Amathia
Senior Member
Difficulty to cope with uncertainty seems indeed as one plausible psychological factor for some believers who'd rather have an easily digestible explanation to all unknowns than to accept these unknowns as 'unknowns'.
However, the hard problem of consciousness is an unknown in terms of not lending itself easily to any explanation including reductive materialism. We have also discussed and debated it on other threads. In other words, the self-identified skeptic is often the one that assumes a neurophysiological explanation to abstract cognitive human capacities such as 'morality' and 'ability to comprehend and discuss psychology and philosophy' without any evidence existing to that effect. In exactly the same way a dualist assumes such experiences must be born of some spiritual substance which evades all scientific scrutiny.
This is a topic more for a separate thread, but since your broached the theme, I will say this.
Materialism is a popular philosophical belief underlying much of skeptical thought and, in many ways, represents an understandable historical counter-reaction to fanatical, naive, frequently illogical, evidently ridiculous and superstitious religious beliefs imposed on the average person throughout history. However, materialism is not the foundation, nor any sort of requirement, of a rigorous scientific pursuit. Empirical falsifiability is.
Many scientists subscribe to materialist/physicalist beliefs, others don't. The alternative to materialism does not need to be superstitious, bigoted and moralistic religious dogma promoted by the more noisome denominations nor some fluffy feel-good spiritualism involving crystals, unicorns, mushrooms and manifesting that seems to be the latest trend. Unfortunately these intellectually jarring popular alternatives to materialism put all non-materialist ideas in a bad and unscientific light, and renders materialism as the only popularly known philosophical position that doesn't invite the stigma of a 'kook'.
Having said that, science is founded upon the philosophical assumption that only the physically observable universe lends itself to scientific scrutiny by the virtue of the hypothetico-deductive method of rigorously testing testable hypotheses through empirical predictions and experiments. It's also founded upon the philosophical assumption of a mind-independent reality (realism, as opposed to solipsism or phenomenalism) and that for every phenomenon there must be a sufficient reason to occur which science exists to explore (the Principle of Sufficient Reason, a.k.a. PoSR).
These are some of the philosophical beliefs underlying rigorous scientific pursuit which in themselves are higher-order philosophical axioms and hence scientifically unprovable.
But materialism isn't one of them. It's a separate unprovable philosophical belief that makes a sweeping claim on the underlying character / substance of all existence, as is the alternative claim that there must be 'spiritual' substance in addition to material that accounts for all things irreducible to material things, or the third option (which I am inclined to accept) that 'substance' (physical or non-physical) is an entirely inadequate predicate to describe all the weird stuff that's happening at a far closer level of observation and analysis of our physical world as well as of our own consciousness whilst, neither, do these two phenomena lend themselves to the same language of explanations.
Hence, to apply, say, quantum mechanical concepts (say, the wave function, decoherence, superposition, entanglement, uncertainty principle) to explain consciousness stops at its tracks due to its evident and immediate conceptual limitations. Conscious experiences being explicable through QM or neurophysiological processes is an unproven materialist god-of-the-gaps claim that can also be said to stem from a psychological need to counter 'spiritual' (non-physical) ideas due to the uncomfortable historical/cultural/religious baggage they often bring along with them even though they don't need to all go together as one big dogmatic ensemble. But one thing weird doesn't automatically account for another thing weird.
It'd be conducive to a more scientific and constructive discussion on consciousness if everyone just accepted: 'I don't know exactly what it is, but it has thus far persistently evaded reduction to known physical, including neurophysiological, phenomena whilst remaining intimately correlational to brain-processes'.
Oof. I agree with all of this. I should have used a different and non-contentious example than consciousness. It was just the first and biggest anomalous outlier that came to mind that continues to resist reductionist explanations. I have no interest in defending materialism and don't want to derail this thread.
