I hope you enjoyed your toast, but what I have to say here might not be quite so palatable. Let's start with the cooking example, as it epitomizes the difficul

I hope you enjoyed your toast, but what I have to say here might not be quite so palatable. Let's start with the cooking example, as it epitomizes the difficulty in all of them. What you call "the classic materialist move" - to just say "yeah but it's just flour, water, and yeast" - is a rather simplistic parody of the full physical description of the process, and it does not even begin on the explanation of the process that science can give. A materialist would have no problem with saying that bread is different from its ingredients, whether considered either separately or collectively, and she could go along with calling this an ontological difference. The thing, though, is this: just because flour, water, and yeast are physical things, and they have now been turned into something that is in a different ontological category - namely bread, or baked goods - it does not follow that this bread cannot be a physical substance, and this argument provides no justification for the premise that it is not. At this point, you may be thinking that you had no intention of saying bread is nonphysical, but if so, then that only emphasizes the point, as, in the rest of your analogies, you are doing the equivalent of exactly that (for example, concepts of sound are not ontologically the same as sound waves and the latter are physical, and from this, it is supposed to follow that the former are not.) The general schema here is this invalid syllogism: Major premise: X is physical. Minor premise: Concepts of X are not in the same ontological category as X itself. Conclusion: Concepts of X are not physical. Once we remove the ineffective ontological argument from your posts, all we have is a number of claims that mental phenomena cannot be physical phenomena, presented without any reason given to think they are true, and in the parallel thread where I am debating geye1234 [1] I explained why, for a conclusion of this sort to be taken as a fact - i.e., a justified true belief - you need to give readers a reason to think your conclusion is justified, which in turn means giving them a reason to think its premises are. By the way, what is potential matter, as opposed to the alternatives of raw and physical matter? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42345089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42345089 , 3rd. paragraph.