The Good Place

Well this gets into the whole "What use are metaphysical labels?" debate. I think it's useful to a point, but as in past discussion I know Max for example is more critical of the "isms"...I think both sides of this argument can raise good points.

For broad strokes it's somewhat useful (for me at least) to know whether someone is trying to describe a kind of Idealism, Physicalism, Platonism, etc...but it does get to a point where the distinctions become less clear. People who are Idealists sometimes seem to describe   Thought as a kind of substance, and similarly one can think of qualitative aspects like redness or the smell of chives as belonging to a physical but non-mechanistic material universe that is simply not fully measurable in a quantitative sense.

Re: whether there's an unfair burden I'd say Materialism/Physicalism taken a burden upon itself akin to that of other metaphysical positions like Panpsychism, Idealism, etc. For Idealism the burden is explaining how what we usually take to be matter arises from consciousness, for Materialism/Physicalism the burden is flipped.

Could any metaphysical position described all of reality? Probably Idealism could, if one is willing to accept that the differences between a lucid dream and physical reality aren't easily distinguished?

Re: New discoveries - well I don't know if metaphysical positions could necessarily be altered by new discoveries. The Idealist can always say a new discovery is made within our consciousness experience, the Materialist can say any new discovery extends the material world, etc. That said we can probably answer questions like "Is there an afterlife?" or "Is Psi real?" with some degree of satisfaction, but even an afterlife doesn't invalidate Materialism any more than Idealism would definitively mean survival of the Individual after death.

Holy cow! I mean that with approval.