What you say continues to be trivially wrong. You assume what you want to show. Please provide evidence that there is something about pain that is not a physical process.
Note, I have run out of patience with you. I will not approve yet another iteration of you stating your beliefs. Please provide evidence. Any peer reviewed and published paper that pain is not a physical process will do.
This is the universal pattern I see with materialists/physicalists. They simply ignore my arguments and say I'm "begging the question" or accuse me of employing some other informal logical fallacy. So far as I'm aware such accusations never have any merit, although they are very fond of employing such fallacies themselves.
This "begging the question" defence that materialists/physicalists utilize seems to act like a magic wand they wave in lieu of any actual arguments. I'm begging the question where exactly? That physics only deals with the quantifiable? That conscious experiences are in fact quantifiable -- perhaps because conscious experiences are the very same as the underlying neuronal activity (which obviously are quantifiable)? I have no idea, Sabine Hossenfelder never specified. And I have dealt with all these possibilities in my previous responses to her, and I get the same tired "begging the question" response and never anything substantive, time after time.
Materialists like Hossenfelder have an all-consuming obsession with evidence. Hence, she says I need evidence that reductive materialism is incorrect. I might as well equally retort where's the evidence that subjective idealism is incorrect? Or interactive dualism? Evidence is simply not relevant in determing the truth or otherwise of metaphysical hypotheses. If it is retorted that they are scientific, then how does science support materialism (and which version?) over idealism? It doesn't (read the first two parts of this essay of mine).
I have shown that reductive materialism cannot possibly be correct here. In addition, in another essay, I have shown that reductive materialism is incompatible with a causally efficacious consciousness and that necessarily our consciousness must be causally efficacious, at least in the progression of our thoughts in reaching correct conclusions (see the first third of that essay up to "various objections").
Anyway, I have responded to her on her blog. This is my response below:
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Sabine, in common with most scientists and those besotted with science, you simply have zero understanding of these issues.
How many times must I tell you it's not a question of evidence, it's a question of being able to think. There's no evidence that could ever show that pain is material, at least not as the word is employed in reductive materialism. One could of course simply stipulate pain is material, but you would then need to expand the word "material" to include aspects of reality that don't fall under the ambit of physics. And BTW, this is why "materialism" can have a broader meaning than the word physicalism.
Peer reviewed papers? Peer reviewed by their fellow materialists no doubt. The academic world is infested with materialists who have been effectively brainwashed into an unthinking acceptance of the common western metaphysic.
Look, pain has no physical properties. It has no mass, no dimensions, no electric charge. It's not measured in any units. Oh yes, and it cannot be detected from a 3rd person perspective. So what is left by labelling it as "physical"? This is why materialists *identify* it with some physical process or the function carried out by such processes, or indeed say it's an illusion (materialists don't agree with each other, they all ardently defend their own variety of materialism). But it ain't identical. Redness is in every way wholly different from either the underlying neuronal activity and wholly different from the wavelength of light that physicists label "red".
The success of science -- and especially physics -- has its detractions. One major detraction is that people imagine that science is potentially able to describe reality in its entirety. So, although we do not have at present a full knowledge of all physical laws, we can nevertheless be confident that, once obtained, there is nothing that such physical laws could fail to explain.
This is kinda like a metal detector user concluding that since his detector only detects metal, that only metal exists, and anything else such as plastic, rubber, wood etc must either be metal in disguise or simply be illusory. It is seriously that stupid.
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