for others who think materialism* is probably true, what’s your best guess/reasoning re: what the world is like conditional on its being false?*i mean ontological materialism here, attempting to move the religion discourse somewhere interesting, but if you have an interesting response for the historical kind I won’t stop you
I would love to know this as well. “Conditional on materialism being false” encompasses a lot, and many anti-materialist positions are mutually contradictory. So this question is difficult to answer in a way that doesn’t feel like I’m being set up for a trap where somebody springs their entirely new type of anti-materialism on me.
One possibility that would be a serious blow to materialism might be mental phenomena affecting the external world (if you want to be really obstinate, “humanity’s collective subjective experience of the world”) with no mediating physical interaction. Or, more pithily, “psychic powers”.
But if I bring up psychic powers to most anti-materialists, they get offended and go “C’mon, be serious. You’re strawmanning us, of course we don’t believe in that stuff.” And that’s fine, non-materialism doesn’t have to imply psychic powers, but they can never tell me what their anti-materialism looks like or implies for the physical world.
I have seen anti-materialist claims that there can never actually be “evidence against materialism”, because evidence is always physical and material. Again, that’s fine if that’s what you believe, but it leaves me in an awkward position when I’m supposed to put forward a counterfactual claim for what anti-materialism might look like.
I was looking forward to this discussion and I’m still disappointed that oligopsoneia deactivated. Does anyone want to get back into it?
*nudges* @oligopsalter Eh? Eh?
Psychic powers as strong evidence against materialism: agreed. There still might be ways in which you could rescue most of what we find compelling about materialism, but it would certainly be weaker and less of a sure thing.
(I also don’t think that psychic powers are all that ridiculous a notion to entertain: the strongest evidence against them seems to be materialist priors based on a long track record of explanatory power of materialism. There seems to be a lot of anecdotal and some large-n evidence that I’d take seriously without those priors.)
So, updating things:
Revealed religions: still almost certainly false, since they all contradict each other, without any good reason to prefer one over the other - i would update in the direction of many miraculous accounts being true, but these don’t seem to favor one religion over others - and there seem to be good sociological evidence of why we develop them. I would update in the direction of historical revelation being based in real supernatural events, however. I would probably want to investigate if one religion’s miracles hold up better to examination than others - it would surprise me but the stakes would be high. (I guess the chances are still low but the stakes are still high so it would be good to look into this anyway, I guess.)
Existence of God: God seems to solve a lot of (real, not just God-of-the-gaps) philosophical problems if you can get around the mind-as-fundamental thing, and I still suspect on those philosophical grounds that there’s something like God - an ultimate unmoved mover that’s maximally simple and not affected by anything else but everything depends on etc - except not conscious. I’m not sure how much materialism being false would give me reasons to think this thing is now conscious, but it would make it a bit less ridiculous, so p(meaningful theism) definitely goes up.
Metaethics: I think the best accounts of ethics are just a combination of decision theory and peer pressure, which can be complicated in the particulars (obviously) but don’t depend on any sort of complicated ontological machinery. So not updating this. Obviously if like there’s a God sending people to Hell or w/e that becomes a cause priority but in a relatively boring way.
While we’re at it, heaven and hell: I feel like there’s at-least-within-model infinite anthropic evidence against these as classically conceived, since if they’re true you should almost certainly find yoursef in heaven or hell rather than on earth. Reincarnation seems a lot more likely, esp since there seem to be a lot more accounts of ghosts and reincarnation than the saved/damned coming around to say hi (although maybe they just can’t interact, or it’s after a final judgment, or w/e.)
Angels, demons, small-g gods: totally plausible, seem to have a lot of anecdotal evidence behind them. That book by the druid guy that @anaisnein reccomended sounds about right on the philosophical implications/greater plausibility of this than many more elaborate religions, except that my instinct would be not to trust these entities at all. Will Newsome once suggested that omnitheology is basically a method of rigorously defining what demons it’s safe to interact with, which suggests that you should maybe be a henotheist but only for extremely good gods like jesus or amida or idk some god you openly made up like elua or whatever
as usual with any complicated topic i’m probably deeply wrong about a bunch if not all of this, completely missing important parts of it, &c
The most important pieces of evidence regarding materialism, in a practical human sense, are all mechanisms-of-cognition stuff. Phineas Gage, neurological experiments, hormonal changes, etc.
Psychic powers and disembodied spirits are all very well, but you can probably take or leave them unless you’re a hardcore believer in something specific. Almost everyone who’s committed to non-materialism cares about some form of “my personality exists independently of my body-meats,” such that it can survive physical death / travel the spirit-realms / whatever. Seeing how physical processes can alter all the things that make you you renders this kind of thinking extremely difficult to maintain.
(…yes, this means that the best piece of concrete evidence for non-materialism is probably the continued hardness of the hard problem of consciousness. But if all that ends up getting you even in the best case is “the soul is a traitless point-of-view that needs functioning brainmeats in order to be a person,” you don’t have a very satisfying religion or magic system or anything.)