Has Physics Pounded a New Nail in the Coffin of Materialism?
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says that matter is now known not to be fundamental but that fact is taking a while to catch onBBC sports reporter Simon Mundie, author of Champion Thinking (Bloomsbury 2024) also operates a YouTube channel.
There, he recently interviewed University of California cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman:
In this video, Donald Hoffman explains why material scientists will soon be left behind, as the understanding that matter cannot be fundamental spreads. Professor Hoffman says the 2022 Nobel Prize was a crucial moment in dispensing with physicalism, but scientists often take time to catch up – as was the case when Einstein discovered his theory of relativity in the 20th century. (March 31, 2025/3:13 min)
So why don’t popular science media appear to notice this? Hoffman explains:
Donald Hoffman: I’m pretty confident that [0:03] that’s going to happen because human beings, scientists in particular, are just as dogmatic as anybody else on the planet. But science as an institution, a social institution, is not dogmatic.
It may be slow to change its views but it’s not dogmatic because eventually data will overwhelm our biases and the the new theories will overwhelm our biases.
So, for example, in 1905 it was over for Newton as the fundamental theory of physics.
1905?
That was the year that Albert Einstein (1879–1955) published three seminal papers in Annalen der Physik. He upset ideas about spacetime that had reigned since the days of Isaac Newton (1642–1747).
Image Credit: Fernando Batista - Hoffman notes that the effect did not sink in right away among physicists. They appeared to want to back away from the significance of Einstein’s new approach:
It was [0:35] over but 17 years later when Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Nobel committee was very clear that it was not for his theory of spacetime; it wasn’t for his theory that overthrew Newton. It was for something else. It was a thing in quantum theory, the photoelectric effect.
So it took a long time for even the Nobel Prize Committee to respect and believe Einstein’s theory — even though it had already predicted the change of the position of stars in a solar eclipse and so forth. They were not convinced. Well, everybody is convinced now.
But you can see that even if it’s a genius like Einstein, who has made what we now know to be one of the biggest contributions of all time, it takes the science a little while, a few decades to catch up. But eventually it does.
About that 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics that Hoffman is talking about…
Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have each conducted groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated. Their results have cleared the way for new technology based upon quantum information.
“Entangled states – from theory to technology,” Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, October 4, 2022
The physicists showed that nature is not completely determined at the local level by Newton’s laws of physics. Also, from moment to moment, the state of a system is not absolutely determined by the properties that immediately precede it. That has profound implications for mind and brain issues like consciousness and free will. Essentially, the fact that there is no purely physical explanation for them does not conflict with science.
So, in Hoffman’s view, if popular science literature is still rattling on about finding the consciousness spot or the God circuit or some such thing in the brain, that’s probably because science culture still hasn’t caught up with the new findings.
What gets lost in translation
Image Credit: AREE - Actually, many of the great minds in physics were not particularly materialist at all:
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), author of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, said that “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), author of the famous Cat Paradox, did not believe that the human mind was an illusion. Far from thinking that, he believed that there was only one mind in the universe and that our individual minds are like the reflected light from prisms.
Theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008), a “giant of 20th century physics,” believed that “reality might not be a wholly physical phenomenon. In some sense, Wheeler suggested, reality grows out of the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself: it is “participatory.”
For that matter, the great logician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) believed in and defended the idea of the immortality of the human soul on logical grounds.
There are, of course, exceptions. As Neil Thomas tells us, Hoffman once worked with genome discoverer Francis Crick (1916–2004). Crick was the author of The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for Soul (Scribner, 1994), proclaiming that we are “nothing but a pack of neurons.”
It was astonishing. But is it true? From Thomas,
Both Hoffman and Crick were finally forced to conclude that all purely physicalist theories of consciousness had failed to provide illumination and that the state of consciousness could not be explained in neurological terms …
“How Darwin and Wallace Split over the Human Mind,”Evolution News, June 13, 2022
Continued failure to materialize the mind could be the beginning of a serious reckoning with the problems that physicalism and materialism represent.
