My "blah-Popper" comment was a joke/self-deprecating to my argue. I agree that non-falsifiability isn't strictly sufficient grounds to dismiss something, but it is a curious smell.

Edit- crap, I'm pretty new at actually participating in HN comments, I don't think I followed chain properly

I would tend to agree with your claim "the latter statement, though, seems much more reasonable of an assumption", but that does not give any particular reason to think that minds are examples of such phenomena.

Certainly not, my only goal is to assert that it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

Yes, the uncertainty of what can be known and the arbitrariness of empiricism make a wonderfully powerful hypothesis generator, allowing one to hypothesize against not only unverified hypotheses, but also against any claim that any given hypothesis has been empirically verified. One can, for example, employ it to say that it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that the apparent global pandemic is not being caused by a virus, or that homo sapiens did not evolve from other species.

I mean that’s getting into the point of being unnecessarily facetious.

If something is true from an empirical perspective that is one thing. It is another thing to say that even though we have been unable to form a conclusion from an empirical point of view, the ultimate ability to do so is given, and that all hypothesis that cannot be tested in such manner must be completely disregarded, even if they make sense.

My post was influenced by your comment about absolute empiricism being magical thinking. Now, you did qualify ‘empiricism’ with ‘absolute’, but the author of the post to which you were replying seemed to be adopting a pragmatic form of empiricism, much like the one you have adopted in the first part of your last post. It seems to me that bringing up ‘absolute empricism’ here seems to be something of a straw man (though maybe the original post was edited before I saw it.)

FWIW, I completely agree with that person’s view that saying “Well, it’s not physical” to the question of what a mind is and how it works, is a non-answer that avoids the question. Materialism has not answered that question ether, but it is a double standard to deprecate only materialism on that basis, as the author of this thread’s root post did.

The philosophy of mind seems to me to be hobbled by its fascination with zombie arguments, which are rather cleverly constructed to persuade one that a philosopher’s metaphysical speculation is a stronger guide to how the universe is than any amount of empirical physical evidence.