Nine Arguments Against Materialism

[Oppositionless]

Hello, these are my nine arguments against materialism. I created them myself, but I did use chatgpt to fill in some of the gaps . Regardless, I feel I guided it well enough that I can post the raw text it gave me.

 

Here are your nine core arguments against materialism, with the recent updates and refinements we’ve made together:

 

1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness

 

Materialism cannot explain how subjective experience (qualia) arises from physical processes. There’s no logical bridge from unconscious particles to conscious awareness. This is an ontological gap, not just an explanatory one.

 

2. Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics

 

The collapse of the wavefunction doesn’t occur due to mere physical interaction (as decoherence claims), because environmental interactions happen constantly. The collapse only occurs upon observation, implying that consciousness or meaningful awareness plays a fundamental role in physical reality.

 

3. Fine-Tuning of the Universe

The universe appears precisely calibrated for life and consciousness. This doesn’t require a theistic designer, but it does suggest that consciousness is self-organizing, intelligent, and possibly fundamental to the structure of reality—supporting idealism or cosmopsychism.

 

4. Mystical Experience

Mystics across cultures report similar direct experiences of unity, timelessness, and consciousness as the ground of being. These are phenomenologically consistent, deeply transformative, and more easily explained under idealism or dual-aspect monism than materialism.

 

5. NDEs (Near-Death Experiences)

Cases of veridical perception during cardiac arrest or flat EEG states challenge the materialist assumption that consciousness depends entirely on brain activity. These experiences are structured, coherent, and sometimes verifiable, suggesting that consciousness can exist independently of the brain.

 

6. Psi Phenomena

While controversial, certain psi effects (telepathy, precognition, etc.) have been supported by statistical meta-analyses. Materialism cannot account for these without stretching its framework. Even one verified psi effect undermines its completeness.

 

7. Epistemic Skepticism

We never have direct access to matter or a mind-independent world—only to qualia within consciousness. All claims about a material world are made from within experience, making materialism epistemically self-defeating.

 

8. Idealism Is Closer to Direct Realism than Materialism

 

Most people assume direct realism—that we perceive the world as it is. But materialism says we only perceive internal neural models, not reality itself. Idealism, on the other hand, says experience is reality, making it far closer to direct realism.

 

9. Infinite Container Problem

 

If the universe is physical, it must exist somewhere—but what contains that? And what contains the container? This leads to an infinite regress. Idealism avoids this by asserting that space and time are modes of consciousness, not substances.

 

[LastThursday]

I'd say the top of your list is the top argument against materialism, the rest are more meh. But if materialism isn't true, what is?

Idealism has the complementary problem: how does the material world arise within consciousness, why does everyone agree on it and why is it so persistent? Why does consciousness behave "as if" there is a material world?

 

[Someone here]

1 hour ago, LastThursday said:

Idealism has the complementary problem: how does the material world arise within consciousness, why does everyone agree on it and why is it so persistent? Why does consciousness behave "as if" there is a material world?

 

Same thing happens in a dream bro.

What are you basing the "persistency " of reality on ? Memory right ?

Can you Prove the world and all of your memories didn't just come about Last Thursday ?

[Breakingthewall]

Materialism is true. Everything materialism postulates is true. Atoms and molecules exist, life evolves, space and time are created in the Big Bang, etc. There is only one thing that materialism does not explain, but it recognizes its impossibility: what is the origin of reality? Where does the creative impulse of reality come from?

Any advanced scientist who has dedicated their life to understanding reality knows that there is an unknowable unknown: if reality arises from nothing, this implies that nothing would be something. If nothing is something, that something is unknowable to science. Science can understand every last process of manifest reality, since science is a part of manifest reality, but it cannot understand unmanifested reality, the origin. It is impossible, since science is on another plane of existence, on the plane of form. It cannot touch that which has no form, dimension, or qualities: the origin. It is impossible.

[Oppositionless]

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

Materialism is true. Everything materialism postulates is true. Atoms and molecules exist, life evolves, space and time are created in the Big Bang, etc. There is only one thing that materialism does not explain, but it recognizes its impossibility: what is the origin of reality? Where does the creative impulse of reality come from?

Any advanced scientist who has dedicated their life to understanding reality knows that there is an unknowable unknown: if reality arises from nothing, this implies that nothing would be something. If nothing is something, that something is unknowable to science. Science can understand every last process of manifest reality, since science is a part of manifest reality, but it cannot understand unmanifested reality, the origin. It is impossible, since science is on another plane of existence, on the plane of form. It cannot touch that which has no form, dimension, or qualities: the origin. It is impossible.

Technically materialism doesn't postulate any of the things science has discovered. All it postulates is a certain view of what those things are. 
what you said about nothing being the source of something is what I was trying to get at with my ninth and final argument. "Something" exists within nothing. Therefore it isn't really "something", it's nothing . But it's also still something. So materialism false . 

[Oppositionless]

20 hours ago, LastThursday said:

I'd say the top of your list is the top argument against materialism, the rest are more meh. But if materialism isn't true, what is?

Idealism has the complementary problem: how does the material world arise within consciousness, why does everyone agree on it and why is it so persistent? Why does consciousness behave "as if" there is a material world?

 

We don't know. But I don't think materialism gets away from the issue. Why is the material world so consistent? It's not obvious at all why materiality leads to consistency. 
for instance, there could be a higher meta-law of physical reality that causes the laws of physics in this universe to change every 10 years .

Edited Monday at 06:35 PM by Oppositionless

[Jodistrict]

5 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

Materialism is true. Everything materialism postulates is true. Atoms and molecules exist, life evolves, space and time are created in the Big Bang, etc. There is only one thing that materialism does not explain, but it recognizes its impossibility: what is the origin of reality? Where does the creative impulse of reality come from?

Any advanced scientist who has dedicated their life to understanding reality knows that there is an unknowable unknown: if reality arises from nothing, this implies that nothing would be something. If nothing is something, that something is unknowable to science. Science can understand every last process of manifest reality, since science is a part of manifest reality, but it cannot understand unmanifested reality, the origin. It is impossible, since science is on another plane of existence, on the plane of form. It cannot touch that which has no form, dimension, or qualities: the origin. It is impossible.

In my opinion, the metaphysics of Kaishmir Shaivism makes more sense than Advaita Vedanta.    Kaishmir Shaivism says that Maya (i.e., objective reality)  is just as real as Shiva (i.e., Brahman).  It is a real expression of Shiva’s power.  It is part of His divine play.  Shiva is both transcendent and immanent.

[LastThursday]

The thrust of what I was saying is that you can't explain consciousness from materialism and you can't explain materialism from consciousness. You could use one as an argument against the other. And yet here we are experiencing both simultaneously, so the two must be intimately connected.

Persistency is just one aspect of the world, there are others like structure and time. There is also spatial persistence and temporal persistence.

As @Someone here says there is the problem of memory in explaining (temporal) persistence. This boils down to a comparison, that of comparing a memory of a thing with the direct experience of the same thing and there being some similarity between the two. It could be that the memory is "just there" or has been "implanted" to fool us into a sense of ongoing persistence, maybe it was indeed done last Thursday. The question would then be why? If memory is indeed behind persistence then I would say it is mostly automatic and not done consciously mostly.

One answer with the memory problem is that there is not only a persistence of tangible stuff, but also a persistence in the flow of change (i.e. time) of that stuff which is a far more abstract phenomenon. We are able to see "in real time" how stuff changes at a persistent rate, it would seem that memory isn't needed to explain that. And if stuff changes at a predictable rate, then there must be some persistency nearly by definition.

Spatial persistence is interesting also. If you close one eye, or the other you can agree that somehow there is plenty of similarity in what you experience between the two - and each eye has a slightly different view of space. Even if you look with one eye, there is somehow a consistency in the quality of what you experience within your whole field of view, or if you want a (spatial) persistence across your field of view.

 

[Breakingthewall]

10 minutes ago, Jodistrict said:

In my opinion, the metaphysics of Kaishmir Shaivism makes more sense than Advaita Vedanta.    Kaishmir Shaivism says that Maya (i.e., objective reality)  is just as real as Shiva (i.e., Brahman).  It is a real expression of Shiva’s power.  It is part of His divine play.  Shiva is both transcendent and immanent.

Yeah, Brahman is Maya, there is not a dreamer and a dream, there is the reality, and anything that appears is an expression of the reality. 

[Breakingthewall]

30 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

The thrust of what I was saying is that you can't explain consciousness from materialism

You could. You can explain that consciousness exists because there is sensory information that the brain processes, and genetic structures that shape those processes, and therefore consciousness is the chemical interaction of the neural network. From an absolute perspective, you can agree with that, since the neural network would be a manifestation of the absolute, a facet of reality. The human brain is a manifestation of reality, and consciousness is its result. 

[Reciprocality]

The cultural distinction between matter and consciousness could be methodical or practical as opposed to fundamental, that when we try to found either in the other we often end up pointing to invariances that are identical suggests that the distinction is precisely so: a methodical angle.

Some strands of structural realism can maintain monistic ontology via invariances as condition for objectivity quite parsimoniously and consistently, and unifying materialism and idealism while at it just as it unifies philosophical rationalism and empiricism. 

One naivite on part of materialism is how the concept of time, which we gain via the invariant rate of diminution of phenomenal and cognitive intensity is supposed to pertain to objects which invariant rate of diminution depends on and is relative to sufficiently particularised locations which through being imposed by information from every other location outputs a rate of "time". Yet these accounts of material substance is hardly to find anywhere thus hypostatised time projected from the mind takes its stead.

If we try to look for fundamental physical substances we end up with entities that instantiate properties that partake in dualities and are exhaustive of all possibilities, thus dichotomies like continuous/discrete, necessary/contingent, connected/spontaneous, the very same invariances that arises in phenomenological accounts of the behaviour of consciousness, suggesting the already mentioned mere practical nature of the distinction between mind and matter.

 

The real question becomes how well we are able to stratify the distribution of contingencies, invariances and origins in the tenants of our personal experience and therewith determine when we have the "right" perspective in our everyday life, determining when our thoughts are merely our personal world and when they really are objective, not whether reality is material or conscious.

[Someone here]

2 hours ago, LastThursday said:

The thrust of what I was saying is that you can't explain consciousness from materialism and you can't explain materialism from consciousness. You could use one as an argument against the other. And yet here we are experiencing both simultaneously, so the two must be intimately connected.

You can't explain consciousness from materialism..that's true .because materialism says reality in its essence is dumb and unconscious. Then how can dumb matter like molecules ..synapses..neurotransmitters etc give rise to qualia aka sight ..sound ..touch etc ?

But you are wrong that materialism cannot be explained from consciousness. Because consciousness can dream of material  persistent universe just like most of your dreams (if we exclude the wacky ones ).

 

I have no answer to the rest of your post .you roasted my brain 😂. And it's mostly semantics and impossible inquiries. 

Edited yesterday at 12:52 AM by Someone here

[Elliott]

Isn't everything experienced 'material' though, even the sounds in your 'head' and the colors in your 'mind', just sound and Light waves. The fact that no one else hears or sees them is not evidence that they're not physical, it's just the noise out of the others persons mouth sounds like they are saying they don't see or hear them.

You can see the noise and colors someone is 'imagining', in a brain scan.

Edited yesterday at 04:23 AM by Elliott

[Jodistrict]

1 hour ago, Elliott said:

Isn't everything experienced 'material' though, even the sounds in your 'head' and the colors in your 'mind', just sound and Light waves. The fact that no one else hears or sees them is not evidence that they're not physical, it's just the noise out of the others persons mouth sounds like they are saying they don't see or hear them.

You can see the noise and colors someone is 'imagining', in a brain scan.

But that doesn't explain awareness.   A robot can process light waves and turn it into a meaningful object, but isn't aware of the object.  The processing in the robot is purely information processing using material devices.   There is also information processing in the brain which is a material device but how can the awareness come from something material? (hard problems of consciousness)

Edited yesterday at 06:09 AM by Jodistrict

[Elliott]

3 hours ago, Jodistrict said:

But that doesn't explain awareness.   A robot can process light waves and turn it into a meaningful object, but isn't aware of the object.  The processing in the robot is purely information processing using material devices.   There is also information processing in the brain which is a material device but how can the awareness come from something material? (hard problems of consciousness)

What do you think awareness is though, is awareness actually there?

Awareness implies separate from the qualia, something recognizing it, are you sure that's the case. What at all indicates that, other than a human concept you've been told?

Imagine 'you're' born in a primitive tribe, wouldn't qualia be all that there is, would there be something separate you call awareness observing qualia?

Essentially, it comes down to whether your 'thoughts' are separate from 'reality', reality being what is shared with everyone else, what everyone else reaffirms. Is there any proof your thoughts are no more sounds and lights as much as the television, other than other people telling you they don't see or hear them? And isn't the sound from their mouths, the words telling you that, just qualia as well?

Edited yesterday at 09:21 AM by Elliott

[LastThursday]

11 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

You could. You can explain that consciousness exists because there is sensory information that the brain processes, and genetic structures that shape those processes, and therefore consciousness is the chemical interaction of the neural network. From an absolute perspective, you can agree with that, since the neural network would be a manifestation of the absolute, a facet of reality. The human brain is a manifestation of reality, and consciousness is its result. 

Equally, you could flip it around and you could say that consciousness (the absolute if you like) manifests a brain and all its structures and chemicals and correlates it with what consciousness itself experiences, i.e. the brain is an epiphenomenon of consciousness. This is the reverse of saying consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain.

[LastThursday]

9 hours ago, Someone here said:

But you are wrong that materialism cannot be explained from consciousness. Because consciousness can dream of material  persistent universe just like most of your dreams (if we exclude the wacky ones ).

You are right that consciousness does dream a material universe. Equally, it could potentially dream of a non-material universe where nothing persists, and that wouldn't explain why it chooses materiality over any other sort of dream. I guess psychoactive drugs allows consciousness to express itself differently - but even then it seems to return back to materiality. My thought is that consciousness gets stuck in a habit of materiality.

Philosophy: it's mostly semantics and impossible inquiries. 

 

[Breakingthewall]

30 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

Equally, you could flip it around and you could say that consciousness (the absolute if you like) manifests a brain and all its structures and chemicals and correlates it with what consciousness itself experiences, i.e. the brain is an epiphenomenon of consciousness. This is the reverse of saying consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain.

Conciousness is perception, how could perception create anything? Then it is not just conciousness.

[LastThursday]

@Breakingthewall that's kind of what I meant by my comment above:

On 3/30/2025 at 11:20 PM, LastThursday said:

Idealism has the complementary problem: how does the material world arise within consciousness, why does everyone agree on it and why is it so persistent? Why does consciousness behave "as if" there is a material world?

That's what I like to call The Hard Problem of Idealism.

Part of it is because you're thinking from the materialist paradigm; that perception is a passive process and generated by something else that isn't perception (material matter). But you can see it from a different viewpoint.

If consciousness is perception, then something must be being perceived (bear with me). What is that something? It actually doesn't matter, because if it is perceived then it is within consciousness  - I would add that what consciousness can perceive is unlimited. The bottom line is that perception is the fundamental nature of consciousness, it cannot not perceive, something must always exist to be perceived. Otherwise, consciousness itself would not exist. 

That viewpoint is sort of ok, in that it explains why there is perception at all, it is not generated as such but is in the nature of consciousness itself. Just like matter is in the nature of materialism.

 

 

[Breakingthewall]

23 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

That's what I like to call The Hard Problem of Idealism.

Part of it is because you're thinking from the materialist paradigm; that perception is a passive process and generated by something else that isn't perception (material matter). But you can see it from a different viewpoint.

If consciousness is perception, then something must be being perceived (bear with me). What is that something? It actually doesn't matter, because if it is perceived then it is within consciousness  - I would add that what consciousness can perceive is unlimited. The bottom line is that perception is the fundamental nature of consciousness, it cannot not perceive, something must always exist to be perceived. Otherwise, consciousness itself would not exist. 

That viewpoint is sort of ok, in that it explains why there is perception at all, it is not generated as such but is in the nature of consciousness itself. Just like matter is in the nature of materialism.

All spirituality starts from a false premise: reality is consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no reality, since something exists to the extent that I am conscious of it.

Everyone hears this and exclaims: "Ah, of course, that's obvious!" How can something exist without a conscious creator to create it? It's absolutely impossible. There is no consequence without a cause, therefore the cause is God. Problem solved! Well, it doesn't have to be this way. The expression of the absolute does not need to be conscious to exist, nor does it need a conscious creator to exist. Reality has an absolute nature, and this nature is absolute nothingness, which is unlimited potential. This potential develops inevitably, not because an entity designs it. There may exist infinite absolutely unconscious universes whose existence is just as existent as a conscious universe.

Consciousness is a quality that exists in reality, and it is not fundamental, but an inevitable consequence of the total potential. It is not special. Well, yes, it is special for us who are conscious beings, but we are not consciousness. Consciousness is not absolute, it is relative.

Let's see, you, as an existence, are absolute, but your consciousness is limited, and very limited, just the tip of the iceberg. Is that obvious? There's an unconscious infinity within you. Your true nature is absolute potential; you can become aware of it, or only be aware of the information from your senses or that you want drugs or anything. If there are levels of consciousness, as Leo always says, consciousness is relative. Trying to square a circle is confusing and useless.

 death, real death, the nothingness, the absolute lack of consciousness, is equally alive than life and absolute conciousness . Absolute is absolute, with the lights on or off. 

Edited yesterday at 01:39 PM by Breakingthewall