I am (or was) a physicist. Even scientific revolutions like Relativity and Quantum mechanics don't invalidate 'most' of our prior understanding. Newtonian mechanics continues to be a very accurate model on the length scales that were testable at time it was conceived (apples and trees). The Relativity and Quantum Mechanics revolutions explained why classical mechanics breaks down at the scale of planets and atoms respectively. All that is invalidated is the idea that the current model is universal, but that would be naive thing to believe at any time. Scientific progress does not mean the prior results are wrong, it's an additive process, if done correctly.
It is not unscientific to speculate on how things may be - without that, there would be no hypotheses.
Lucas's argument claims that materialism is false, so Udo is within his logical rights to assume otherwise -- it would be begging the question to insist he cannot do that.
None of this makes any progress on the question of whether Lucas' argument is valid and sound.
Would this describe the world of physics prior to Einstein and Quantum Mechanics? I'm not a physicist, but my impressions is that it absolutely was "something extraordinary that invalidates most of our current understanding."
> Whenever there are unknowns in our scientific understanding (and I'm sure we'll have more than enough of those for aeons to come), it has so far not been fruitful to offer magical external influences as the explanation.
Sure, offering magical solutions is not any better, and explanations based on current scientific understanding are likely more correct than magical explanation, but - that doesn't mean that the scientific explanation is the truth, but rather that it's simply a more useful theory.
This is also not mentioning the problem of induction, which is an entirely different and deeper conversation.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/
> By contrast I am making the claim that whatever gaps we have in our theory about minds will eventually turn out to be an extension of what we already know, as opposed to some revolutionary but as of yet unseen aspect of the universe. My claim is small, yours is quite large and also seems vague to me.
Again, the history of science would show otherwise. Did anyone in 1800 predict quantum mechanics? It seems naive to assume that science will never upend our fundamental view of the world.
My claim is simply that of the scientific method itself: observational knowledge is useful for constructing our current best view of the world, but it is simply that: our current best. Extrapolating that into statements about reality itself is a non-scientific act and is only common because agnosticism is such a nebulous difficult position for humans to hold.