In the final part of his discussion with Pat Flynn, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offered reasons why he thinks the power of materialism in science is waning:

So I think that atheism and materialism which kind of go together, that’s not an ultimate way to look at the world. Some people have called it, and I think it’s kind of true, bookless. And what they mean by “bookless” is that it is such a boring stultifying way of seeing life that it’s never going to get anywhere. It’s like you’re never going to have somebody writing profound books like Aristotle’s work or Thomas Aquinas’ work, or Bonaventure’s work, all these beautiful people that have written these fantastic things. That will never happen in the materialism.

He has a point. In neuroscience, the bestselling materialist output tends to be bleak tomes like primatologist Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (Penguin 2023). In “public intellectual” territory, it might be Juval Noah Harari’s screeds about the problem of “useless people.” In cosmology, we are asked to accept the existence of an arbitrarily large number of universes simply to avoid the obvious conclusion that our universe seems fine-tuned for life. And so forth.

In short, there are no grand new ideas, but a great many dispirited, dispiriting, malignant, and devious small ones.

But here are two trends to watch and the difference they will make:

● As we’ve often discussed here, watch for the rise of panpsychism in science — the belief all life forms are conscious — or perhaps that everything is conscious, as in “consciousness pervades the universe.” Panpsychist ideas are increasingly aired in science journals, whether the thesis is that cell cognition drives evolution or that goldenrod plants are intelligent.

The good news is that the materialist attempt to pretend that the mind or consciousness somehow doesn’t exist may be petering out. On the other hand, we may need to get used to the politics of Insect Rights and of Rocks’ Lives Matter.

That is because many panpsychists may resist any distinction between human lives and plant lives. If that seems odd, recall that the panpsychism that originates in the sciences* is a form of naturalism (nature is all there is). However, it includes consciousness in nature as opposed to excluding it — and therefore it does not declare human consciousness to be an illusion, as a strict physicalist/eliminationist would. But a panpsychist may have no more use for the idea that humans are exceptional than a physicalist would.

● Scientism, an aspect of materialism, is the view that all valid knowledge comes from the sciences. It is false but it has a redeeming feature: Its adherents are not necessarily hardline boycotters and censors about things they do not consider their territory.

Today, our leaders seem to consider everything their territory. Thus, for various reasons, we are seeing a huge surge in attempts to shut down unapproved speech. This includes the revival of boycotts at universities, which are sure to spread through the sciences as well as the arts, stifling innovation. Beyond that, in Britain, there is serious social media censorship; in Canada, the notion of pre-crime … and they are just getting started! New AI technology makes the job much easier. It’s not clear that panpsychism has much to offer by way of opposition to this trend because the idea of freedom of the human spirit may not be an important emphasis.

In short, the decline of eliminative materialism will bring changes, but they won’t necessarily be positive. We shall see.

*There are forms of panpsychism originating in religion which are often very different in character from the type that is gaining ground in the sciences. That’s properly the topic of a different discussion; here’s an article outlining such views.

Here are excerpts from the transcript, with notes:

Is materialism slowly losing its death grip on science? If it is, neuroscience discoveries will play a key role, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor tells podcaster Pat Flynn, in a recent podcast interview. Materialism is a totalistic claim. If the human mind is not simply the physical processes of the brain, with no remainder, then materialism is disproven.

What brain surgery for epilepsy taught us about the human mind. Michael Egnor continues his discussion with Pat Flynn, noting that neither seizures nor Penfield’s brain stimulation provoked abstract thought. The claim that we will find a materialist explanation some day, no date specified, means that we never reckon with failure to do so.

What did splitting human brains in half tell us about the mind? How did split brain study subjects compare things when no part of their brains saw both things? As Michael Egnor told Pat Flynn, research of this sort — where split brains provide united perceptions — is an unacknowledged problem for materialism.

and

Michael Egnor: The neuroscience evidence for free will You ask a hundred neuroscientists about Libet’s work and 95% will say he disproved free will, when he did exactly the opposite. Egnor talks about the demand for materialist conformity: “If I were a basic scientist and I relied on grants to live, I’d be toast.”