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

That is the first point.
THAT WAS the first point.
That still is.People seem to want to quibble about what exactly we are discussing. Fine.Here is another quibble point:I remembered Chris Matthews objected to Rick Warren asking Senator Obama when live begins.Matthews said it was a "metaphysical" question, and it has no place in a Presidential candidate interview.But, there is a way to put science to the "metaphysical":Fetal viability at 23 weeks was around 4.5 percent, if I understood a 2003 journal article I just saw on a routine Google search.But, in a 2023 University of Rochester Medical report shows modern technology now has a 535/958 (55.8 percent) fetal viability rate, for 23 week pre-mature fetuses.So, is this a metaphysical example simply a bad metaphor, via a political pundit, or is this a "viable" example of metaphysics meeting science.Ironically(?):Roe V Wade had a constitutional protection at 24 weeks. But the 1992 Casey decision allowed for earlier bans, based on viability evidenceI

Nope still as crazy as ever.

Science can only tell us what percentage of fetuses will survive if they are delivered at a certain week of gestation.Science can't tell us that this is a valid measurement to base our ethical and moral standards on.

Yup, spoke too soon. The mania is still there.

Alot of people feel they were pre-existing, prior to birth.I have known people (or, specifically, a person)who had night dreams of living their spirit lives in earth, as a watcher-spirit, and talking to fellow spirits about how he looked forward to the day he got to become a living animal - via a future human birth.Chris Matthews was indeed on the right track, when he saw the Saddleback 2008 interview as crossing over into metaphysical territory.I figured that you would respond by saying twenty-three week-old fetuses are too late in the pregnancy to be truly considered part of the metaphysical debate.(I actually was thinking of the issue, because I was wondering if Jimmy Carter could have been born as late as early June 2024 - thus prematurely, and still be healthy enough to make it to June 2024. I was wondering if our life measurements as starting at birth should be seen as 100.0 percent the correct measure. I was wondering what the odds are of the former President reaching 100.Then I thought of this thread.

My post won't scroll when editing. On my phone.I was wondering if Carter could have been conceived at the same time, in 1924, but born prematurely, and then still survived infancy plus been healthy enough to reach 99/100.I was thinking he might come close to reaching 100 (but not quite), by our reconing, but still come close enough - in months/weeks - that could be within the bounds of survivability in a premature birth.

Scrolling works fine on my iPhone while editing, both the page and the text box where I'm editing. Can you describe the problem in more detail?--Percy

It might be that my phone is about to die due to moisture corrosion.I cant tap on my text box and get it to scroll, during the initial post and editing. If my post is too long, then I cant change it.(I had this problem earlier as my phone spell check turned READERs into "traders", and I did not catch it when I read it.While we are there:(My point about history books was that items are taken on an article by article basis, even if a work has an author who has a grand theme he wants to get across)(Richard Carrier feels that a historian uniquely has vital skills via a special training, and he has strong views which demand we recognize archaeologists and theologians as simply lacking in the qualifications to produce a sound historical study )(That was what initially caused the issue to be on my mind, and you were the reason Percy. I had a slightly larger point here though)

Feelings aren't science. Anything could conceivably be part of a metaphysical debate, even complete nonsense.However, science isn't a metaphysical system. It's just a method we use to figure out how objective nature works. Science makes no metaphysical, ethical, or moral claims.Science can tell us what the outcome of our actions will be. We use our inner moral and ethical senses to determine what outcomes we want or don't want. Science can tell us that a specific bacteria causes infections. Science doesn't tell us if we should either encourage those infections, let them just happen, or stop those infections. We humans make those decisions outside of science.

But a single bacterion is part of the metaphysical debate.Does every life have a conscience experience and did it come from an intellect which can be described as a "spiritual" existence?Where do the minds go when biological death occurs.Every issue touching on life & death will fall squarely into a "spiritual" sphere if you feel your philosophical leanings are so concerned.And, absent some unknown physical law at play, it will also be solidly in the METAPHYSICAL realm.The fact that scientific consensus (via observations)will place the philosophy very much outside of "science" does not overthrow the point. It, in actuality, makes the point.

Not necessarily. For there are ways to scientifically test these kinds of things. An example for that is the so called "Aware Study" (Apparently, looking this up now, there's an Aware 2 study going on, interesting)This study dealt with a small portion of people who, after some accident or sickness, end up in the hospital and clinically dying but then get revived. Some of these people would then talk about out of body experiences, seeing the operation happening from a higher point of view.The Aware Study tried to test this, aligning with a lot of hospitals, it would place cards in places you couldn't see from anywhere in the room normally, unless you were well, out of body. These cards had numbers on them so when an out of body experience supposedly happened, there'd be something verifiable that the patient couldn't otherwise know about or see in any other way.I remember the first study giving no result though, over the span of multiple years, there were very few of those in the right place at the right time that had an out of body experience, and none of those few saw the cards.But, it does pull something that is otherwise seen as a spiritual, metaphysical realm kinda thing and through scientific experimentation, pulling that into a physical light.There are thus, ways of studying the supposedly metaphysical or spiritual, but I guess, if the study succeeds, it won't at that point be metaphysical or spiritual anymore.

What I still find interesting is that you began the thread talking about Penrose and Orch OR. It looks like an entirely materialistic process to me.

quote:

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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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What, if anything, do you think is spiritual about this? What are the outlines of the metaphysical ideas you have about this?At the very least, you need to describe what the spiritual is in a way that would allow us to understands its properties.

I was talking about the HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESSThat was what I thought I was fundamentally talking, about

It would seem that there are two main approaches to the problem. The first is to accept a faith based belief system. The second is to use science to understand neurobiology. The idea put forward by Penrose would seem to fall into the science bucket. However, some would probably bring up all of the quantum woo that was popular a few years back (e.g. Deepak Chopra's stuff).

Hard problem of consciousness - WikipediaThat came first.Penrose used his non-deterministic, non local, wave function collapse (albeit not Copenhagen, but an idiosyncratic theory) theory to reach his scientific hypothesis on the Hard Problem Of Consciousness.Non-determinism is the mainstream in QM. Determinism is the minority view.Philosophy came first.The scientific hypothesis came second.I am having computer problems (I could not get the wikipedia page to load), but I will show the 2022 study when I can load pages and paste. The scientific test came much later than Penrose & Hammeroff's theory.(they were interviewed favorably - decades ago - by the Guru you mentioned, but the Guru never had a quantum mechanical theory himself, as a YouTube interview with Richard Dawkins demonstrated.)Aside from tackling a very important philosophical concept, Penrose' scientific theory had the noteworthy feature of using a Quantum Theory of Gravity. So, it was a really big deal.