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People have been heralding the end of materialism and the dawn of a new paradigm for quite a while. The ancestor of the Scientific and Medical Network is an organization called the Society for Psychical Research, which was founded in 1882 and included some of the greatest thinkers of the late Victorian era, like William James and Marie Curie. The SPR sought to prove that consciousness was not confined to the physical brain, that it could connect minds through telepathy, and survive death, then communicate with earthlings from beyond the grave.
It had a similar millenarian faith — soon, very soon, humanity will shift out of the materialist cul-de-sac into a luminous new age of mass telepathy and communication with the dead. We will evolve into ‘superhumanity’ — becoming immortal beings capable of transcending time, space and death. A similar belief was very strong in the 1960s — here comes the Age of Aquarius! Then in the 1980s — the Age of Aquarius is definitely coming! Then in 2012 — here comes the Harmonic Convergence! It’s now 2022, and as I put it before, dude, where’s my paradigm shift?
I am basically on Team Post-Materialism. Materialism doesn’t really explain consciousness at all — it simply ignores it, or calls it an epiphenomenon. Seeing as the only thing we know for sure is that we’re conscious, and we experience everything through our consciousness, it’s amazing that a theory that ignores consciousness and has no explanation for it has lasted this long.
I also get the emotional and spiritual appeal of non-materialist theories of consciousness. They fit better with older religious or spiritual ideas — that we have an immortal soul, that we are connected in spirit to one another and to the universe, that what we think and do matters, somehow, to God or the cosmos.
On the other hand, it strikes me that the main reason for the stubborn survival of the materialist thesis and the failure of post-materialist theories to gain dominance is not the craven fear of the scientific establishment, but the fact that non-materialist theories are useless.
I mean that literally. Materialism may be wrong in important respects, but it nonetheless proved incredibly useful in the inventions and medical breakthroughs it inspired. The materialist theory of the body led to huge advances in medicine. The materialist theory of physics led to the steam engine and the computer, the jet -plane and the space shuttle. We owe the entire technological revolution of the last 300 years to the materialist theory. Without it we’d still believe in Galenic humours and sympathetic magic, and life expectancy would still be 40.
