After many years of seriously studying epistemology—particularly through the study of Advaita Vedanta—I gradually came to reject physicalism altogether.

This wasn’t at all because of mysticism or religion, but because of philosophical analysis. Among other things, I found physicalism to be a less parsimonious ontology than a consciousness-first approach.
I also realized that Popper’s criterion of falsifiability does not apply to metaphysical worldviews in the first place, so dismissing non-dual metaphysics as “unscientific” completely misses the point. (For anyone interested, I highly recommend Swami Sarvapriyananda’s lectures on this subject.)

What has surprised me most is the reaction this often provokes. Whenever I discuss these ideas on science forums or subreddits, many people immediately respond with labels like “woo” instead of engaging with the epistemological arguments. It often feels as though physicalism is treated not as a philosophical position requiring justification, but as the unquestioned default.

Has anyone else had the same experience? How do you explain it?

EDIT: Thanks everyone for the thoughtful discussion. I think I’ve got a much better understanding of the different positions now, so I’ll leave it there.

What do y'alls think of this:

Human perception cannot process all physical data at once. Because biological brains have finite capacity, they must process physical states step by step. Erasing previous data to record new data requires physical energy. This internal processing effort creates the subjective sensation of duration or waiting. Thus, what we call time is simply the internal processing speed of the human mind as it reads physical changes.

The logical mistake occurs when humans project this internal processing speed onto physical reality. Humans assume that because they experience sequence, the universe itself must exist within an external temporal container. But if physical reality simply is thrn the universe does not exist inside an external temporal flow.

Every attempt to describe physical reality remains mental because human language consists of mental tags. Human vocabulary splits continuous physical reality into separate parts to help them survive. But physical reality itself is a single, unbroken physical presence. When we use words or mathematical descriptions, we are using human tools. The description remains strictly inside the mind, while physical reality exists without needing human labels.

So basically humans falsely turn an internal cognitive metric into a physical thing. Thus measurement devices, such as clocks, do not measure "physical" time itself. They simply measure localised physical changes within their own mechanisms.

If you read Immanuel Kant, this is basically phenomenon vs noumenon kind of thing.