I have no idea why my immediate reaction to your post was just to smile and feel happy ..... but there it isundefineable wrote:
Perhaps a full understanding of materialist philosophy demands some element of enlightenment to the nature of reality . Anyway, I used the s since I can't see how a purely mental process *simply is* a purely physical one - in other words, perhaps I'm an 'epic fail' at materialism . The two parallel processes might be different aspects of the same underlying phenomenon, as I get the impression they might be said to be (more s) in Dzogchen (more of that in a distant future lifetime in my case), but one wonders how much religious faith might be involved in adopting atheist materialism as one's worldview - how much turning a blind eye to one's own apprehending of reality in favour of a unifying theory that irons out the contradictions without demanding a higher level of understanding. There seems even less sense in claiming 'there is matter but no awareness' (and it's interesting that materialist philosophers like Dan Dennett were avoiding such unqualified claims the last time I looked ) than there is in claiming something like 'the meaning of life is that Jesus died for our sins' - The former denies both our common experience and any means by which we might have that experience, while the latter appears as just a kooky flight of fancy. As definitive statements made outside any particular context or perspective, it would be a fair guess that both are gobbledegook
Anyway,
And you are right of course