Rather than being defended on the basis of reason, the idea of a physical or material reality is an unexamined dogma that pervades modern culture. Not only do I think it strips us of meaning through the removal of transcedence, reducing humans to meat machines - it is the worst metaphysical position on the table.
A physical or material reality means that everything in reality, including all aspects of ourselves, can be fully accounted for or deduced in terms of the entities descibed in physics - atoms, particles, fields, etc.
Is this actually the case though?
In a physical reality, everything is ultimately quantitative; that is, everything there is to say about something is captured by a list of quantities: mass, spin, charge, ... Consciousness, the only thing you've ever known, is not quantitative. Consciousness is the world of qualities: the smell of a flower, the taste of an apple, the burn of a hot stove.
By defining reality to be physical, you introduced a category of thing called matter that has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness. In fact, matter is incommensurable with consciousness because one is quantitative and the other is qualitative.
Thus, any assumption of a physical reality will be unable to explain the existence of consciousness, so it can't be true. Today, the challenge of explaining consciousness in terms of physicality is called the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" (0 progress has been made) but it is not a problem to be solved - physicality can not explain, not in principle.
A physical or material reality means that everything in reality, including all aspects of ourselves, can be fully accounted for or deduced in terms of the entities descibed in physics - atoms, particles, fields, etc.
Is this actually the case though?
In a physical reality, everything is ultimately quantitative; that is, everything there is to say about something is captured by a list of quantities: mass, spin, charge, ... Consciousness, the only thing you've ever known, is not quantitative. Consciousness is the world of qualities: the smell of a flower, the taste of an apple, the burn of a hot stove.
By defining reality to be physical, you introduced a category of thing called matter that has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness. In fact, matter is incommensurable with consciousness because one is quantitative and the other is qualitative.
Thus, any assumption of a physical reality will be unable to explain the existence of consciousness, so it can't be true. Today, the challenge of explaining consciousness in terms of physicality is called the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" (0 progress has been made) but it is not a problem to be solved - physicality can not explain, not in principle.
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