The term "promissory materialism" makes it seems as if there is some sort of "promises-delivered immaterialism." Could someone post links to those articles?
~~ Paul
The point is, that science should simply acknowledge those issues where it can't supply an adequate explanation. It is invalid to argue that because some approach worked in a very vaguely analogous situation, it must work again in future. It is invalid to talk as if the future of science is known, and that a certain approach must work given time.
Materialism doesn't want to admit fresh - fundamentally different ontological primitives (to use your phrase). Yet I think science has actually developed enormously by doing just that! Immaterialists (I am starting to write like you - but your words don't always spell check!) can't seem to let go enough to even speculate freely about what it would mean to accept mind as another fundamental component of the universe.
The reason we want to include mind as an irreducible component, is that so many phenomena seem to be hardly described at all by materialist science. Mind and matter seem to be orthogonal (loosely speaking) - something that affects mind - e.g. a poem - may do next to nothing physically, and that poem can be written on paper, or a metal sheet, or in sand, and it will have the same effect.
I am not religious, and I haven't had any significant ψ experiences, but the above argument seems at the core of my feeling that mind is fundamental, and that when people report NDE's in situations in which it is stupid to argue that some residual brain action is taking place, they are probably telling us something important.
Regarding all those famous fine tuning of physics arguments, I can't help wondering if they arise in a very different way. That we started out as purely mental beings, but our desire to explain our existence physically has gradually created the physical universe we know, but 'we' needed those finely tuned constants just to get those theories to work -
but we could have devised other theories, and the external world would have gradually come to look that way instead!
Indeed, maybe we 'created' life back in the days when we were purely mental, rather like people now create all sorts of abstract 'mechanisms' and then play with them.
David