What is materialism? It is known as other things like material reductionism and physicalism among others. It is the view that only one substance exists – matter – and that all reduces to matter. This is a faith-based position that is spreading wildly through the West as a reaction to oppressive Western religions. It is philosophically unsound and has no supporting evidence. Let at look at this.
1) The “evidence” for materialism is that doing something to the brain effects how consciousness comes through. Take a drug or a hammer to your head and you may start slurring, seeing things, hearing things, stumbling, etc. This is not evidence of materialism because it is also expected in more supported positions such as dualism and idealism, as we will see. It is the only support that materialism has presented thus far in its favor and it does not even actually suggest materialism itself. We will look at this more below.
2) The Law of Identity is the most basic and foundational law of logic and states that things with different properties cannot be identical – “A is A and not Non-A”. The material and conscious worlds have entirely different properties, including but not limited to (respectively); being spacial vs. not taking up space, being objective and being subjective, being universally accessible and being wholly private, and many more. We can illustrate this by looking at a brain, having others see it as well, and measuring the space taken up by the brain. Now imagine your fantasy man/woman standing in the room before you. Does she take up space? Can others see her? Are the traits that make her “perfect” objective? Of course not, because matter and consciousness have different properties, and so thinking matter causes the mind is a violation of the most basic logic.
3) Our own conscious experience is the one thing we know directly, and everything else we know of depends on us being conscious beings. This includes matter. So to reduce consciousness to matter reduces the one thing we know with certainty to something that we know through it. This is unreasonable.
4) Things like cognitive science prove the mind can override the brain. Self-regulation, internal coping skills, bio-feedback, meditation – all are conscious and willful acts that override the material body. This can be seen such as in a depression patient recognizing a depressed episode coming on and using skills like Self-talk and meditation to keep the episode at bay. This is scientific fact, and once you remove willful engagement from therapy it becomes ineffective. Further, and good psychiatrist will also recommend counseling or various therapies along with the physiology-altering drugs.
5) The mind is actually capable of manipulating nature, even changing it to suit its will. One example of this is in architecture, where complex buildings are created in the mind and then transferred into the objective material universe. Movies or music are another good example as they exist as ideas before they even become “reality”. Medication is another example where we literally change the nature of substances in order to affect our health, such as manipulating the flu to make yearly flu-shots.
6) Materialism also relies on the faith in future discovery. “Maybe one day we will find the mechanism that makes consciousness.” “Maybe one day we will explain how the subjective arises from the objective”. And maybe not. This is blind faith and nothing more.
7) The Upper Paleolithic Revolution was an event in human history that saw the species leap from “just another animal” to a species with higher consciousness. This led to the creation of art, religion, the rise of individuality, the creation of languages, the formations of societies, etc. Everything that let human beings become the dominant species on this planet occurred during the UPR. However, we had already existed as an evolved species for tens of thousands of years before the UPR. Further, this changes seems to have affected the species as a whole over a relatively short amount of time, rather than through the longer-term genetic changes we see with evolution. On top of this, the consciousness that it produced, as we have been discussing, had not only different properties from the natural world but was able to question, manipulate, and go against it. This again shows that consciousness is entirely different from the material world and how it functions.
8 ) Absurdity – in short, materialism leads to philosophical absurdity any way you look at it. For example it pretends to be a skeptical position but relies on the senses and puts what we know aside for what we know through it. This is the exact opposite of skepticism, and skepticism and materialism are mutually exclusive.
Further absurdity is that the only “evidence” for materialism amounts to nothing more than correlations – we may as well also accept the pastafarian position that the decline in pirates causes global warming!
Metaphors that materialism tries to create reduce to absurdity – for example they will say “mind” is what the brain does like “running” is what feet do, that “mind” and “running” have the same properties. Does running not take up space, can it not be seen, heard, felt? Another example is that water is not identical to the atoms which create it, similar to the mind and brain. Yet are both atoms and water not spacial, objective, universally accessible?
Yet another absurd reduction of materialism is again found in the single piece of evidence that doing things to the brain affects consciousness. Sure, maybe this means that materialism is true, but there is no other evidence that materialism is true! It would be like saying “well MAYBE magic leprechauns are the cause of gravity.” Sure that could theoretically explain it, but is that really the most rational way to go about it?
9) Finally, materialism is dangerous. For example we can look at mental and behavioral health and how those are treated. For instance, any good doctor who prescribes medication to address the physiological side of mental illness will also recommend therapy to address the mental side. As talked about above, without willful engagement in such therapy interventions no changes can occur. It would be dangerous to address only the physiological and not the mental aspects of these illnesses. Further, belief that individuals are deterministic machines with no control over their lives would make any kind of mental/behavioral healthwork impossible. Imagine a counselor telling a client to just say “**** it” because they have no control over their problems anyways!
It can also prove dangerous in other aspects of life. The best example of this to date is the Life-Fields of Dr. Harold Burr out of Yale University. Along with dozens of other scientists over decades of time Dr. Burr and company scientifically proved that L-Fields act as blueprints to all physical life. Measurements of these fields could predict cancer, disease, infection, depression, ovulation, prime times of learning information, and much more. But because the findings of Burr, Ravitz, etc. convinced them not only of a creator but of mind/body dualism, teleology of life, and a model to replace materialism, it was inherently written off as pseudo-science by the religion of materialism. Ironically, in the modern day Electric Universe theory is looking promising towards replacing that non-science “science” which has overrun physics, and the hypothesis is currently being tested. We will have to see how materialism reacts to this.
SUMMARY / TLDR
Materialism does not have evidence that supports it specifically and relies on faith in future discovery, it violates the Law of Identity, it puts what we know (consciousness) under what we know through it (matter), the abilities of consciousness go against the material world, consciousness can manipulate and change the material world, what we know about the rise of consciousness doesn’t fit with materialistic evolution as we know it, materialism reduces to absurdity, and materialism is a dangerous faith that puts its own beliefs over objective knowledge which could benefit human beings.
