This is a reply to two posts upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42389025 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42395650

Far from adding any specificity to what you mean by likeness, your Dec. 12 post [1] continues to avoid doing so. This seems very odd, as one hallmark of true theories is that the more one can say about them, the more strongly justified they appear (I suppose, under your thesis, you would say they become more like reality?) Why would you pass up on multiple opportunities to make your thesis as strong as you can? Or has it already reached that point? The direction of this discussion suggests the latter is the case - but you still have an opportunity to turn that around.

Your 'meet at the foot of the mountain' analogy falls flat, as no example of a situation where there is sufficient information does anything to establish that, in a different case, there is sufficient information.

The reason why what you have said so far is inadequate is that you have made a very strong assertion ("materialism makes rational thought impossible, and is therefore false" [2]) which you say follows from your claim that true thoughts have some sort of likeness to reality, but you have not offered any reason for a reasonable skeptic to think that your assertion states a fact - i.e. a justified true belief. As it stands, it does not meet even the 'justified' criterion. The fact that you have said literally next to nothing about how thoughts are like reality is just one of the things standing in the way of this assertion having any justification, though it is the one that we come to first, as the other big, so-far unjustified leap - to your anti-materialist conclusion - is predicated on it.

"Now you show you have some idea of what 'likeness' means in your response" - indeed, I have an idea of how one could say that true thoughts are like the reality they are about, and, in fact, I wrote "personally, I do not suppose that one could think meaningfully about reality without there being a correspondence, at some more-or-less abstract level, between the thoughts and the real world, and for all I know from what you have said about it, that may or may not be what you mean when you say 'similarity' or 'likeness'." [3] I do not know whether it is anything like what you mean, because you have been so opaque about it.

You could certainly say that my correspondence is no more specific than your likeness - and you would be right - but that is not a problem for what I am saying, because, once again, I am not claiming anything that is predicated on it.

Contrary to what you say here, my position is not dependent on whether my position on the 'central question' that you posed in the beginning (what is it that makes a thought be one about reality? ) is actually correct: I believe that information flow from the real world via chains of causality is sufficient to explain why true thoughts reflect the world as it is, but even if this is completely false, it would not mean that your thesis has been justified: it has to stand up on its own merits.

Consequently, I do not have to say anything more about chain-of-causality, but I am not averse to scrutinizing it, so I am happy to take on the infinite regress issue and show that it is not a problem. For example, you wrote "someone without knowledge of the earth's rotation could tell you that it was day or night without telling you how it was day or night", and that is true enough, if they could see daylight, or hear the sounds characteristic of day- or nighttime activity, or read a clock (or from their body's circadian rhythm, absent any better information, but that does not work for long.) In all these cases, the thought arises from information flow along a chain of causality that does not, in any circumstance, need to be followed back any further than the rotation of the Earth, so there is no infinite regress. Furthermore, there is no need for the person to know about the rotation of the Earth, as that rotation causes corresponding phenomena, which in turn feed information to our subject - information which allows them to deduce the fact of it being day or night so long as they have some knowledge about how to differentiate the two (the chain is there even for clock-reading and circadian rhythms, which are synchronized to the Earth's rotation.)

You seem to have come to your infinite regress conclusion because I occasionally used phrases such as 'factual information'. That is just a shortcut for referring to information caused by the actual state of the world, either directly or through a process of sound reasoning from direct information, and I should have been clear about that.

We can continue with this line of thought: a person might wake up, look at a clock reading, say, 13:00, and think it is daytime - but in one case the clock is working correctly, and in the other, it is broken, and it is actually midnight. This is no problem for CHOC, as in the latter case, there is no causal chain from the Earth's rotation to the clock's reading. According to your thesis, this thought is like reality in the first scenario, but unlike reality in the second - yet it seems to be the case (or at least it plausibly is) that the thoughts in the two scenarios are identical (they can certainly be expressed by the same proposition.) From this consideration, it seems that likeness to reality is not an intrinsic property of thoughts, but merely a correspondence between them and reality - and mere correspondence does not seem to be a problem for materialism, at least not without further explanation.

With phrases like "you need to find another explanation" and "it does not get you off the hook to show that my argument ... is invalid", I feel it is necessary for me to repeat what I said earlier about burden-shifting: "in order to show that your argument has failed to make its case, I neither need to show how there can be likeness that is not physical likeness if materialism is true, and nor do I need to show that likeness is not necessary for a thought to be about reality. On the contrary, you have chosen to make a strong claim - essentially that the mind cannot possibly be the result of physical processes [4] - and to sustain that, you need more than arguments grounded in appeals to intuition about how things either must or cannot be. In particular, anything resembling 'so prove me wrong' would amount to burden-shifting, and while we are about it, the alternative to 'the mind cannot be a physical phenomenon' is not 'the mind must be a physical phenomenon', it is 'the mind might be a physical phenomenon.'"

All of this is probably moot, however, given the sibling comment in which I show, using an argument revealed to me by this discussion, that materialism is correct;)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42395650

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42319985 , in the summary.

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42345041 , final paragraph.

[4] After I wrote this, you made it quite clear how strong of a claim you are making: "materialism makes rational thought impossible, and is therefore false." [see footnote 2]