Materialism as a religion

Name one character of space that is quantifiable?
I think your way off the mark. Ever since Skeptiko and now here the assumption is brain and mind are separate things even so far as to be labeled non-local and some have argued the brain is nothing more than a radio receiver. To argue  those perspectives do not originate from immaterialists metaphysics as again silly.

I'll be as brazen as I choose.

What are you even talking about? Read, quite literally, 10 posts back where I say: 

But one of the major postulates here is that the brain can still give rise to the unphysical mind, physicalism can be wrong, and idealism/post Mortemsurvival still be false. It’s not tied down either way, it just makes it less likely if physicalism is wrong ( which I believe it clearly is ).

But see, it’s clearly not.

Either way, I don't think it is "clearly" anything.

You’re only categorizing the mind as physical because of physicalism, when it clearly displays no physical attributes.

The physicalist may say that that is a manufactured problem (a pseudoprofound argument beloved by a certain brand of philosopher) in that the mind doesn't actually actually "exist" as a separate entity in the way you like to paint it. The fact that you "feel" it does may miss the point. Beware of trusting your nervous system too much; it is constantly modulating its inputs, and using elaborate feedback systems, to facilitate your interaction with your environment. In a sense, nothing it does is "real". The idea that one can experience the functioning of this system in order to determine anything useful about its aetiology or essential nature could be a mis-step. In other words, Descartes may have got ahead of himself.

It cannot be independently measured, and the contents of such cant be guaranteed to even exist at any time. You have to take into assumption that it does exist for brain process. Like I have to assume you actually have an inner life and conciousness, because there’s no way for me to physically measure it. Just hand waving off that distinction doesn’t work.

I don't think it's just handwaving. In nature we see increasing neural complexity in organisms corresponding with higher levels of awareness and interaction with their environment (consciousness?). These organisms, and their nervous systems, are constructed of the same stuff (atoms, molecules etc) that makes up everything else we can observe.

At no point do I consider all of this anything other than utterly bizarre btw  

I don't think it's just handwaving. In nature we see increasing neural complexity in organisms corresponding with higher levels of awareness and interaction with their environment (consciousness?). These organisms, and their nervous systems, are constructed of the same stuff (atoms, molecules etc) that makes up everything else we can observe.

Be careful not to mistake the map for the terrain. 

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10930

 
The mind-body problem may not fall within the scope of physicalist science, since this problem has, as yet, no bona fide physicalist theory. Its defenders can surely argue that this penury shows only that we have not been clever enough or that, until the right mutation chances by, we cannot be clever enough, to devise a physicalist theory. They may be right. But if we assume that consciousness is fundamental then the mind-body problem transforms from an attempt to bootstrap consciousness from matter into an attempt to bootstrap matter from consciousness. The latter bootstrap is, in principle, elementary: Matter, spacetime and physical objects are among the contents of consciousness.

And ...

 
Consider, for instance, the quest for neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). This holy grail of physicalism can, and should, proceed unabated if consciousness is fundamental, for it constitutes a central investigation of our user interface. To the physicalist, an NCC is, potentially, a causal source of consciousness. If, however, consciousness is fundamental, then an NCC is a feature of our interface correlated with, but never causally responsible for, alterations of consciousness.

Be careful not to mistake the map for the terrain. 

I think I’ve been careful to avoid that... but the orienteering will be trickier if I leave the map at home.

Here's a guy I have not come across before. The lecture is really a definition of materialism followed by the various challenges to materialism. I think he summarises them very well and I should cross-post this into the Darwinism thread because that constitutes one of those challenges. I'm pretty sure that Malf and his fellow materialists will agree with Koons' definition of materialism - if not, I'd be interested to know why not. I'd also be interested in the reaction to the challenges other than some kind of ad hominem attack which I'm expecting will be presented anyhow.

Here's a guy I have not come across before. The lecture is really a definition of materialism followed by the various challenges to materialism. I think he summarises them very well and I should cross-post this into the Darwinism thread because that constitutes one of those challenges. I'm pretty sure that Malf and his fellow materialists will agree with Koons' definition of materialism - if not, I'd be interested to know why not. I'd also be interested in the reaction to the challenges other than some kind of ad hominem attack which I'm expecting will be presented anyhow.

Very good. But it is too bad that like most philosophers he ignores many of the empirical objections to materialism. It clearly is incompatible with evidence from research into psi and survival, which is most compatible with interactional dualism. He unreasonably gives short shrift to dualism.

I don’t think there is anything new here. We have a Christian philosopher cherry picking the evidence he likes and ignoring the weight of the contrary. His own spin is put on other ‘evidence’. He has a predictably narrow view of ‘the physical’.

Oh dear, Malf, you disappoint me. I said when I posted this in the other (materialism thread) that I expected an ad hom response and here it is immediately. He makes no case from faith or religion in his presentation yet you can't resist using his Christianity against him. So I can just as easily say that you are bound to support materialism because of your atheism. The cherry picking argument is lazy too - I think he was pretty thorough in outlining the main challenges to materialism although, as @nbtruthman has mentioned, he probably didn't go far enough in not including empirical evidence. I have no doubt that if he had included that evidence (psi, etc.) he would have been condemned by skeptics for peddling woo. 

So either admit that you are just offended by the fact that someone challenges your ideology of be more specific in your counter argument.

Sorry, I just don't see the ad hom here.
All of his challenges appear to be the same ones we pull apart on here, and previously at the other place. I didn't see any new ones but may have had my attention diverted whilst I was viewing.
The fact that he interprets QM to be outside of the material realm might be a clue that he is setting up an easy target to shoot down. I simply don't encounter physicalists who deny QM exists.

Sorry, I just don't see the ad hom here.
All of his challenges appear to be the same ones we pull apart on here, and previously at the other place. I didn't see any new ones but may have had my attention diverted whilst I was viewing.
The fact that he interprets QM to be outside of the material realm might be a clue that he is setting up an easy target to shoot down. I simply don't encounter physicalists who deny QM exists.

What’s the limit though? Where is the line drawn where people say ‘That’s not physical, that’s non physical?’. When you don’t define a limit to what you can define as physical, physicalism is just always bound to be correct and utterly useless at the same time. You’re never wrong, you just define something as physical and fold it into your metaphysic. It’s why materialism was actually a proper, yet failed metaphysic and physicalism is so utterly useless as a metaphysic that it’s also failed.

Why would any metaphysic assume that what we know now is all that we would ever know? I’m sure the notion of physicalism has yet more room to expand, and rightly so. Whether one calls that ‘useless’ or ‘sensible’ may depend on how badly you want to throw stones at it.

At the risk of introducing another thinker/expert/scientist without a prior background check to make sure he has no weird fetish hiding in his philosophical cupboard, I'll offer this article on the subject at hand. This time it is professor of astronomy, Adam Frank (an actual scientist this time, not a philosopher) writing in Aeon magazine.

https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone...sciousness

In the very public version of the debate over consciousness, those who advocate that understanding the mind might require something other than a ‘nothing but matter’ position are often painted as victims of wishful thinking, imprecise reasoning or, worst of all, an adherence to a mystical ‘woo’.  

It’s hard not to feel the intuitional weight of today’s metaphysical sobriety. Like Pickett’s Charge up the hill at Gettysburg, who wants to argue with the superior position of those armed with ever more precise fMRIs, EEGs and the other material artefacts of the materialist position? There is, however, a significant weakness hiding in the imposing-looking materialist redoubt. It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself.

He then goes into a description of applied quantum physics and continues ...

You can see how this throws a monkey wrench into a simple, physics-based view of an objective materialist world. How can there be one mathematical rule for the external objective world before a measurement is made, and another that jumps in after the measurement occurs? For a hundred years now, physicists and philosophers have been beating the crap out of each other (and themselves) trying to figure out how to interpret the wave function and its associated measurement problem. What exactly is quantum mechanics telling us about the world? What does the wave function describe? What really happens when a measurement occurs? Above all, what is matter?

And he asks ...

Given these difficulties, one must ask why certain weird alternatives suggested by quantum interpretations are widely preferred over others within the research community. Why does the infinity of parallel universes in the many-worlds interpretation get associated with the sober, hard-nosed position, while including the perceiving subject gets condemned as crossing over to the shores of anti-science at best, or mysticism at worst?
 ... 
Some consciousness researchers might think that they are being hard-nosed and concrete when they appeal to the authority of physics. When pressed on this issue, though, we physicists are often left looking at our feet, smiling sheepishly and mumbling something about ‘it’s complicated’.