All that follows is WJM’s:
Modern physics has long ago disproved the idea that “matter” exists at all. Timothy’s position might as well be that because we all perceive the sun moving through the sky from east to west, it is a fact that it is the sun that is doing the moving.
Just because we perceive a world of what we call “matter” doesn’t change the fact that we know no such world actually exists regardless of what our perception tells us. What we call “matter” is a perceptual interpretation of something that is not, in any meaningful sense, “matter”. We know now (current science) that matter is, at its root, entirely “immaterial”, despite what our macro sensory perceptions have told us for millennia (like the sun moving through the sky).
Materialists are clinging to a pre-Victorian perspective of what it is we are perceiving, long since discarded after over a hundred years of experimental results.
Now we get to the so-called “material-immaterial interaction problem”. First, there is no “material world,” so it’s problematic to begin with a term that draws from an archaic, unscientific understanding of what it is we are perceiving.
Second, has the “material-material” interaction problem even been addressed, much less “solved”? We have absolutely no idea **how** “matter” interacts with other “matter”. We can describe the behavior of that interaction, then use a term to refer to that model as if that term was an actual “thing”, but describing the behavior is not explaining the **how** of the interaction.
When so-called dualism objectors can first explain matter/matter interaction, and when they can tell us what they mean by “material” and “immaterial”, they will then have a meaningful foundation to form a cogent objection to the idea of material/immaterial interaction.
Any materialist here up to that very basic task?