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The first part is a subjective view. I could say that most parents expecting to see all their children to reach adulthood is a meaningful change to the human condition that's less than a century old, or that steroids trade health for fitness in a way the two couldn't be meaningfully opposed in Socrates' time, but we'll likely never agree on what counts as meaningful. I think merely massively improving the human condition counts for a lot. You do also mix this with measurable aspects, as in the linked post, where you are just factually wrong.
I could argue that coveting built most of our modern prosperity and lust is why most of us are even around, by looking at the evolutionary basis for these feelings. That they have negative effects as well doesn't say what the total sign is.
I continue to not care about what outlandish predictions past materialists made which failed to materialize. It is not an ideology that requires unity of thought among its adherents, I can evaluate individual predictions under my own materialist framework. No form of materialism I respect has promised mind control rays. It's still unclear to me what your problem with the quoted original passage is. The importance is obviously subjective, but evolution by natural selection very much explains the cause of human impulses in a way unavailable before.
I agree that framing Bayesian priors in exact percentages is generally disingenuous, but that doesn't make the entire approach so. Enough people I know and respect claiming miracles would make me significantly question my understanding of the world. A non-negligible part of the internet ratsphere turning catholic mildly made me do so, my understanding of internet rationalists a lot more than my understanding of religion though.
I have no idea how decapitation is supposed to show that the brain is the seat of consciousness over the heart, for example. Trepanation being used for mental illnesses is a much better example. But I do think there's a significant difference between using alcohol as a black box and knowing it's one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GABAA_receptor_positive_allosteric_modulator, knowing the chemical actions by which it inhibits neuron activity and knowing that your altered conscious state is caused by inhibited neuron activity. Yes, going from this to explaining how being drunk makes you feel is a very long way, but I think it's a step in the right direction and I still don't care if some people claimed they could make the entire journey in a couple of decades or whatever.
Plenty of people on this board often complain about the deleterious effect of the superstimulus that is modern entertainment, so presumably they would vehemently disagree with your assessment. I think modern disney is mostly a massive tangle of principal-agent problems.
For the soul, I mean a metaphysical answer to the hard problem. I think most religious peoples conception of a soul fits this description. So zero drugs affecting your conscious experience would be evidence for a soul. As is, many drugs do affect it, so it does in fact have physical properties and interactions.
Yes, compatibilism is equally currently unfalsifiable as any test would have to prove one version of free will over the other. I'm just saying it's a perfectly coherent model of why I experience free will, so this experience in no way contradicts materialism.
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