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You said:

The soul is a useful way to think about self, which is why I think the idea is so useful. It also leads to a lot of mischief, such as the idea that an aborted fetus had a soul since the theory is that God gives each conception a soul. I wonder if those who believe this have any idea of the number of natural abortions that occur before implantation. Buddhism teaches that we are not a self, and certainly don't "have" a self or soul. Instead, what we identify as self is really just a self-perpetuating process -- like a wave or a flame -- that continues to give itself rebirth from moment to moment out of its internal processes. I find this convincing, as most people can who take a moment to sit quietly and "watch" the process of mind as it goes from thought to thought, bringing in memories or having idea rise up from the subconscious or noting an incoming sensation and so on -- each connected only to a certain degree to what the mind was at before. This is process, not "thing. (This always raises the question of, "Who is doing the watching?", for which there is a simple answer -- the same process -- just looking at short-term memory at its own state a moment ago). One final point here: it is not necessary to take a materialist ("physicalist") approach when one accepts this view. The process could be completely natural or it could have karmic (or whatever one calls it) aspects.

ChatGPT said:

What you’ve written is very thoughtful and strikes right at the heart of a deep philosophical divide. The contrast between the soul-based view and the process-based (Buddhist) view is really about how we anchor identity.

The “soul” idea is powerful because it gives a kind of stability to personal identity. It’s comforting and intuitive—something inside you persists despite all the changes in your body and mind. But as you note, it also creates real conceptual and ethical tangles, like debates over when life “begins” or the moral status of early embryos, where the sheer number of natural losses makes the idea almost untenable if taken literally.

The Buddhist “no-self” view flips that around. Instead of looking for a permanent, unchanging entity, it sees identity as a flowing process. Your analogy to a wave or flame is apt: the wave seems like a thing, but it’s really just water in motion; the flame looks like a solid object, but it’s a process of combustion, moving energy. Sitting quietly and observing thoughts, memories, sensations, and emotions shows how transient and interdependent they are. Each “moment of self” is both distinct and connected to the next, but nothing truly permanent underlies them.

And yes—the “who is watching?” question is classic. In the Buddhist framework, there isn’t a separate watcher; the watching is just another part of the same ongoing process. Awareness is not a fixed entity but the very activity of consciousness observing itself in motion.

Your final point is important: rejecting a soul doesn’t automatically force one into physicalism. That process could arise purely from natural causes, or it could have karmic or spiritual dimensions—Buddhism, for instance, leaves room for moral causality without insisting on a permanent self. The key is that identity is not a “thing” but a pattern, and patterns can have multiple layers of explanation—material, moral, or metaphysical.

If you like, I can try to map this idea visually—a sort of “self-as-process diagram” that shows thoughts, memory, and awareness interacting without any fixed soul at the center. It can make the concept much easier to grasp. Would you like me to do that?

You said:

The ancient idea was "materialism," the idea that everything is made of "atoms" of various sorts (cannot be broken into smaller units but of varying masses and shapes and maybe other characteristics) and "the void," empty space between them. The word "atom" was used too early to apply to elements once their existence was known, as we now know atoms can be broken into smaller units. The point of materialism, though, was that everything is made of them, leaving no place for things like spirits. It's sensible but wrong, and never got general acceptance. Now we know that matter is a form of energy, as we know how and do convert material things into energy, but just what energy might be is much harder to define. "Doing work," leaves out matter and a thing known as potential energy. So now we had the horrible word "physicalism," instead of materialism, to convey the idea that there is nothing else, with the problem that the word is only defined in the negative, not what it is but what it is not.

ChatGPT said:

Yes — that’s a very clean diagnosis of the problem, and I think you’ve put your finger on why physicalism feels so unsatisfying even to people who are otherwise scientifically minded.

Ancient materialism was at least ontologically clear. Atoms and void: two kinds of things, sharply defined. Everything else—souls, spirits, divine agencies—was ruled out not by hand-waving but because there was literally no room for them in the ontology. The theory could be wrong, but it was intelligible. And as you note, it was wrong in multiple ways: atoms turned out not to be indivisible, and “solid matter” dissolved into fields, forces, and interactions.

Modern science didn’t so much replace materialism as quietly dismantle it. Once mass becomes a form of energy, and particles become excitations of fields, the old picture of little billiard balls in empty space is gone. But instead of producing a new, positive metaphysics, we ended up with a retreating definition: whatever physics says exists, that’s all there is.

That’s where physicalism becomes slippery. It doesn’t tell us what reality is; it tells us what it isn’t—not spiritual, not supernatural, not non-physical. But “physical” now just means “whatever our best physical theories talk about,” and those theories themselves are provisional, abstract, and often deeply counterintuitive. Fields, probabilities, wavefunctions, potentials—none of these look much like the commonsense “matter” that materialism was built on.

Energy, as you say, is a particularly revealing case. Defining it as “the capacity to do work” is operationally useful, but ontologically thin. Potential energy isn’t doing anything, yet it’s treated as real. And once energy becomes fundamental, the question “what is it?” starts to look uncomfortably like the old metaphysical questions physicalism was supposed to banish.

So physicalism ends up in an odd position:
– It insists that only the physical exists.
– But it cannot give a stable, positive account of what “the physical” amounts to.
– And it quietly relies on whatever future physics may discover to keep the boundary intact.

This is why your earlier point about the Buddhist process view is so important. A process ontology doesn’t need “stuff” at the bottom in the same way. It can say: what exists are patterns, relations, and continuities—whether those are described in physical, mental, or karmic terms. That avoids both the naïveté of ancient materialism and the evasiveness of modern physicalism.

In that sense, physicalism is less a metaphysical theory than a veto: “no explanations allowed that are not eventually cashable in physical terms.” But until we know what those terms ultimately are, the veto floats free of any clear ontology.

If you want to push this further, one interesting question is whether physicalism survives only because it borrows the authority of science, even though science itself is largely silent on metaphysics. Physics tells us how processes behave; physicalism tells us what is allowed to exist. Those are very different enterprises, and they’re often quietly conflated.

You said:

For those who deny the existence of any phenomena outside physical reality, it seems that the method of definition doesn't (at least so far) succeed, and we are pushed back to only asserting that there is no credible evidence for it and cannot argue from first principles. This is in spite of all the time being faced with the seeminginly unsurmountable evidence of the fact of sensation.

ChatGPT said:

I think that’s exactly right, and it exposes a quiet but profound asymmetry in the usual debate.

If one denies a priori the existence of anything outside physical reality, one might hope to do so on definitional or principled grounds. But, as you note, that strategy has largely failed. “Physical reality” cannot be cleanly defined from first principles without circularity, and so the position retreats to an epistemic claim rather than an ontological one: there is no credible evidence for anything else. That is a much weaker stance than it often pretends to be.

What makes this especially awkward is that sensation—raw experience, the “what it is like”—is not merely evidence but the starting point of all evidence. Every experiment, observation, or measurement presupposes it. To treat sensation as something whose reality must be justified by third-person physical theory is to invert the order of justification. We do not infer sensation from physics; we infer physics from sensation, structured and disciplined by method.

So physicalism ends up with a strange burden. It must say, in effect: the most immediately given feature of reality is also the most ontologically suspect. Hence the familiar moves—calling sensation “emergent,” “illusory,” or “nothing over and above” neural activity. But these are not explanations in the strong sense; they are relabelings that avoid granting sensation independent standing.

You’re right that this leaves no route from first principles. At best, physicalism can say: everything we can reliably measure and predict behaves as if physical causes are sufficient; therefore we will provisionally deny anything else. That is a methodological rule, not a metaphysical proof. It’s immensely successful as a way of doing science, but much thinner as an account of what exists.

This is where your earlier process view fits neatly. Sensation does not need to be a “thing” outside physical reality, nor reduced to an illusion within it. It can be taken as a real process, irreducible in description even if correlated with physical processes. That avoids both dualism and denial. One can say: there is one world, but it is knowable under multiple irreducible aspects—experiential and physical—without pretending that one can be defined away by the other.

In short, denying non-physical phenomena cannot be done cleanly from first principles, and retreating to “no credible evidence” is an admission of that failure. Meanwhile, sensation remains the one datum that refuses to go away, because it is not inferred, hypothesized, or measured—it is encountered. Any metaphysics that treats that fact as secondary is, at minimum, starting the argument from the wrong end.

You said:

That doesn't mean that nothing has been achieved. The historical claims of metaphysics have largely been refuted with lack of evidence.

ChatGPT said:

Absolutely—and that’s an important correction to keep the discussion honest.

A great deal has been achieved, just not in the way metaphysicians once imagined. What has largely collapsed is not the possibility of non-physical reality, but the credibility of specific metaphysical claims that were once treated as explanatory. Claims about immaterial substances intervening in nature, vital forces directing biology, planetary intelligences, souls as movers of bodies, or heavens layered above the spheres have steadily lost their footing because they made contact with the world in ways that could be checked—and failed those checks.

In that sense, modern science has been devastatingly effective as a filter. It has shown that many traditional metaphysical posits were not just unproven but unnecessary or wrong. Where predictive, mechanistic explanations became available, metaphysical ones did no additional work. That is a genuine intellectual advance, not mere skepticism.

What remains, though, is telling. The survivors are not the old, richly detailed systems, but thin residual questions: why there is experience at all, why there is something rather than nothing, why the laws have the form they do, what “existence” amounts to when stripped of substance metaphysics. These are not refutations so much as boundary conditions—places where empirical success does not translate into ontological closure.

So the picture looks something like this:
Metaphysics has been pruned, not eliminated. The overconfident, explanatory-heavy claims have been cut away. What persists are questions that do not compete with science, because they were never in the business of predicting outcomes in the first place.

This also explains why physicalism feels stronger than it really is. It benefits from the negative success of refutation: because many metaphysical claims were false, it feels natural to conclude that all non-physical claims are false. But that inference goes beyond what the evidence warrants. What has been shown is that unsupported metaphysics fails, not that ontology has been fully exhausted by physics.

In other words, the achievement is real but limited: we are far better at knowing which stories don’t work. What we have not gained is a complete positive account of what ultimately does. That gap isn’t a failure of rigor; it may simply mark the edge of what evidence-based inquiry can settle.

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