Hey everyone, so this is a little excerpt from last year's course with Bernardo Castro, week one, where he goes into the

scientific and philosophical evidence for refuting materialism. If you're interested in what you hear, then do check out the links in the

description for the upcoming course with Bernardo Castro, starting in April, called *With Reality in Mind*. So I think this is a very important

thing. Materialists conflate philosophy and science all over the place. Not only do they not understand materialism, as I

as I alluded to in the beginning, they think that the effectiveness of science somehow proves, or at least constitutes

strong evidence for materialism, and that is entirely false. It doesn't constitute at all any evidence in favor of materialism.

On the contrary, if anything, the behavior of nature that we have been observing over the last 40 years

outright contradicts the metaphysics of materialism. For instance, materialism requires physical realism; it requires that physical objects

exist in and of themselves, in a defined way, independent of whether they are measured or observed or not. Because if that's not the case,

then there is no objectively existing, self-standing material world out there in a defined form. That's basically the definition of

physical realism, and quantum physics has basically thrown physical realism out the window—news that is already relatively old.

The first strong evidence in favor of this view, of this conclusion, came up in

1981, the experiments of Alain Aspect and his team in France. A number of experiments followed up because it's so hard to part

with physical realism in the mindset of materialists. Materialists need to believe that there are objects

with defined position, defined form, defined momentum up there, irrespective of observation or measurement, and science is telling us that that's

not the case, so materialists come up with all kinds of incredibly implausible hypotheses for why the experiments are showing what

they are showing. Um, in a way that could still be made consistent with materialism. These are extraordinarily implausible

hypotheses, which are taken seriously anyway because of the momentum behind the metaphysical belief of materialism.

So experiments have been repeatedly redone to close the so-called loopholes. Yeah, that's how these things have

been described. There are loopholes in the experiments that leave a door open for physical realism or materialism,

and progressively more and more and more sophisticated experiments have been done since 1981, culminating in 2015,

perhaps 2018, depending on which experiment you think is more convincing, but steadily have closed all

of those loopholes and steadily have shown that the conclusion is the same, and it's inevitable. There is no such

thing as physical realism. Whatever the world out there is, it is not physical. Physicality arises only upon observation, upon an

interaction of the experimenter or of the observer with this objective world. Short of that interaction, short of an observation, short of a

measurement, there are no such things as physical entities with defined shape, position, and speed. Whatever they are, they're just not there. There is surely something out

there; it's common sense that there is something out there because we describe the world in very consistent ways,

but that something is not physical. My alternative, of course, would be to say it is mental, and physicality arises

from observation because physicality is the act of observation. Reality is on the screen of perception, so it's very important to make this

separation if we are to progress in a sane way. Conflating science and philosophy leads to all kinds of

issues all kinds of dilemmas, all kinds of contradictions that are just not helpful for us. If you go to my

website, bernardocastroop.com, and you go to—uh, there's a top menu, a horizontal menu

right at the top, and you click on "Papers." One of the papers in the list—you will see it's a technical paper,

but one of them basically summarizes all the laboratory physical evidence that goes against, that refutes, physical realism. An

alternative is to click on the SciAm menu—Scientific American; I abbreviate it on my website; I just say

SciAm. Click on there, and you will be—you will go to—uh, to my personal page on the Scientific

American website. It has a list of all my Scientific American essays, and two of them—um, that have "quantum"

physics" in the title—two of them discuss at length all the evidence, the experimental evidence,

that has been amassing over the last 40 years, uh, that refutes physical realism. So these are the two key

Bernardo Kastrup on the scientific evidence against materialism

Scripts