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I think you're adding more to the concept of "materialism" than it strictly/necessarily implies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
(I am using it interchangeably with physicalism, since I obviously know that energy and fields exist and not "just" matter.)
I do not see where any of your objectioms come into the picture as an indictment of materialism itself.
At most, you're bringing up notions of falsifiability in the Popperian sense, but that is strictly inferior to Bayesianism, where 1 and 0 are not valid probabilities, it's impossible to actually prove or disprove any hypothesis, at most you can get arbitrarily close (or assume them as your starting prior, in other words an axiom, which no amount of evidence will budge).
So the fact that we can't be perfectly sure of what's going on in potential previous universes or even the Basement of the Simulation is a quantitative and not qualitative failing. Since literally nothing else you didn't start out as holding axiomatic can meet the same standard, what of it? I can see where the bulk of the probability mass lies.
But I am compelled to believe so. The overwhelming trend for millennia has been that our best model of the laws of physics explains a wider and wider set of phenomena, to the point that outside particularly exotic situations like black holes, extremely high or low temperatures, or at the Big Bang, most of physics is solved, the equations predict mechanics to well within the limits of your sensors and computational hardware for simulating it. Not even the enormous amount of dark matter and energy out there even remotely comes close in terms of causal influence as a star a dozen lightyears away does through the tenuous tug of its gravity.
It is not complete, but it's inching ever closer, and we're busy trying to tease out 0.00000001% divergences between reality and our predictions to find the errors. Try doing that with a Bible.
Besides, there could potentially not be just one "true physics" but a family of equivalent models that produce the are isomorphic to each other and produce equivalent results, while being technically distinct. This is just a minor quibble, if I'm to be exacting.
Believe it or not, not even I claim that adopting Atheism makes you infallible when it comes to matters of fact. At best, it makes you less wrong (ever wonder why the biggest collection of rats don't fall themselves "100% Guaranteed Correct.com"?), and at least here, they're avoiding a glaring and unforgivable form of being wrong.
It doesn't remotely balance out.
Bayesianism is a strict superset of "Science". It allows me to observe the distribution of the numbers produced by a die and see it's glaringly lopsided, and then to take the money of anyone who loudly claims that we must studiously pretend that it's balanced since we don't know for sure what the exact odds are.
As I've kept on saying, the balance of probability is nowhere close to evenly split. Materialism/physicalism is overwhelmingly likely to be correct, even more so if you compare it to religion. Since you can't have perfect credence without starting with it, better take what you can get.
On the matter of falsifiability, on a scale much smaller than deriving a GUT or solving the Hard Problem, if someone was to train an AGI on solely known physics/empirical observations of reality and it started espousing the Jude-Christian God (all references being scrubbed from the training set), I will happily do an about face, at least if you can convince me there isn't any data contamination or other forms of tampering involved.
Religion as you see it, while hardly the worst strain around, is still a pernicious distortion of your memeplex and epistemic rationality. There's no way in hell an independent, intelligent entity without the same biological failure modes as humans would come to the same conclusions as you do, I'll bet on it.
Sure? It would change how confident I am in said conclusions, at the very least. And not to just a tiny degree either.
Once again, as I've said so many times, by the standards of Occam's Razor (itself a consequence of Bayesianism when you have two hypothesis, of different levels of complexity, that do the same job of predicting the data, leaving aside that in this case they are hilariously lopsided), and from constraining of expectations.
To the extent it's a value judgement, it's an unavoidable one.
Trust me, not veering off a cliff is sufficient reason for me to feel like I'm being more sane even if I don't know where the road ends. I'm no physicist, I merely have justified confidence that nobody is doing a better job than they are.
Besides, cause and effect become very confusing at that level, if you think Kolmogorov complexity is a headache, you haven't seen nothing yet. All directed acyclic graphs and complicated causal boundaries while throwing even the concept of objective time to the wind. But the maths works, I'll do better at understanding it when someone finds a way to lend me about 20 more IQ points. In the meantime, I am content with my confidence that I'm on the correct team, even if we're still hashing out the finer rules and tiebreakers of the sport.
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