RA: I will follow up with the empiricist claim that there is a difference between what you can abstractly dream up in your imagination (relations of ideas) and that matter which is actually perceived through the senses that makes up the basis of the physical sciences.
DS: Here you are conflating the phenomenological “matter” perceived through the sense and the abstracted, quantified (“relations” of measurements, not even of ideas)data used as models by physicists, such as “matter,” “energy”, “gravity,’ etc. Sir Arthur Eddington explained this nearly a century ago when he observed that an intelligent student of physics, coming across a question on an exam beginning, “A 2 ton elephant slid down the hill,” knows to replace the sense data “elephant” and “hill,” with numbers. Richard Feynman was expressing the same idea when he stated that “Nobody today knows what energy is." And Werner Heisenberg stated the same underlying truth when he observed, "It is not nature we are studying but nature's response to our questions."
RA: Put another way, the scientific method works quite well even in the presence of your personal confusion over what it is or how it works.
DS: Though I do not agree with Berkeley’s philosophy, your statement is a non sequitur, just as Johnson’s statement, kicking a rock, “I refute it [Berkeley’s subjective idealism] thus, had nothing to do with idealism. As Wolfgang Pauli would say, both your statement and that of Johnson is “not even wrong” (ie, being incoherent it is meaningless). The “working” of the scientific method is perfectly consistent with materialism, atheism, dualism, panpsychism, qualified nondualism, Madhyamaka philosophy, Kashmir Saivism, neo-Confucianism, transcendental idealism, positivism, etc
.RA: You can doubt the presence of the moving train until it smears you all over the tracks and the rest of us have to clean up the mess
. DS: once again, conflating phenomenological experience of matter with the physicists’ abstraction.
RA: You can say that no one has offered you a sound definition of physical matter just as the MAGA nuts can say that the 2020 election was stolen, and you can all do that until you’re blue in the face, and still, the vaccines work, for which we thank the physical sciences.
DS: An amazing facility for creating a variety of non-sequiturs. Once again - the “working” of the scientific method is perfectly consistent with materialism, atheism, dualism, panpsychism, qualified nondualism, Madhyamaka philosophy, Kashmir Saivism, neo-Confucianism, transcendental idealism, positivism, etc. Used as physicists use the word “physical,” not as the experience of sensory solidity, you have not made a single statement even relevant to the question; thus, once again, your comments are incoherent non sequiturs, and thus, non even wrong.
You could start, to take a whole different tack, by distinguishing pressure waves in the atmosphere from the experience of “sound.” As in, when a tree falls in the forest and no sentient creatures are present, there are pressure waves but – if “sound” refers solely to experience – no sound.
Similarly with solidity (your so-called “matter”), taste, smell, seeing, etc.
I don’t happen to agree with Galileo and 4 centuries of scientists, especially neuroscientists, who distinguish primary and secondary qualities.
However, all of your physicalism is based on this fundamental duality. This is the so-called “hard problem of consciousness.”
It was Galileo and Bacon’s split which led to the hard problem. There is no problem except the somewhat autistic (my apologies to those who are neurologically atypical; it’s a useful metaphor) incapacity to understand the difference between the experience of physicality (gosh, at LEAST get a more original example than the train; you obviously have never had 100 false awakenings in a row, as Bertrand Russell claims to have had) and the physicists’ abstract model they refer to as “physical.”
By the way, I wonder if you’d have difficulty understanding this joke (actually, it actually happened, as far as I can see)Bertrand Russell said a woman wrote to him, declaring herself to be a solipsist, and adding, “I don’t understand why there aren’t more solipsists.”