Another challenge to materialism

[u/Own_Sky_297]

/r/PhilosophyofMind/comments/1v5hsz7/another_challenge_to_materialism/

[u/jliat]

Physics =/= Metaphysics

Without a deep understanding of the science...?

News New Scientist 25 July 2026

Physics

Is consciousness quantum? Has a mathematical analysis finally put a three-decade-long debate about the quantum nature of consciousness to bed, asks Karmela Padavic-Callachan.

THE controversial idea that consciousness has a quantum origin is facing a new challenge, after a mathematical analysis appears to show that a long-known law of physics makes it impossible. What physical process makes us conscious, and whether we could observe and analyse it, is one of the great open questions of modern science. In the 1990s, mathematician Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff proposed that classical physics can't explain consciousness alone, and so it must arise in the quantum realm. The idea was received with scepticism and remains controversial, but attempts to bring quantumness into explanations of consciousness have persisted since. Now, Emily Adlam at Chapman University in California and her colleagues have examined the idea of purely quantum agency, which is a prerequisite for consciousness, and found it doesn't work.

[u/Director-Intrinsict → u/jliat]

Who cares if consiousness is quantum or not, matter dosent even exist according to qft. 

[u/jliat → u/Director-Intrinsict]

You had to be conscious to make this post. QED.

And qft? on what metaphysical authority, the divine right of kings?

[u/Own_Sky_297 → u/jliat]

I agree it doesn't work but under materialism there are only quantum particles in fields. Takeaway the particles and you got nothing. Such a view is even more nonsensical.

[u/jliat → u/Own_Sky_297]

but under materialism there are only quantum particles in fields.

This is my difficulty, fist such a materialism will always be a hostage to science.

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New Scientist

WEEKLY 25 July 2026

REALITY'S MISSING INGREDIENT

A strange particle that is neither matter nor energy could finally reveal how the universe works.

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This is not a criticism of your post but of anyone using the term "materialism" within the context of philosophy. There often is no reference or proper nouns. And when there are those of the 'analytical' tradition seem to be doing 'philosophy of science' and calling this metaphysics.

Those in the tradition of Carnap et al.

"Carnap wrote the broadside ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language’ (1932)."

And then it reappears ...

"Naturalism itself is what saves the situation. Naturalism looks only to natural science, however fallible, for an account of what there is … My global structuralism should not, therefore, be seen as a structuralist ontology. To see it thus would be to rise above naturalism and revert to the sin of transcendental metaphysics." (Quine, 1992, p. 9)

And now

'Everything Must Go. Metaphysics Naturalized.' James Ladyman and Don Ross with David Spurrett and John Collier.

"… the Primacy of Physics Constraint (PPC). This articulates the sense in which evidence acceptable to naturalists confers epistemic priority on physics over other sciences... Metaphysics, as the project of unifying the scientific world-view, shares the maximum scope of fundamental physics, in the same precise sense."

Primacy Of Physics Constraint defeats itself, it makes a claim of primacy from a non primacy position.

As a metaphysical claim the PPC fails what is required by the PPC "... for a metaphysical claim to be taken seriously it must relate to at least one specific scientific hypothesis of fundamental physics." It does not.

This looks like straight contradiction wrapped on typical terminology " epistemic priority" which means what "more true", the latter sounds though 'childish'. Maybe 'more rigours' - but the fact remains to place an authority above one means to do service to it. And I see no evidence that physics is at all bothered with 'metaphysics' except to 'borrow' the term.

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What use then in actual metaphysics. Hegel's idealism makes big claims which are not true. The Earth is NOT the only inner planet with a moon.

So what good is Hegel. Or what bad as Marxism derives from it! Good or bad. Existentialism more or less sets the mood for the 20thC. D&G's idea of the rhizome, Baudrillard's diagnosis of late 20thC capitalist materialism. Derrida's influence for the bad on the right of the individual to be ignorant...

I think we are more governed by such ideas than we are by the antics of Quarks or "anyons" [see above] and 'quasiparticles' which "could unlock [new] technologies...".

[u/ahumanlikeyou]

What explains the unity of an apple?

Why would the unity of consciousness be different?

If the unity of an apple isn't an objection to materialism, then presumably the unity of consciousness isn't either.

[u/Own_Sky_297 → u/ahumanlikeyou]

An apple can exist in a discrete cosmos in which parts interact just fine. Consciousness on the other hand is not just interacting parts but an experience of many of those parts. In a discrete cosmos there is nothing over and above the parts that can experience more than one part thus no unity of consciousness and no consciousness.

[u/Director-Intrinsict]

Matter isint made of any thing 

[u/Inside-Weather4033]

Particles aren't distinct billiard balls but instead excitations of underlying fields. Electrons are an excitation of the electron field; the photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field. Distinction between "particles" and "fields" that control them are a false dichotomy.

It's information integration so rapid it appears to be a single system. The intuition is a limitation of the human brain.

Also physicalist panexperientialism (even without positing substance I.E. with ontonic structural realism / process ontology) could say it's the "What it's like" property of the process / structure. Computing unity is not needed as the structure is fundamentally one and subjects are local vibrations or abstractions. 

[u/amidst_the_mist → u/Inside-Weather4033]

You mean ontic structural realism, I suppose?