Occam's razor specifies that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." Materialism cannot be true, despite it's seeming simplicity. Therefore one must multiply the entities until one can arrive at a true, simple explanation with the fewest number of extant entities.
The mind is not a physical thing, despite it being connected with and informed by the brain. Consciousness and the body cannot be separated, because consciousness is not physical and thus no separation can take place. Consciousness 'winks out' when the mind is anesthetized. This is not possible for a physical object but eminently possible for an non-physical (abstract) one. Physical objects are subject to state change, while abstract entities exist, well, differently. It may involve state change, but it also may simply be there/not there.
Abstract things can still exist, when you learn things, it is an abstract thing, the mind, interacting with other abstract things, learnings. These abstract things interact with the physical world through the instrument that evolved to allow them to do so, the human body and mind.
There's another example I can use. When we model a system using state machines, the diagrams of those machines provide a representation of the workings of the model. We can point, on the state diagram, what the underlying system running the state machine is doing. But that 'pointing' isn't the actual system, it's an abstract thing that helps our minds understand the underlying system it's running on.
Did you catch the invocation of the law of parsimony in the last paragraph? The very existence and usefulness of Ockham's Razor invalidates materialism. Entities are not physical objects.
> Materialism cannot be true, despite it's seeming simplicity
[citation needed]
The mind is not a physical thing, that's correct, but we need not claim the existence of anything non-material to explain the mind. The mind - or more specifically consciousness is made of information, which is 100% encoded in matter, hence materialism. (See Joscha Bach's detailed description of this.)
> But that 'pointing' isn't the actual system, it's an abstract thing that helps our minds understand the underlying system it's running on.
Yep, and that's platonism in a nutshell, but that doesn't contradict materialism either.
You could have stopped there. A thing that is not physical, exists. Bye bye materialism. Materialism is monism, holding that things are only made of one kind of 'stuff', specifically physical stuff. You can't get around that by saying that "you don't need to invoke anything non-material to explain" non-physical things. The mind is the non-material thing. As soon as you say it exists, you've thrown out materialism. The thing you're trying to defend is physicalism, which is an entirely different ball of wax. Physicalism is exactly the sort of 'multiplication of entities' that I was referring to in the first paragraph of my original reply.
> Entities are encoded in our brains.
That doesn't make them physical, any more than '4A' is the same thing as 'J' because that's it's ASCII representation. An encoding is not the thing. The representation in the brain is physical, the thoughts in the mind concerning them as well as the entities themselves aren't.
I'm not familiar with philosophy this much, but it seems strange to assign structure, organization and other conceptual meta-things the same thing status as we assign to matter.
The mind is a description of the organization/structure/function of a chunk of matter. And the matter part completely determines the non-material part, hence materialism, no?
The mind is not a physical thing, despite it being connected with and informed by the brain. Consciousness and the body cannot be separated, because consciousness is not physical and thus no separation can take place. Consciousness 'winks out' when the mind is anesthetized. This is not possible for a physical object but eminently possible for an non-physical (abstract) one. Physical objects are subject to state change, while abstract entities exist, well, differently. It may involve state change, but it also may simply be there/not there.
Abstract things can still exist, when you learn things, it is an abstract thing, the mind, interacting with other abstract things, learnings. These abstract things interact with the physical world through the instrument that evolved to allow them to do so, the human body and mind.
There's another example I can use. When we model a system using state machines, the diagrams of those machines provide a representation of the workings of the model. We can point, on the state diagram, what the underlying system running the state machine is doing. But that 'pointing' isn't the actual system, it's an abstract thing that helps our minds understand the underlying system it's running on.
Did you catch the invocation of the law of parsimony in the last paragraph? The very existence and usefulness of Ockham's Razor invalidates materialism. Entities are not physical objects.