quantum physics Fallacy here? And any others?

I will try to keep it as short as possible as it was a long take with respect to an argument that was inspired vie the book "The outsider test for faith" by John Loftus. 

Them: 

my contention is that contrary to the secular worldview, science and reason actually favors the existence of God-like entity

Me: 

Care to elaborate?

Them:

to get this out of the way first, materialism is most certainly wrong. it fails to cohere well with certain evidences and, most fatally, fails to account for subjective experience, which is reality's sole given on the scientific side: (1) quantum mechanics strongly implies physical reality only exists insofar as it is observed. (2) Donald Hoffman's interface theory of perception indicates that evolution by natural selection causes an organism to not perceive reality as it is, but to perceive a heavily interpreted construction thereof that is fit for survival. that means what we see (a material world) is not what reality is actually like in of itself. and (3), the strong evidence for parapsychological phenomena makes no sense under a materialist paradigm
 
 
on the logical side, materialism simply makes no damn sense. how can an abstract substance (viz. physical substance,) that is completely reducible to quantities and their relationships give rise, much less be identical to, qualitative consciousness? there is nothing about mass, spin, charge, momentum, etc. that betrays any information about subjective experience from first principles
 
it's clear that the hard problem of consciousness hasn't been solved yet because it isn't a problem to be solved in the first place; the very assumptions that generate it are the real problem. consciousness is fundamental, not quantum fields and spacetime  
 
 
and thus, we get to idealism
 
 
my own idealism is an objective monistic idealism that takes heavy inspiration from Bernardo Kastrup's own analytic idealism. Kastrup proposes that there's only one mind that pervades all of reality -- or, rather, it is reality
 
 
the appearance of separate individual minds is just that, an appearance; illusion. the cause of this illusion is a dissociative process
 
 
essentially, this one mind is undergoing something very similar to Dissociative Identity Disorder (it's not pathological though, i'm not implying that). we know that DID is a real thing btw, there's been sufficient enough studies done on it that we can be certain about it. the idea that this one mind is going through a similar thing is a simple extrapolation. 

 

This was a job for chatGPT:

There are several conceptual, logical, and scientific issues with the statement you've provided. Below is a breakdown of the most significant ones, organized by theme:

 
1. Category Errors and Misinterpretation of Physics
Quantum Mechanics
Claim: "Quantum mechanics strongly implies physical reality only exists insofar as it is observed."
Issue: This interpretation, often associated with the "consciousness causes collapse" idea, is not a consensus view among physicists. It's one of many interpretations (e.g., Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, decoherence theory), and none have definitively demonstrated that consciousness is required for wavefunction collapse. The claim overstates what QM tells us about reality.
 
2. Misuse of Evolutionary Theory
Donald Hoffman's Interface Theory
Claim: "Evolution causes us to perceive only what’s useful, not what's true."
Issue: Hoffman's theory is speculative and not widely accepted in evolutionary biology or cognitive science. It presents an intriguing idea — that perception is tuned for fitness, not truth — but doesn't logically or empirically entail that all perception is illusory or that material reality doesn't exist. Also, the theory doesn't logically lead to idealism.
 
3. Overreliance on Parapsychology
Claim: "Strong evidence for parapsychological phenomena makes no sense under a materialist paradigm."
Issue: The evidence for parapsychology remains highly controversial. The field is often criticized for methodological weaknesses, lack of reproducibility, and publication bias. Most mainstream scientists do not accept parapsychological findings as established. Using them as a foundational argument against materialism is shaky.
 
4. Conceptual Confusion Around "Materialism"
Claim: "Materialism cannot account for subjective experience."
Issue: This is a common critique and part of the “hard problem of consciousness.” However, it’s not accurate to say materialism "makes no sense." Physicalist theories (e.g., integrated information theory, predictive processing, illusionism, etc.) offer various models to explain consciousness. These may be incomplete, but declaring them nonsensical is an overreach.
The argument also commits a category error by contrasting “abstract substance” with "qualitative experience" without explaining the bridge. Many philosophers see this as a challenge, not a refutation.
 
5. Unfalsifiable Metaphysics
Claim: "There is only one mind dissociating into many."
Issue: Idealism, especially the kind proposed by Kastrup, is metaphysical and unfalsifiable — it doesn’t make clear predictions or allow for empirical testing. This makes it philosophically interesting but scientifically inert.
The analogy with DID is metaphorical and speculative, not based on any biological mechanism that could scale to cosmology. It risks anthropomorphizing the universe without basis.
 
6. Logical Leap from Problem to Paradigm Shift
Claim: "The hard problem of consciousness isn't a real problem; consciousness is fundamental."
Issue: This is a non sequitur. Saying a problem is unsolved doesn’t justify reversing the ontology. There’s no logical or empirical necessity that consciousness must be primary just because we haven’t fully explained it yet. That’s an argument from ignorance.

 
That said, idealism can be a legitimate metaphysical position — but the argument needs to be much stronger, more precise, and grounded in logic rather than in cherry-picked or speculative interpretations of science.

Hi, Jack!

My understanding is that the quotations are a response that a person made to a John-Loftus-inspired argument. Little work is required here. 

In order for a collection of sentences to exist as an argument, each sentence in that collection must be a reasonably unambiguous, declarative sentence. “Unambiguous” means that the sentence clearly expresses exactly one statement. It is unclear why there is no “a” prior to the term “God-like entity”, and it is unclear what the term “God-like entity” is suppose to capture. (Consider how the number six is immaterial and exists outside of space and time. Those seem like God-like characteristics. Superman is marvelously powerful. That seems God-like. A pet cat may give you a sense of purpose and provide unconditional love. That’s God-like.) Due to this, there is no argument for the contention.

The importance of dispelling ambiguity is observed in practice, Jack, by noticing that secularism does not state or imply that there is no God-like entity, depending on how you interpret what is takes to be God-like. For instance, a being who gives you purpose and shows you unconditional love may be interpreted as being “God-like entity” and is compatible with secularism. Moreover, science and reason do not favor “God-like entity”, depending on how you interpret such a term. Scientific evidence doesn’t favor a perfectly moral entity, for instance, if that is part of the interpretation of God-likeness. As for reason, reason can favor contradictory interpretations of what counts as God-likeness (Aristotle and Aquinas both had reasons to believe in an entity that they believe is God-like, though both of their entities cannot exist at the same time and in the same sense, and both of their reasonings cannot be sound at the same time and in the same sense.) Thus, non-ambiguous sentences are required in order for an argument to exist and must precede the identification (telling whether a collection of sentences is an argument or not), analysis (recognizing the parts of an argument and how they connect to each other) and evaluation (telling whether an argument is good or bad) of an argument. 

The ambiguity is useful in persuading listeners, since if the person intends for his contention to refer to God—and for whatever reason he is just shy about being so frank—then although this creates an unambiguous sentence, what too becomes plain to the eye is that the main argument which would appear for that contention out of the quotations that you have provided would be fallacious. The argument would be fallacious because from the fact that science and reason show that materialism is false, it would not follow that science and reason favor that God exists. For all that this shows, science and reason favor neither materialism nor the existence of God. Also, from the fact that science and reason show that objective monistic idealism is true, it would not follow that science and reason favor the existence of God. For all that this shows, science and reason favor that the one mind pervading all of reality is finite, or even hardly different than a human mind. 

In sum, the contention is too ambiguous. Argumentation, and the logical study of an argument, such as testing it for fallacies, requires reasonably unambiguous, declarative sentences. If the person intends to refer to God, then the ambiguity was convenient, seeing how the main argument would commit the fallacy of non sequitur in two places: science and reason may favor neither materialism nor that God exists, and may favor both objective monistic idealism and a finite mind, for all that the person has shown. 

Thank you, Jack.

From, Kaiden