I find it’s useful to clearly distinguish between two kinds of materialism: materialistic values vs materialist philosophy. They’re two different things that confusingly share the same name.
So here I’m referring to materialist philosophy—thought I do think materialistic values are an emergent property of that worldview, so not unrelated. Also the view that “all science is downstream of physics” is wrong even within materialist philosophy, as it ignores emergence and spontaneous symmetry breaking, which give you substrate-independence—effectively that you could run the same high-level science on different hardware (so, e.g., run the same cognitive processes on biochemistry or on silicon—in which case the details of our fundamental understanding of biochemistry don’t matter for understanding cognition)
I find it’s useful to clearly distinguish between two kinds of materialism: materialistic values vs materialist philosophy. They’re two different things that confusingly share the same name.
So here I’m referring to materialist philosophy—thought I do think materialistic values are an emergent property of that worldview, so not unrelated.
Also the view that “all science is downstream of physics” is wrong even within materialist philosophy, as it ignores emergence and spontaneous symmetry breaking, which give you substrate-independence—effectively that you could run the same high-level science on different hardware (so, e.g., run the same cognitive processes on biochemistry or on silicon—in which case the details of our fundamental understanding of biochemistry don’t matter for understanding cognition)