Ha?

Materialists argue in favour of a multiverse despite the fact that they have no experience or knowledge of it, indeed no evidence of it at all. They argue in favour of a multiverse because it is not implausible.

By the same token it is not implausible that the pinnacle of material complexity contained in our brains can generate phenomena beyond our knowledge and general experience, such as a level of consciousness which no longer depends on its physical origins.

Perhaps human beings mark the point where consciousness expands from being totally contained in the brain, as for animals, to becoming partly independent of it.

I would say that how exactly we form concepts is unknown. What consciousness is, is also unknown. But whenever people report having ideas, thinking, dreaming ad so on, there is neural activity occurring. Whether something more than neural activity is going on, is also unknown and not established by the neural activity or the subjective reporting of it.

As for abstraction, I do not see anything mysterious. Labelling a marble "1" is an abstraction, identifying properties of the marble as a category of marble seems pretty straightforward. Through very simple processes such as this we can get to incredibly complex systems as we have shown in the few decades since we have been tinkering with artificial intelligence. We now have built minds that can beat any human at chess, draw pictures of observed images smell better than us, see and hear more. That can dance. To be sure these devices pale in comparison to what evolved in us over 500 million years, but give us a few more decades and I expect we will have computers who are indistinguishable from human cognition.

Anyways, always a pleasure conversing with you. I think we are near to beating this one to death!

When we form concepts or see the forms of things it is subjective in the sense that it happens in our intellects but it is objective in that it really does capture something true in the real world.

I think an important question is how can we abstract from material things if we ourselves are merely matter?

If a concept, such as any generalization, is not immaterial, then what is it made of? What, for example, is the concept "chipmunk" composed of?

I do not think it is implausible, I think it is virtually certain that we cannot completely measure all physical or material phenomena. This is not an issue for the brain but all matter. See Heisenberg's uncertainly principle.

This means we lack knowledge. I don't know about plausibility, I'd say we are simply not in a position to place probabilities on what is happening on some level we cannot observe directly or indirectly.

Immaterialism is not impossible, maybe. I don't know that either. I don't know if it is plausible or probable. Our ignorance of it does not entail it. Our subjective experience that is demonstrably related to material also does no entail it.

Again from a strictly materialist point of view, it is not implausible that a very high degree of material complexity contained in the brain can produce phenomena which we cannot measure because we are only equal to and not superior to the thing which is producing the phenomena.

We can observe the phenomena a simple structure like a star produces because we are far superior to a star in terms of complexity, but we cannot observe all the phenomena created by our brains because we are not superior to them and therefore lack the means to do so.

As you say, we only have a subjective feeling that we are more than our bodies in the face of all observation that we are our bodies. This could be because our observations are limited. All we have with which to study our brains are our brains.

I have an open mind and, like you, I agree we do not know. I am responding to the claims made by theists that we indeed do know that there is something immaterial that this something includes something called a soul and this should can, in some way, allow me to have eternal life in my own somehow reconstituted physical body.

What is the justification for this? The subjective feeling that we are more than our bodies in the face of all observation that we are our bodies. Ancient texts that also feature talking donkeys. I'm saying our ignorance and feelings are insufficient to ground these claims.

I don't accept premise 2. Nor is there anything in this which makes the immaterial ontologically necessary. The I. Arterial in this is contingent on the existence of the beings that do this and the truth of the premises.