The Fallacies of Materialism in Understanding Consciousness

Materialism fails to explain consciousness, as it reduces experience to mere brain activity, contradicting empirical evidence.

### The Limitations of Materialism: A Philosophical and Empirical Critique
* 🧠 Materialism, or physicalism, posits that the world outside our minds is **purely quantitative** and can be **fully described by numbers**, disregarding the **qualitative experiences** we perceive.
* 🔢 This perspective suggests that qualities like **color and taste** exist only within our brains, as mere byproducts of **mental processes** rather than inherent properties of the world.
* 🤔 However, materialism is internally contradictory, as it attempts to explain the qualities of experience through a framework that defines matter solely in **quantitative terms**, which cannot account for our **direct experience of qualities**.
* 📉 Furthermore, empirical evidence from modern physics reveals that **fundamental particles do not exist until they are measured**, indicating that physical reality is **contingent upon observation** rather than being an independent entity.
* 📺 Using metaphors like a painter identifying with their self-portrait or the correlation of images on different TVs, we can understand that our **perception of reality** is not the reality itself but a **representation of it**.
* 🌌 Neuroscientific studies show that experiences can occur even when brain activity is reduced, such as during **psychedelic experiences or brain trauma**, challenging the notion that **consciousness is solely a product of brain function**.
* 🦄 These "black swan" cases reveal significant limitations in materialism, suggesting that it cannot adequately explain the **richness of human experience** or the **nature of consciousness**.
* 🔍 As a result, materialism stands as the **least plausible option** among philosophical frameworks, prompting the need for **alternative explanations** that better accommodate the **complexities of reality and experience**.

foreign [Music] Let's review the mainstream worldview of our culture: materialism or physicalism. I'll keep on using the word "materialism" first. Let's understand what it is in philosophical terms, strictly. Let's understand what it is, what it means, what

the implications are. Materialism is the view that the world out there beyond our minds is not mental. Whatever it is, it is not mentation. It is of a completely different kind of stuff than thoughts and emotions are made of, than dreams are made of, um, and that abstract stuff that is

supposed to constitute the world around us, under materialism, can be exhaustively describable through a list of numbers. In other words, if you provide a complete enough list of numbers, you will have said everything there is to be said about the world. Nothing will be missing.

Now notice that this is not as intuitive as it may sound at first because the world we see around us is a world of qualities, not quantities. It's a world of reds, blues, and greens. It's a world of sweetness and saltiness. It's a world of

melodies and textures. It's not a world of kilograms, of Hertz, of frequency, amplitude, mass, charge, and momentum. But materialism would say that this is what the actual world is made of. It's a purely abstract world made of, well, quantities, and it has no intrinsic

qualities whatsoever. It is not something you can visualize because the moment you visualize, you're already bringing qualities into the picture. The world of materialism, the best you can do to visualize it, is a world that is made of equations floating in a vacuum.

and qualities under materialism are supposed to be generated by our brain inside our skull. The redness of an apple only exists inside your skull because it's made by your brain. The sweetness of a strawberry only exists inside your skull because it's made by your brain. The bitterness

of disappointment exists only inside your skull. The shiny silvery color of the moon at night only exists inside your skull. The inner surface of your actual skull is beyond the qualitative moon you see on the night sky under materialism. Now why is this wrong and demonstrably

wrong? There are a number of reasons. Let's start from the logical reasons why this is wrong. Materialism needs internally contradictory, and the reason is the following: it defines matter in a way that makes it incommensurable with mind, and then tries to explain mind in terms

of matter. It cannot work. Materialism defines matter as purely quantitative and then tries to explain the qualities of experience in terms of those quantities, and that, that makes no sense. It's an internal contradiction. Another reason it's contradictory is that we never are directly acquainted with purely

quantitative matter. All we have are qualities, uh, the, the textures of the objects I touch, the solidity of a rock if I take it, these are qualities of experience. The blues, the blueness of the sky is a quality of experience. We never come in

contact, in direct contact with purely quantitative matter. Therefore, matter under materialism is a theoretical abstraction. It is not a fact of experience. It's not an empirical given. It is a theoretical abstraction, a theoretical entity that may or may not exist, but either way it

is insofar as we can know a theoretical abstraction. Now, who makes the theoretical abstraction? Well, the minds of materialists. This abstraction of purely quantitative matter is a product of a mind and it exists, as far as we know, only in the mind that creates it.

And once it has created it, that same mind tries to reduce itself to it. Tries to explain itself in terms of its own abstraction. Now here's a metaphor for you to understand what I'm trying to get across. Imagine you're a painter and you paint a self-portrait. You you

paint a representation of yourself on canvas and having done that, our painter will then point at the portrait and say, "I am that. I am the portrait I just painted." Well, but what about the painter then? Well, our painter would say that he can explain himself in terms of the patterns

of pigmented distribution on canvas, the portrait he has just painted. Can that work? Of course not. This this is like a dog chasing its own tail. It cannot work. So that's the second reason materialism doesn't work. There is a third also, a logical reason.

Materialism replaces the territory with the map. When quantities arose in the early days of science, they were used as descriptions of a qualitative world. Descriptions of our experience of the world. So if I would tell you your piece of luggage weighs 50 kilos, you would know what to

expect to experience if you tried to lift your 50 kilo piece of luggage as opposed to a piece of luggage that weighs only five kilos. So the 50 and the five, these numbers are descriptions of experiences of the world we experience. That's how quantities came

into the picture that's how kilometers kilograms hurts they came into the picture quantities were descriptions of the world descriptions of experience in other words quantities are the map a description of the territory but at some point in the 19th century something very weird took place certain people

very influential in the intellectual elites of the world started putting forward that the quantities the descriptions precede the thing described that the map precedes the territory and that we must explain the territory in terms of the map in other words we need to take the

map reach into it and pull the territory out of it now obviously that doesn't work and today we give we give it a name we call it the hard problem of consciousness and we promise ourselves that although we don't have a solution to this problem

in new future versions of the map we will be able to reach into it and put a territory out of it now that is ludicrous that is just silly because it arises from an obviously faulty line of thinking we are not to replace the

territory with the map quantities are descriptions of the thing in itself not the thing in itself and that's another reason why materialism can never work it replaces the territory with the map and tries to pull the territory out of the map which will never work not even

inversion 3.0 or a million of the map there are also empirical reasons why materialism is demonstrably false in foundations of physics today we know that the fundamental physical entities that seem to constitute the world in other words elementary subatomic particles like

electrons, quarks, muons, and so on. We know that these elementary building blocks of the physical world do not have standalone existence, do not have standalone reality. They only come into existence upon measurement. You have to measure the world to get subatomic particles. Before you measure

the world, you cannot say that there are subatomic particles to be measured. Now, how do we know this? We know this from a series of experiments that has now been going on for over 40 years, and what we do, we produce two elementary subatomic particles together, so they are entangled.

And we shoot one in one direction and we shoot the other in the other direction at almost the speed of light. Let's call them particles A and B. And then say scientist Alice, after a while, performs a measurement on particle A, and on the other side of the universe,

but at the same time, scientist Bob makes a measurement on particle B. It turns out that what Bob sees when he measures particle B depends on what Alice chooses to measure about particle A. In other words, we cannot say that what Bob sees was a particle that already

existed prior to Alice making the choice of what to measure. Instead, the conclusion, which is now unavoidable short of some theoretical fantasies, the conclusion is that particles A and B do not exist prior to measurement. They exist only upon a measurement on the world. So, the world itself cannot be

constituted of particles because the thing you measure is not a particle. Particle arises from measurement. Now, the two theoretical fantasies that could avoid this conclusion are: one of them is the notion that there are countless physical universes popping into existence every infinitesimal fraction of

a second for which we have absolutely zero empirical evidence. This is a fantasy and it's one of the most implausible fantasies conceivable to human thought. The other fantasy is that there are so-called hidden variables about the world that orchestrate these uh correlations between the measurements of

Alice and Bob, but we don't even have a hypothesis about what those hidden variables might be, not even a theoretical hypothesis, and certainly not an iota of empirical evidence for them. So they too are pure fantasy. So short of these woo fantasies,

we are left with the conclusion that the world prior to measurement or observation is not physical. The thing that we measure is not physical. Physical is the result of measurement. How can we make sense of this? Well, it's very very simple. Let's go back to the

airplane metaphor and the dashboard. The dashboard only displays something if the airplane's sensors measure the world outside, measure air speeds, measure air humidity, and then those measurements are displayed on the dials of the dashboard. If nothing is measured, the dials show nothing, and is this surprising? It's not

surprising at all. It only means that the world out there is not physical. Physicality is a representation that arises from measuring the world. It's an indication on the dials of the dashboard. That's all it means. And the correlations between what Alice chooses to measure

and what Bob sees when he makes his measurement are also very easily explainable in the same terms. I will use another metaphor. Suppose you are a soccer fan and there will be an important soccer game and you want to watch it from home and you are

such a fan that you buy two television sets and you watch the same soccer game on both television sets, each TV tuned to a different broadcaster. And suppose that each broadcaster has their own set of cameras in the stadium so you see two different images on the two television sets, but two different

images of the same game. Therefore, what happens on one image correlates perfectly with what happens on the other image without the TVs having to communicate with one another. Now imagine that you have a friend who is a time traveler and he just came to

visit you from the 19th century to watch the soccer match with you in the 21st century. He sees that the images on the two televisions, their behavior is completely correlated with one another. If the little man on the TV on the right runs

up, the little man on the TV on the left runs down or something like this and he is flabbergasted with this because the little men are not communicating with one another across the TVs. How can that be? How can what happens on one side be

so perfectly correlated with what happens on the other side? How do the little men know where to run so to synchronize their behavior? Well, our time traveler is surprised because he thinks that the images on the TV are the game, that the images are the thing in itself.

So if there are real little men running on the left and real little men running on the right, then it's a miracle that they can coordinate their movements without communicating with one another. Just as it seems to be a miracle that what Bob sees correlates perfectly with

what Alice chooses to see, chooses to measure, now of course the fallacy here is to think of the images on the television as the game. The images are not the game, the images are representations of the game. The the thing in itself is what's happening in the stadium, not what's

happening inside the TVs. So if we understand that the world as it is in itself is not physical, many of the Fantastical, uh, Troublesome implications of quantum mechanics become very intuitive. We just have to look at 21st

century evidence with the 21st century mind, but under under materialism we look at 21st century evidence with the 19th century mind and that's not going to work. Now finally there is one more empirical reason why materialism is wrong and that

comes from the Neuroscience of Consciousness and Psychiatry. Under materialism, experience is brain activity or is generated by brain activity, so there cannot be anything about the information content of experience that is not directly grounded in the Dynamics of brain physiology. One is the other, so to say, and most of

the times this seems to work. Most of the times, more experience correlates with more brain activity, that's it's needless to say there's lots of neuroimaging studies showing that that ordinarily speaking more experience by more experience I mean more varied or intense

or experience correlates with more brain metabolism, more brain activity. However, there is a set of circumstances in which precisely the opposite happens and this set is very reliable. It's the Black Swan and if your theory is that all swans are white, that all experiences produced by

bearing activity, then one Black Swan is enough to break your theory and refute your theory. We know today, for instance, that psychedelics, all psychedelics that we have studied so far, work by significantly reducing brain activity and not increasing brain activity anywhere. Yet, a psychedelic trip

is known to be one of the top three most significant experiences in someone's life. That's research by Johns Hopkins. While you're having the intensive, richer, intensest, and richest experience of your life, your brain is effectively going to sleep as a matter

of fact, it's not even that because the sleeping brain dreaming has quite some activity, and under psychedelics there is a significant reduction in reduction in activity. And it's not only psychedelics. If you reduce blood flow to the brain or brain oxygenation by

partial strangulation or by G-Force induced loss of consciousness, people report trip-like experiences, a dream-like experiences, very rich, very intense. Pilots that undergo G-Force induced loss of consciousness in a centrifuge during training, they report quote memorable dreams. Even people who

suffer bullet wounds to the head, head trauma, or the progression of dementia have been known to to to manifest what is called acquired savant syndrome. They suddenly become geniuses in certain areas of human activity like music composition or memory, prodigious memory

or mathematical calculations that are done as fast as a computer. And if you ask them how do they do that, they say, 'I don't know, this stuff just comes to me.' And that follows severe brain trauma, lightning strikes to the head, bullet wounds, traffic accidents.

with major head trauma even the progression of dementia as I said there have there has been neuroimaging studies for instance of so-called mediums that write text down that they claim doesn't come from themselves now I reserve I I reserve judgment about this

mediumship stuff but the research is very objective and very well controlled it has been shown that for controls if you ask a control group of people to write down complex text brain activity in key brain areas associated with cognition will increase significantly under a brain scan or an fMRI but if

mediums do that during activity significantly decreases in respect to the default brain activity baseline and then people still have scored the respective texts according to a measure of complexity which can be done very objective objectively through a computer program that analyzes the syntactic or

grammatical and semantical complexity of the text and the text produced by the mediums scores higher in complexity than the text produced by the controls and so this is not only psychedelics it's not only the choking game it's not only

acceleration induced loss of consciousness it's not only mediumship it's a whole host of activities that correlate with the reduction or an impairment of normal brain activity which lead to higher cognitive skill in tensor richer experience and that's a

whole group of black swans for my for materialism so materialism just doesn't work logically or empirically of all the options we have available on the table today materialism is the worst it's the one we can discard with the most confidence as not plausible as not

tenable, we have to look for alternatives

Why Materialism is Baloney | dr. Bernardo Kastrup

Essentia Foundation

Defining Materialism and its Implications

Materialism, or physicalism, is the view that the world is purely physical, not mental.

The material world is exhaustively describable through a list of numbers; qualities are absent.

This contradicts our sensory experience of a world full of qualities (colors, tastes, etc.).

Materialism posits that qualities are brain-generated, existing only within the skull.

Visualizing the material world is impossible because visualization involves qualities.

Logical Contradictions within Materialism

Materialism defines matter as quantitative yet attempts to explain qualitative mind with it.

We only experience qualities, never purely quantitative matter; matter is a theoretical abstraction.

The abstraction of matter is a product of mind, which then tries to reduce itself to this abstraction.

A painter creating a self-portrait and identifying with it is used as a metaphor for this flaw.

Materialism replaces the territory (reality) with the map (quantities), attempting to derive reality from descriptions.

Empirical Refutations of Materialism from Physics

Subatomic particles don't have standalone existence; they only exist upon measurement.

Experiments show that entangled particles' states depend on measurement, not pre-existing states.

The world prior to measurement is not physical; physicality is a result of measurement.

The airplane dashboard metaphor illustrates that physicality is a representation, not the thing itself.

The two television sets broadcasting the same game illustrate correlated representations without communication.

Empirical Refutations from Neuroscience and Psychiatry

Materialism assumes experience is directly tied to brain activity; however, psychedelics show otherwise.

Psychedelic trips, despite being profoundly intense experiences, correlate with reduced brain activity.

Reduced blood flow or brain oxygenation also leads to intense experiences, contradicting the materialist view.

Acquired savant syndrome, occurring after brain trauma, demonstrates enhanced cognitive abilities with impaired brain function.

Studies on mediums show decreased brain activity during complex text production, yet the produced text is of higher complexity.

Materialism is logically and empirically flawed; alternatives need to be explored.