[Retric]

> I don't think one's opinion on the Catholic Church could be said to be "foundational"–for the vast majority of people.

> Some might.

I’m not saying these specific beliefs are foundational for everyone that holds them or even that those people would label them as foundational, just that they preform that function for some people. Being American is a huge part of some peoples identity and largely irrelevant to others.

It could their job, politics, culture, hobby, or even taste in music etc. But many people seem to crystalize around some external concept. It’s not as clear as I’m a “vegan” or “Republican” therefore I believe all these things, but identifying as something seems to have knock on effects. Someone thinks of themselves as having made it into an higher economic status and suddenly they have options about wrist watches or whatever. People will not just own a PlayStation/BMW/whatever but reject competing brands and think this then implies other things about themselves.

[skissane]

Maybe we are using "foundational" somewhat differently?

You start talking about "foundational beliefs", and I immediately think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundationalism – maybe that's a consequence of having studied philosophy at university

I doubt many people derive their beliefs from a hobby or taste in music. You can find people who share the same hobby or like the same music, even while their views on politics / religion / social issues / etc are at complete opposite ends of the spectrum.

[Retric]

Foundationalusm assumes an internal logic to people’s belief systems that simply doesn’t hold up in practice.

People don’t decide the big questions to build up a belief system from the ground up. Instead they work from the middle of a web of beliefs. Arguably the true foundations of belief are things like object permanence which we discover as infants. Ie: Closing my eyes doesn’t make something go away.

Older kids ask questions like “what’s the point of life?” and get culturally appropriate responses from parents, religious leaders, TV or whatever. They don’t ask about things like materialisms vs dualisms vs idealisms until they are even older and have built up a complex web of interlocking beliefs.

[skissane]

> Older kids ask questions like “what’s the point of life?” and get culturally appropriate responses from parents, religious leaders, TV or whatever. They don’t ask about things like materialisms vs dualisms vs idealisms until they are even older and have built up a complex web of interlocking beliefs.

Sure, few people will hear about “materialism” or “dualism” or “idealism” as philosophical theories until adulthood, if that. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t presumed by a lot of things ordinary people say, and which children and adolescents end up hearing.

Someone who says “there is no afterlife: there is no scientific evidence for it” is effectively presuming materialism, even if they don’t know what “materialism” is. (Many people only know “materialism” as “excessive emphasis on material goods”, not the philosophy of mind sense.)

[Retric]

I agree, my point is that predisposition.

Though I can’t help but adding… You can have a non material world without having an afterlife (telekinesis or spells working) and you can have an afterlife in a material world (via active intervention and time travel).

So rather than materialism being foundational it can be thought of as a category that arises from more foundational beliefs.

[skissane]

> I agree, my point is that predisposition.

Well, I'd agree a lot of people choose ideas because of what they associate them with – as in, "religious people are boring and bigoted, science produces all these cool amazing new technologies, materialism is the science option and dualism/idealism are the religious options, so I'm picking materialism". From a strictly philosophical point of view, there are lots of holes in that argument – even if a non-materialist philosophy of mind is true, that does not in itself entail the truth of any particular religion, and (arguably) there are non-materialist philosophies of mind which are just as consistent with the results of contemporary science as materialism is – but, many people can't see those holes, so that kind of argument convinces them.

> Though I can’t help but adding… You can have a non material world without having an afterlife (telekinesis or spells working) and you can have an afterlife in a material world (via active intervention and time travel).

Telekinesis or spells could work in a perfectly material world. Imagine there was a swarm of nanobots which could read our minds, and are programmed to obey certain verbal commands – in such a world, telekinesis and spells would be completely real, but those facts would not in themselves make the world non-material. Furthermore, ideas such as Boltzmann brains and Poincaré recurrence suggest the possibility that an afterlife may be inevitable even in a purely material universe (although whether they actually do entail one gets into all kinds of complicated debates which I myself lack the competence to confidently decide.)

However, in another sense, my point stands. If materialism is true, it makes sense to identify the mind with the functioning brain, and hence to identify (presumably) irreversible brain death with the permanent cessation of the mind's existence; if materialism is false, that identification is a lot more open to question. With materialism, an afterlife is implausible, unless we rely on some highly speculative ideas (Boltzmann brains, Poincaré recurrence, simulation theory, etc). With idealism or dualism, an afterlife is much more probable, even without considering those kinds of ideas – if the mind does not necessarily depend on the brain for its existence, we have no strong reason to assume that the cessation of the latter must entail the cessation of the former.

[Retric]

> there are lots of holes in that argument

There’s holes in all kinds of things people believe. If you’re talking about actual belief systems then you can’t assume rational actors and logical thinking. Philosophy really doesn’t have the tools to explain what’s going on. We’re in the realm of psychology / neuroscience.

> to assume that cessation of the latter must entail the cessation of the former

Mind uploading blurs the line between life and afterlife because it wasn’t conceived of when those ideas were created.

IMO the conceptual framework that created the idea of a material world is really a delineation between magic rituals / religion and what people actually observed. The wacky nature of the observable universe is really orthogonal to the initial differentiation to the point where I think people would still talk about the material world in terms of things like fate and reincarnation even if spells worked.