> Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. I've never seen any recourse other th

> Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order. Usually it's something along the lines of emergent behavior, but no mechanism is ever given for how or why said emergence occurs This seems pretty bad faith, I'd imagine you're getting lost for other reasons. For one, inanimate matter probably needs to be animate before it can think. Secondly, perhaps the difficulty in explaining the mechanism comes from the fact that materialists are honest about the uncertainties of this (extremely difficult) problem and are burdened with an epistemology that requires evidence from the actual world, unlike other approaches.