What is the basis for scientific materialism?

originally posted by: michaelsuede

originally posted by: neoholographic

What's the basis for materialism in science?

Many scientists claim the only real science that can be done is on things that can be measured. They are at a loss to explain the qualia of consciousness so they pretend it doesn't exist.

No, they simply do not try to measure it. Big difference.

a reply to: neoholographic

The basis for materialism is the physical universe. Matter is anything with mass and volume. If you don’t speak about the universe in materialistic terms, ie things with mass and volume, you would only be speaking about the ideas in your head and nothing besides.

originally posted by: michaelsuede
Many scientists claim the only real science that can be done is on things that can be measured.

If you can't measure something, you can't claim to know much about it from a scientific perspective, since science is based on measurements.

They are at a loss to explain the qualia of consciousness so they pretend it doesn't exist.

Science has been at a loss to explain many things over the years, but time has shown it doesn't always remain so and sometimes science figures out ways to understand things it didn't understand before.

originally posted by: DJW001
No, they simply do not try to measure it. Big difference.

That may be changing. Elon Musk has a lot of interest in the future of artificial intelligence and funded some interesting research on this topic of measuring qualia in natural and artificial agents. There's still a long way to go, but it's a start.

Detecting Qualia in Natural and Artificial Agents

The Hard Problem of consciousness has been dismissed as an illusion. By showing that computers
are capable of experiencing, we show that they are at least rudimentarily conscious with potential
to eventually reach superconsciousness. The main contribution of the paper is a test for confirming
certain subjective experiences in a tested agent. We follow with analysis of benefits and problems
with conscious machines and implications of such capability on future of computing, machine
rights and artificial intelligence safety...

The author is grateful to Elon Musk and the Future of Life Institute and to Jaan Tallinn and
Effective Altruism Ventures for partially funding his work on AI Safety.