Phycalist materialism

I think the widely imagined scientific materialism is not so.  Most scientists avoid the issues involved, and are rather unsettled about it.  Materialism of course (there is nothing but matter and the void) went out the window at the beginning of the twentieth century when physics taught us that matter is nothing but a kind of compressed energy.  It tended then to be replaced by "physicalism," but that is much harder to define -- there is nothing but energy and the void just doesn't make it, since we also now know that there is no void, at least in our cosmos.

We use to have a sense of what "matter" is.  This has been destroyed and there is no good way to define "energy."  It has properties and can usually be measured, but it can also be "potential."  It is more a case of balancing the books than have a real "thing."

A problem for the physicalist is what to do about consciousness and sentience and all that.  Of course it is brain activity, and brains are physical, but that is about all we can say, and we suspect there are things going on in our heads of which the neurologist will never know.  Things we feel and experience seem inescapably outside science.

Still, that is not a license to go off into the wilderness believing that we have mental feeds from our toaster.  All we have the right to say without evidence is that we don't know.