There seems to be a growing sense that the point of view physicalism represents is untenable. Philosopher and psychologist Marc Wittmann puts it like this at Psychology Today:

The reductionist physicalist position entails that what is primarily and immediate to every person—phenomenal consciousness—does not exist. This has led the philosopher Galen Strawson in an article to quote thinkers from antiquity to psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman: “We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers.” According to Strawson the “most remarkable episode in the history of human thought” is that those believers deny the existence of something that everyone knows with certainty to exist: conscious experience, a first-person phenomenal perspective. Other physicalists at least acknowledge that we are conscious beings, but that phenomenal consciousness is “produced” by the brain. Future knowledge of how neural signals generate consciousness will for sure explain subjectivity – from a purely neurobiological standpoint. The unsolvable problem here is, however, that ‘neurobiological processes’ and ‘subjective experience’ stem from different, even if correlated, knowledge frameworks.

“Physicalism Is Dead,” November 25, 2024

In short, no matter what stunning neuroscience discoveries we make, we cannot in principle explain E = MC² by what Einstein had for breakfast. A number of alternative theories exist and Wittmann discusses some of them, for example dual-aspect monism and panpsychism. There is also interactive dualism, hylemorphic dualism, and various idealisms. One need not choose between them to see that physicalism is not tenable. It would never have remained in place so long except for the prejudice that the purpose of science is to explain things away, including the mind of the scientist.

He also cautions that even efforts to avoid subjectivity in psychological research will end up requiring some subjectivity in order to gain real information about human beings:

It is a fact that even hard-nosed researchers who ignore a potential phenomenological analysis of experience nevertheless still have to rely on the subjective experience of their human participants. In experimental settings participants have to somehow convey their subjective experience—for example, by pressing buttons for “seeing” certain targets. “Dead,”

And concludes,

More and more people realize the absurdity of the extreme version of physicalism: Consciousness does not exist. Scientists are also increasingly realizing that, in principle, it is not possible to explain how phenomenal consciousness is “generated” or “produced” by the brain. There is movement on the scene. The above-mentioned alternative concepts of what subjective experience means might as well feel strange at first sight. At least we are out of an ideological deadlock. We are being freed to think out of the box to comprehend what consciousness might mean to us humans. “Dead,”

Wittmann specializes in the study of our sense of time, authoring Felt Time (MIT Press 2017) and Altered States of Consciousness (MIT Press 2018).

The sense of time, is of course, a good example of human subjectivity, a part of our consciousness. It is not the passage of time as such but the passage of time as we experience it. A ninety-minute meeting where “everyone’s voice must be heard” can seem like another Ice Age; a fast-paced movie (run time 90 min) can seem to be over in ten minutes.

Why might physicalism be in decline?

After about as century, efforts to explain away the human mind as simply the activities of the brain have gone nowhere and produced no useful results.

Meanwhile, as neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I will show in The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (Hachette Worthy, June 3, 2025), people can show adequate consciousness with any number of brain absences or arrangements, including these:

Split brain: Scientists who dismiss consciousness and free will ignore the fact that the higher faculties of the mind cannot be split even by splitting the brain in half.

Half a brain: Some people think and speak with only half a brain. A new study sheds light on how they do it.

and

Boy born with 2% of brain does maths, loves science. Noah Wall’s story, which includes recovering his brain later, raises intriguing questions about the relationship between the brain and the mind

Just yesterday, Popular Science aired a video about Lev Zasetsky a man who lived with a badly damaged brain but a very active mind, viewing the outcomes over many years:

Of course we need brains. But the exact relationship between the brain and the mind is unclear. More to the point, it is not likely to be resolved by anything as simple as the physicalist proposition that the brain’s activities generate the mind.

It appears that we will have to be more creative in our thinking.

You may also wish to read: Four researchers whose work sheds light on the reality of the mind The brain can be cut in half, but the intellect and will cannot, says Michael Egnor. The intellect and will are metaphysically simple.