It's odd that you rule out the possibility I'm right. — Relativist

It's not a personal issue. It is physicalism that I'm critical of, not you in particular. See response above.

I wasn’t expecting a response, and a well-spoken one at that. So…thanks.

I’ll address just this one item, the rest being uncontentious other than relevant particulars:

The issue is that nothing tells you about or can articulate an "intrinsic" nature of things. — Apustimelogist

I understand nature of things to mean real material things. Even so, I’m of the opinion metaphysics can articulate the intrinsic nature of me, whether or not the mere satisfaction I get from it reflects the truth.

I agree explanations don’t come for free, and I think the fundamental restriction is the human intellect itself. We are, after all is said and done, at the mercy of ourselves.

I don’t believe it, it’s just my preferred explanation*, I don’t hold beliefs. Yes, I am familiar with the interaction problem.
I don’t see it as dualism, although it conforms largely with what is understood as dualism. I see the problems around dualism as a human construct. So where one thinks of substance dualism, for example, I don’t see these as fundamentally different substances, just differing kinds of substance. I entertain both idealistic and materialist ideologies, both atheistic and religious. I don’t see all these divisions as problematic, but rather divisions we have created. That what people think about and talk about are narratives based on an incomplete understanding of our world, coloured by the human condition.That what we don’t know likely vastly outnumbers what we do know. That we really have no idea about existence, because our narratives are developed solely around what we do in the world we were born into. That the basis of the existence we experience is entirely unknown. This is evidenced in the dilemmas any attempt to determine, or understand what existence, or our existence in this world, we come up against.

Surely given the advances in scientific research and human intellect, we would have discovered, or understood existence by know. But we haven’t, maybe we are no further forward in this understanding than prehistoric people. Are we missing something?

More generally, this directly relates to "free will". Physicalism entails compatibilism: any choice you make will be the product of deterministic forces, a set beliefs (dispositions) that are weighed by the mental machinery, and can only produce one specific result. In hindsight, it only SEEMS like a different could have been made. In actuality, no other choice could have been made, given the set of dispositions that existed when the choice was made. So the collective set of dispositions necessarily leads to whatever choice that is actually taken. — Relativist

:100:

I embrace physicalism (generally, not just as a theory of mind) as an Inference to Best Explanation for all facts. You can defeat this only by providing an alternative that better explains the facts.

:up: :up: