reintroduce Theos questions. So here we go.As a side note, I can see why you wanted a more relaxed Coffee House atmosphere, but lets go with the Admins framework of Is It Science?
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Line from the 1933 film, Female (it makes the rounds on Turner Classics), where the female boss is trying to seduce an engineer working for her but he's not playing along:

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"I always thought engineer was a profession, not an affliction!"

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 Then there's that cruel remark you always get when telling the origin story of the PHOENIX ROM BIOS which enabled the production of IBM PC clones.Short form of the story: The cutting remark when you mention "virgin programmer" is to the effect: "Is there any other kind?"That story is reenacted in the first season of the TV show, Halt and Catch Fire.

I agree with those sentiments. If we are talking about metaphysics then we aren't talking about science or the scientific method. The scientific method is Methodological Naturalism, not Ontological Naturalism which would be an actual metaphysical system. Therefore, the scientific method isn't materialism, so if we want to talk about materialism we have left science behind.I also subscribe to the school of thought that philosophy in general is mostly irrelevant to science. The renowned physicists Steven Weinberg states it perfectly:

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Physicists get so much help from subjective and often vague aesthetic judgments that it might be expected that we would be helped also by philosophy, out of which after all our science evolved. Can philosophy give us any guidance toward a final theory? The value today of philosophy to physics seems to me to be something like the value of early nation-states to their peoples. It is only a small exaggeration to say that, until the introduction of the post office, the chief service of nation- states was to protect their peoples from other nation-states. The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers. I do not want to draw the lesson here that physics is best done without preconceptions. At any one moment there are so many things that might be done, so many accepted principles that might be challenged, that without some guidance from our preconceptions one could do nothing at all. It is just that philosophical principles have not generally provided us with the right preconceptions. In our hunt for the final theory, physicists are more like hounds than hawks; we have become good at sniffing around on the ground for traces of the beauty we expect in the laws of nature, but we do not seem to be able to see the path to the truth from the heights of philosophy. Physicists do of course carry around with them a working philosophy. For most of us, it is a rough-and-ready realism, a belief in the objective reality of the ingredients of our scientific theories. But this has been learned through the experience of scientific research and rarely from the teachings of philosophers. This is not to deny all value to philosophy, much of which has nothing to do with science. I do not even mean to deny all value to the philosophy of science, which at its best seems to me a pleasing gloss on the history and discoveries of science. But we should not expect it to provide today’s scientists with any useful guidance about how to go about their work or about what they are likely to find. I should acknowledge that this is understood by many of the philosophers themselves. After surveying three decades of professional writings in the philosophy of science, the philosopher George Gale concludes that “these almost arcane discussions, verging on the scholastic, could have interested only the smallest number of practicing scientists.” Wittgenstein remarked that “nothing seems to me less likely than that a scientist or mathematician who reads me should be seriously influenced in the way he works.
--Steven Weinberg, "Dreams of a Final Theory"

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I assume his manic episode has run its course and we will not hear from him again until mania hits again.