This is sure to raise some hackles. IAI.TV offers an article summary:
The philosophy of materialism has dominated theoretical physics and neuroscience for decades. In this article, theoretical physicist and neuroscientist Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that scientific gatekeeping of alternatives to materialism is the most dangerous type of pseudoscience. To make progress, he argues, we need to examine what we don’t understand in our current theories.
“Materialism is holding science back,” September 16, 2025
Yes. Challenges to a materialist view of, say, human consciousness, have always and only been phrased in terms of the shortcomings of current materialist theories. Better ones, we are assured, are in the pipeline… indefinitely. The underlying premise is never questioned.
Touching a Very Hot Button
Àlex Gómez-Marín goes on to raise — in the very venue that hosts, say, Roger Penrose and Sabine Hossenfelder — the validity of telepathy research:
Totally debunked, you say? Nope:
Half a century ago, a research letter entitled “Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding” was published in Nature. The piece was a remarkable anomaly in the history of the journal. The results were anomalous as well.
The authors, the American physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, provided psychological and neurophysiological evidence that individuals can obtain detailed information about their environment via some means beyond any known sense. Under controlled laboratory conditions, talented subjects were able to describe pictures and scenes in remote locations, achieving performances whose probability of occurring by chance was astoundingly small.
“Holding science back”
Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I noted in The Spiritual Brain (2007) that there has always been a small but persistent signal for telepathy (ESP) in careful research (see p. 187, TSB).
A Small, Persistent, and Wildly Unpopular Signal
As we wrote back then,
Recently, for example, self-professed skeptics have attacked atheist neuroscience grad student Sam Harris for having proposed, in his book entitled The End of Faith (2004), that psi research has validity. Harris is only following the evidence, as we shall see. But in doing so, he is clearly violating an important tenet of materialism: materialist ideology trumps evidence.
Yes, that Sam Harris. The travesty of popular occultism did not erase the signal. It did however help materialists make study of these phenomena radioactive. Thus, unwelcome clear evidence of the immaterial nature of the human mind could be dismissed on account of its unsavory associations. And materialists loved it:
As a reviewer of a follow-up piece by Targ and Puthoff published at the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1976 actually confessed, “this is the kind of thing that I would not believe in even if it existed”. The editor, however, remarked that “the investigation of ESP is a legitimate scientific understanding, regardless of their belief in its ultimate existence”. The reviewer was at least politely honest.
This is not always the case. Last year, a reviewer of a paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (ironically, on the very same topic) was allowed by the editor to send to the corresponding author of the manuscript, who has given me permission to share this, the following report: “This is pseudoscience. Remote Viewing is indistinguishable from random guessing. If Remote Viewing WERE successful, none of the de-classified CIA documents would have been de-classified”. The viewer completed their job by adding the line “The request for 100 word review for rejecting pseudo-science is ABUSE of Reviewer time,” copying and pasting the phrase twenty-four times, and then rounding off their rejection letter with “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
“Holding science back”
My, what a brilliant scientist. Meanwhile, as Gómez-Marín writes,
Back to the science: as it turns out, we can now use the latest meta-analytical techniques to study hundreds of replicated psi studies across a dozen classes of experiments, demonstrating high levels of confidence both in the statistical significance and independent repeatability of some of these effects which, however, are typically small — as shown by Etzel Cardeña in his article “The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review” published in the journal American Psychologist in 2018.
“Holding science back”
Clever people, like the brilliant scientist noted above, were offended to be asked to notice the signal. That’s the opposite of how science is supposed to work — and must work — to advance.
The Rising Cost of Materialism
So what’s changed? The cost of protecting materialism in science has risen gradually, consistent with the rising number of phenomena on which it sheds little light. For example, by 2019, consciousness studies were described in Chronicle of Higher Education as bizarre.There is a cost to forbidding anyone to suggest that the mind may not be simply what the brain does.
Better to offer a dismissible theory than one that gets you Canceled, right? But again, at what long-term cost?
Are Things Changing?
It’s too soon to be sure but, again, Gómez-Marín is appearing in the same venues as Roger Penrose and Sabine Hossenfelder.
In an unrelated development, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I were surprised at the absence of hostility from avowed materialists to our book The Immortal Mind (June 2025). The better informed among them seem to know as well as we do that science cannot simply continue to be used to confirm materialism without harm to the whole enterprise.
The Overton window is, as they say, moving.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.