I discuss what physical means in many places. Including in this article:

“physical things include stuff other than matter, like events, photons, gravity, and spacetime … [hence] “physicalism” [w]hich is a subset of Naturalism, the view that nothing supernatural exists. There are non-physicalist naturalisms (e.g. Platonic Naturalism). But all scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports physicalist naturalism.”

I leave further definition to the recommended books, as they all take different approaches. It isn’t true that they never demarcate what physicalism is (as against what it is not). So you evidently are not reading those books carefully (if at all).

But if you want to know mine, it’s in my own book, Sense and Goodness without God. The first reduction is “everything mental reduces to the nonmental” (that eliminates supernaturalism and leaves naturalism) and the second reduction is “everything nonmental is arrangements of matter-energy in spacetime” (that eliminates nonphysicalist naturalisms, e.g. epiphenomenalism or naturalist Platonism, and leaves physicalism, where everything reduces to mindless stuff in spacetime).

Thank you. That’s a useful link. I’ll put it in my own UFO article making the same point!

https://youtu.be/sZYSjqr6mIc?si=C5NiPWZpk0CeE7fx

cheers

So, those are just general summaries of the idea of decolonial philosophy overall, and do not discuss any specific position on what “religious knowledge” is or in what sense it can be true on existing observations. So those don’t relate to your question.

As for the entire idea of decolonial philosophy, as your own links show, this describes a whole congeries of conflicting theories and ideas and thus does not actually designate anything we can evaluate.

You have to pick a specific, actual claim. Then that specific, actual claim can be assessed.

Otherwise it’s just handwaving.

For example, if the question is “Does objective knowledge exist?” then you have to get into what “objective” even means in a sentence like that. In that case see Objective Moral Facts for a start on the question.

Or if the questioned statement is “If objective knowledge does not exist, then anything I want to be true is therefore true,” then you can disprove that statement in five minutes sitting at your desk. Though in Jordan Peterson fashion, someone trying to argue it with you will likely play dishonest word games with what the words “knowledge” and “truth” mean, but all you have to do is reject their bogus framing to catch them at that game (and this is exactly what happened to Peterson at Jubilee).

Thank you.

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Thank you for your reply, Dr Carrier. I’m asking because I’m having a hard time knowing if this makes sense or not. Here are some links so you can see what it is all about:

https://opiniaofilosofica.org/index.php/opiniaofilosofica/article/download/1082/877 (Abstract, Introduction, 1 and 1.2.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization_of_knowledge
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/04/13/epistemicide-intellectual-genocide-and-eurocentric-modernity/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/situated-knowledge
https://www.meer.com/en/81190-decolonizing-knowledge-boaventura-de-sousa-santos-vision

It depends on what a vacuous deepity like that is supposed to mean.

Religious knowledge consists of knowledge of institutions, cultures, and false beliefs. That is not only compatible with scientific knowledge, we have whole sciences that study it (psychology of religion, sociology of religion, anthropology of religion, history of religion, philosophy of religion, etc.). And that’s not a “decolonial” idea. It’s been a standard idea in analytical philosophy for a century now.

If, however, he means false beliefs could be “true” (like that God or magic or souls exist) then he’s simply wrong.

Agreed. My point is that I can grant for the sake of argument a state of affairs where supervenience (a mind that is built such that essential functions are tied in with qualia) is a property of some but not all minds. And while eventually someone needs to get to an answer to “Why did the universe work out such that its boundary conditions would produce that mix of outcomes”, a universe that, say, due to a peculiarity of some particular minor quantum field we have yet to detect, will produce a mix of 60% of physical minds with qualia and 40% of physical minds without qualia, is not remotely odd to be our universe. If we then got into our Alcubierre drives and met a bunch of aliens and 60% of them had qualia and 40% didn’t, well, we’d have interesting conversations with those non-qualia aliens (and I think you make a strong case that such aliens would probably inevitably install qualia anyways because why not).

Heck, I don’t even think the reasoning needs to be quantum. As an analogy: I can imagine a state of affairs where there’s a sapient species that emerged sapience without needing eyes because they were basically cave squids using chemical, tactile and other mechanisms to detect things, and they are blind. If we encountered that species in our travels, the research project would just be “Oh, cool, what’s the evolutionary research project to explain why your conditions led to that”?

In the same way, a macroscopic evolutionary explanation that lays out rigorous conditions for why X% of big meaty macroscopic sapience-producing brains produce minds with qualia and why Y% don’t (some processing cost that is worth paying in some contexts but not others) would perfectly answer the question. “We have qualia because our evolutionary conditions dictated it”. There’s no special additional research question beyond that aside from the trivial “Trying to solve the causal history of the entire universe”.

In actuality, I suspect that hypothetically available schemes of qualia for sapient species are probably quite broad even under our physics, even as I agree that you’re almost certainly right that qualia logically will cohere in any organism remotely like us. Hell, I even agree that, even if we imagine a thinking module that doesn’t ever need to process sensory information with some kind of differentiation it can relate to and use, it will still likely have emotional differentiation in terms of antipathies and heuristics.