Not long ago, I wrote an article on brain science and why it doesn’t prove the non-existence of a spiritual soul. Shortly after, I was approached by an author claiming science had finally “refuted” the soul. At the same time, I encountered two pivotal works: Dr. Bernardo Kastrup’s Why Materialism is Baloney, which logically establishes an Idealist view, and Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, which argues that consciousness cannot be a mere product of matter.
It seems the materialist view—the belief that reality is fundamentally made of “stuff”—is a default setting for many. Yet, exposing its flaws requires only a bit of philosophical sensitivity.
The Parable of the Teddy Bearist
The problem with materialists is not their answers; it is that they misunderstand the question. Imagine you find a closed room containing a teddy bear and a literary masterpiece.
“Who wrote this?” you ask. “The teddy bear,” replies the Teddy Bearist. “Do you see anyone else here?” “Nonsense! How can a teddy bear write a book?” “Watch,” says the Teddy Bearist. The bear stands, waves its arms, and letters immediately appear on the page. “You see? The movements cause the writing. Every time I poke the bear’s arm, a specific word changes. This proves the bear is the author.”
The Teddy Bearist confuses correlation with causation. He describes what is happening but explains nothing about how a plush toy can possess the agency or intellect to compose a masterpiece.
When the materialist points to the brain (the “gray, slimy mass”) as the source of thoughts and love, they are the Teddy Bearist. They point to neurological states (the bear’s movements) and claim they are the mental phenomena. But there is an “Explanatory Gap”—a leap between electrical signals and the feeling of the color red—that materialism cannot bridge. It simply says, “it just happens.”
The Alternative: Idealism
If materialism (Matter is primary) fails, we turn to Idealism (Mind is primary). In this view, the universe is not a machine, but a “Great Thought.” Our consciousness is not inside the world; the world exists inside consciousness.
1. Ontological Economy (Ockham’s Razor)
Materialism requires us to believe in two things: our perceptions and a “dark universe” of matter existing outside those perceptions which we can never truly see. Idealism is more economical. It suggests there is only one substance: consciousness. We don’t need to “add” a world of matter any more than we need to assume a “real” physical world exists behind our nightly dreams.
2. The Filter vs. The Generator
We have never seen matter create a mind, but we see minds create “matter” every night in dreams. Why assume the brain is a generator of consciousness? As Dr. Kastrup suggests, the brain may be a whirlpool in the stream of consciousness. The whirlpool doesn’t “create” water; it is simply a localized pattern of water. If you disturb the whirlpool (brain damage), you change the flow of the water (experience), but the water itself remains.
3. Solving the Mind-Body Problem
Materialism struggles to explain how a physical thought can move a physical arm. Idealism simplifies this: consciousness influences the body because the body is an image within consciousness. They are the same “substance,” just as a character in a dream is made of the same “mind-stuff” as the dreamer.
4. The Unity of Natural Laws
Why does the universe follow precise mathematical laws? Materialism says, “it’s just like that.” Idealism suggests the universe is uniform because it is the product of a single, transpersonal mind. Mathematical equations describe the universe so well because both the math and the universe are products of the same mental logic.
Anticipating the Materialist Rebuttal
To truly test Idealism, we must answer the most common “common sense” objections:
The “Shared Reality” Objection: “If the world is a thought, why can’t I imagine a million dollars into my bank account?” Response: Idealism is not Solipsism. You are a “whirlpool,” but you are part of a much larger “ocean.” Just as you cannot control your own dreams entirely, your individual ego does not control the “Big Mind” that maintains the laws of physics.
The “Brain Damage” Objection: “If the soul is primary, why does a stroke change a person’s personality?” Response: If you damage a radio, the music becomes distorted. This doesn’t mean the radio produced the music; it was merely the receiver. The brain is the interface through which the “ocean” of consciousness experiences a “point of view.”
The “Objectivity” Objection: “The world existed for billions of years before humans. How could it be mental?” Response: Idealism doesn’t say the world is in human minds. It says the world is a mental process. The universe was “thought” into existence long before our localized “whirlpools” (human brains) appeared.
Quantum pioneer James Jeans famously noted that the universe seems “less like a great machine and more like a great thought.”
If the idea of a “Great Consciousness” feels mystical, ask yourself if it is any more absurd than the materialist’s “Teddy Bear”—the belief that dead atoms, through enough bumping into each other, eventually developed the ability to fall in love, write symphonies, and ponder their own existence. If the bear is writing the book, someone—or something—must be pulling the strings.
To round out this philosophical journey, we can look at how modern physics has essentially pulled the rug out from under “old-fashioned” materialism. If materialism is the belief that the world is made of tiny, solid “marbles” of matter, then 20th and 21st-century science has effectively turned those marbles into ghosts.
The Quantum Verdict: The End of “Hard” Matter
The strongest blow to materialism didn’t come from theologians, but from the physicists who tried to find the “bottom” of reality. What they found looks remarkably like the Idealism described by Kastrup and Jeans.
1. The Observer Effect and the Collapse of the Wavefunction
In classical materialism, a tree falls in the forest regardless of whether anyone is there to hear it. But in quantum mechanics, particles exist in a “superposition”—a cloud of possibilities—until they are measured or observed.
This suggests that observation is not a passive recording of a pre-existing world, but a fundamental part of “bringing reality into focus.” If the physical state of a particle depends on a measurement, then consciousness is not a byproduct of the universe; it is a participant in its creation.
2. Quantum Entanglement (Non-locality)
Materialism relies on “locality”—the idea that for one thing to affect another, they must touch or exchange a signal. However, entangled particles can influence each other instantaneously across across the universe.
This “spooky action at a distance” (as Einstein called it) suggests that underneath the “matter” we see, there is a unified field that ignores space and time. This fits perfectly with the Idealist view that the entire universe is a single, unified “thought” rather than a collection of separate, isolated pieces of matter.
3. The “Matter” that Isn’t There
If you zoom into an atom, you find it is $99.99999\%$ empty space. The “solid” feeling of a table is actually just the electromagnetic repulsion between electrons. As we go deeper into Quantum Field Theory, we find that there are no “particles” at all—only ripples in fields.
If “matter” is just a ripple in a field, what is the field made of? The Materialist has no answer. The Idealist, however, points out that we already know of a “field” that can create complex, structured ripples without being made of physical stuff: Mind.
Closing Reflection
When we combine the logical parsimony of Idealism, the explanatory power of the “Whirlpool” metaphor, and the findings of modern physics, the materialist “Teddy Bear” starts to look like a very shaky foundation for a worldview.
Materialism asks us to believe that mindless matter accidentally created mind. Idealism asks us to consider that Mind—the only thing we ever actually experience—is the foundation of all that is. In the light of both logic and science, the choice is becoming increasingly clear. [Based on a Hebrew article on the website Mysterium]
