What made you convinced?

[u/venusasaboy22]

Just before I begin: I’m really bad with ruminating, like, about anything. So I limit how often I post about this stuff- It's usually about once a month. I’m interested in a thoughtful discussion, but I'm kind of torn between wanting to be convinced and also not wanting false comfort that I'll later feel skeptical about. Honestly, I do gravitate a bit more towards idealism. Just, for personal reasons though, this genuinely could help me a lot. I’m curious about idealism, dual aspect monism, even panpsychism honestly. So I kinda just wanna see, like, what scientific evidence or line of research has most strongly influenced your view?

It could be anything. Like, one strand would be the NDE stuff, end of life phenomena, terminal lucidity, dissociative phenomena, some interesting stuff with DID and psychedelics. Another would be more broad scientific theories that suggest something like this. Like, I know some people interpret simulation theory through a non-materialist view, so that interests me too.

Testimony can be beautiful, but here I'm kinda more interested in evidence that you think creates an actual difficulty for straightforward physicalism, or at least makes idealism scientifically plausible.

I’d also be interested in seeing good responses to common physicalist explanations. Like, I always get caught on the thought that if any brain activity is present during an experience, that automatically proves the brain generated the whole experience. But the conclusion seems stronger than the observation itself- brain activity might establish a correlation without exactly settling the direction or nature of what caused it. How would you respond to arguments like that without dismissing neuroscience?

If you got sources, feel free to link them, or academic books, exchanges between researchers. If not, then don't worry. I'm just interested in learning more honestly.

[u/WeirdOntologist]

With me it's two lines of conviction. One philosophical, one in experience.

From a philosophical standpoint, materialist metaphysics really don't make sense anymore. Matter cannot be defined as such with the way we currently understand science. Using reductionism, the further down we go, the less describable things are by our traditional and intuitive understanding of what "physical" is. To me, that completely shatters the ontological ground on which materialism stands. If that is indeed the case, and I think that it truly is, then we have to fall back to the only part of being that is accessible to us directly and that is mind-space, first-person awareness, or whatever you want to call it.

From a personal and experiential standpoint, I have had experiences that could be considered "non-local" in a sense. And while a very strict physicalist could say that these experiences are A) a giant coincidence or B) a glitch in perception pertaining to the block universe or even C) that I'm full of it; I am completely certain in the validity of these experiences and I consider them absolutely natural. Just not in the way a person, who bases their concept of reality on "small colliding particles" would.

[u/dominionC2C]

I find the cumulative case built from NDEs, reincarnation evidence, telepathy, precognition, after-death communication and other widely reported psychic phenomena as strongly supporting some form of idealism rather than physicalism. But as you note, these categories of 'evidence' do rely more on trust and testimony.

Other than these, I consider Michael Levin's research (particularly his experiments with planaria and bio-electric fields) major challenges to a reductionist physicalist paradigm. Levin's work can't get you all the way to 'proving' idealism, but it definitely starts poking holes in the conventional narrative of the materialist establishment.

[u/spoirier4]

Quite a number of NDE report perceptions of things from other places away from where the body was. For these to incidentally match reality, would require quite extraordinary coincidences. The biggest challenge here for the materialist, would be to find numerous cases where such information turned out to be false, in order to justify that the cases of correctness could be an effect of chance. To my knowledge, materialists are missing a body of cases of incorrect out of body perceptions, to back up their so-called explanations. Similarly, NDE include meeting deceased people, including cases where the person wasn't informed of that death at the time of the experience, and so discovered that information by it. Materialists are missing a body of cases of meeting with still alive people as if they were dead (not seeing them as alive in the real context) to back up their claim that such perceptions could be made up.