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Materialism, as the philosophy exists today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. When we talk about someone being a 'materialist' we don't mean they shop for lots of handbags or fancy dining room sets. Instead, a materialist is generally defined as seeing all facts or pieces of the world, including the human mind and will, as dependable on or in the most extreme case reducible to physical processes.
In other words, there is only physical matter moving around and interacting, no other forces exist in the universe.
There are a number of major issues within determinism such as free will, and the seeming ability of humans to make choices that operate outside of physical processes. Of course this claim has been papered over from the materialist side by claiming that free will is just an illusion, but the determinists haven't made much headway. The most famous contemporary materialist from my understanding is Daniel Dennett, who has written extensively on free will, determinism, religion, et cetera, and basically come up with a convoluted 'compatibalist' view: that the world is all physical processes, yet we also have free will. Somehow.
Now challenges to materialism present a number of problems, primarily the fact that our modern, statistical, ScientificTM worldview cannot tolerate or understand any phenomena that aren't easily and simply repeated. Even if supernatural phenomenon did exist however, the bias against them has grown so massive in the last century that any respectable scientist wouldn't be caught dead going near these claims.
Why does this matter for the Culture War? Well outside of even religion, our entire cultural regime rests upon Science being the arbiter of truth and ender of disputes. If it turns out our materialistic worldview science has given us ends up being false, there are innumerable cultural repercussions, from the temporal vindication of religion to the re-opening of entire new vistas of understanding. Materialism's truth or falsity is, I would argue, the most important higher level question for our world to answer at the moment. Unfortunately, the mainstream consensus has been that materialism is true a priori despite massive contradictions. Even if many moderns don't outright argue this, their actions and stances on various topics reveal them as materialists through and through.
I'd imagine many people reading this haven't been exposed to some of the more respectable claims of anti-materialists. I'm going to quote heavily from this article by Roger's Bacon to give you an idea of some of the more interesting claims. Bacon, in turn, pulls heavily from a book entitled The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, if you're interested in further reading.
Bacon explains how Freeman Dyson, an intellectual titan by any standard, posited this idea:
This view is generally referred to as "Traumatic Transcendence," or in other words you need extremely strong states to activate latent 'powers' or abilities, states which controlled experiments almost by definition cannot excite in patients. We're not just talking scaring someone a bit, we're talking extremely near death or something similar. And even in those states it's an extreme rarity of cases, apparently. However, we have extensive anecdotal reports, many from quite distinguished thinkers and well corroborated, that propose something like traumatic transcendence being real.
There are of course other examples. I'm going to quote this one from Mark Twain at length, which I find fascinating:
Again, there are almost endless examples of these types of phenomena occurring, which are unfortunately decried by any scientific establishment that exists today.
However, traumatic transcendence isn't the only explanation. Another reasonable explanation for our inability to capture these occurrences in experiments would be that they are mediated by an intelligent, non-human agent of some kind such as a ghost, demon, angel, God or gods, et cetera. In fact, this is the claim straightforwardly put forth by most believers in the supernatural throughout history. Which of course is essentially all humans before the last century.
If these other beings did in fact cause supernatural events to happen, or at least need to give their 'permission' so to speak for the normal laws of physics to be suspended, well then of course we wouldn't be able to predict when it would happen. We still aren't even good at predicting human behavior, outside of pacified and corralled Westerners who are manipulated 24/7 by intense media designed to change their behavior.
Another idea to explain supernatural phenomena, while a bit more 'out there,' is actually one I find quite compelling. Bacon outlines it as such:
This idea is actually explored quite a bit in fantasy and science fiction - for instance Warhammer 40K has a similar world, where every conscious mind's inherent beliefs do affect material reality, and enough of those together can cause a planet or part of the universe to operate drastically differently than others.
It's worth considering, at the very least.
Overall, there are still many mysteries to be explained in our universe, despite what our reductionist and materialist culture would have you think. I'll end with another block quote from Kripal, as he says it better than I ever could:
To whom does it seem we have such an ability, and on what basis? We subjectively seem to have free will, sure, but nothing in this seeming directly illuminates its relationship with the material world, just as the subjective feeling of pain reveals nothing about the firing of group C nerve fibers. Direct experience is simply ambiguous on these matters.
Compatibilism was not invented by Dennett, having existed in some form since the Stoics. It's the dominant view among English-speaking philosophers (59% in one 2020 survey). If your best characterization of the doctrine is that we have free will "somehow", you are not engaging seriously with it.
The rest of your post veers in a strange direction. There are a fair number of respected anti-materialist philosophers. Their arguments rarely have anything to do with reports of ESP or other fantastical powers, but rather the irreducibility of things that are ordinary and familiar--free will, intentionality, subjective experience--to a completely mechanistic account of all of reality. Many of these arguments are subtle and persuasive and are taken seriously in the field. "Mental telegraphy", generally, is not.
What are some of the best philosophers to check out or books to read in your view? I'm certainly open to reading more anti-materialist arguments.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on physicalism (which is related to and sometimes interchangeable with materialism) is a good place to start.
If you want to look at particular anti-materialist arguments, there is John Searle's Chinese Room argument. This is in principle a critique of the "strong AI" hypothesis that a computer could fully replicate a human mind, but given Searle's philosophical commitments, it can be read as a critique of any mechanistic account of consciousness rather than Searle ascribing special properties to biological processes in particular. Any of Searle's works on philosophy of mind would probably be up your alley.
The notion of philosophical zombies (very different from the Dawn Of The Dead sort) is another thing to consider. Many philosophers have touched on this issue, but Saul Kripke is a particularly well-known one who has pressed this argument against materialism.
David Chalmers is known for formulating the "hard problem" of consciousness, which is the seeming irreducibility of subjective experience (e.g. the "redness" of seeing red) to physical events (e.g. light of 650nm wavelength stimulating the retina and producing a neural response).
A lot of philosophy is published in academic journals rather than books, so Googling particular articles might be fruitful.
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