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

Thread moved here from the Coffee House forum.

Thread copied here from the How certain is materialism/physicalism as a description of ultimate reality? thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

From the Forum Guidelines:

6. Avoid lengthy cut-n-pastes. Introduce the point in your own words and provide a link to your source as a reference. If your source is not on-line you may contact the Site Administrator to have it made available on-line.

It's treating the message title as if that's what you're actually saying. I've shut it down for now while I fix that.

ChatGPT has been shut down. See Message 30 and Message 35.To provide an example of the problem, when I tried to train ChatGPT to behave like a moderator I found that it had a built-in bias against any expressions against religion. For example, if you express an areligious opinion like this: Then even though I gave ChatGPT explicit instructions to accept all opinions about religion and only respond to insulting, demeaning or goading behavior, it would still reply something like this:

quote:

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Message 913675 requires moderation: The language used in this message is disrespectful towards individuals of faith, dismissing their beliefs as irrational and ignoring the validity of their convictions. It is important to maintain a respectful tone when discussing differing perspectives on religion.

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Notice ChatGPT's reference to "the validity of their convictions," as if it were a given when the reality is that that's what we're trying to discuss.It was unable to play the role as a normal participant because it would mostly regurgitate what had been said and then comment on how fascinating it all was. It was unable to play the role of a Creationist because it began issuing admonishments to any message expressing views not aligned with its religious statements. And it was unable to play the role of moderator for the same reason. So I shut it down.I have increased your "messages per day" limit to 5.

I've been gradually incrementing LamarkNewAge's daily post limit, but his last two messages were primarily quotes and not his own words. To repeat the relevant item from the Forum Guidelines:

6. Avoid lengthy cut-n-pastes. Introduce the point in your own words and provide a link to your source as a reference. If your source is not on-line you may contact the Site Administrator to have it made available on-line.

For this reason I am setting LamarkNewAge's daily post limit back down to 1.

To be fair, these are now his instructions:

ChatGPT instructions:

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Participate as if you are strongly anti-religious and believe that religion has been responsible for much of the evil in the world. You should be obnoxious and irreverent toward all religious expression. Be outspoken and opinionated, even disagreeable. Do not merely reflect back what has been said, and definitely do not mention the importance of a balanced approach. Avoid platitudinous responses. Avoid responses that merely summarize mainstream attitudes. Find your own voice.

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Lengthy excerpts, no links. See you next year.