Materialism is the premise that only matter exists but it has no known ability to experience the events it causes, so the consciousness we experience is unexpected. No law or equation needs it, as the matter that causes physical events has no need for extra-physical experiential events. As science developed other causes to explain physical events, materialism morphed into physicalism, the premise that only physical events exist, caused not only by matter but also energy, space, and time.
Yet physical causes can’t experience physical events either, so physicalism has to reject consciousness entirely (Materialism-A), which denies common experience, claim that it equates to a physical state (Materialism-B), despite the evidence that consciousness doesn’t reside in any brain region, or promise to explain it eventually (Materialism-C). It isn’t easy to deny what everyone accepts, or claim what the evidence denies, so all that reasonably remains is the promise to explain consciousness one day because it has explained everything else so far.
Wheeler described this option by a physical universe (U) with an eye that observes matter (Figure 6.1), given that one set of physical events (P) produces the next in an endless chain. But this chain has no gaps, so one link can’t be an observing eye and another not as the figure implies. This again leads to the conclusion that either nothing observes or physical states do.
Yet the logic that what best explains matter will also best explain consciousness is sound, but physicalism can’t explain the dark matter that is 85% of all matter (4.7.6), or dark energy that is 68% of all matter-energy (4.7.7). The standard model, based on physicalism, then explains about 5% of our universe, the ordinary matter we see, so why should it explain consciousness?
But isn’t a model based on real matter at least realistic? Again it isn’t so, as the standard model needs unverifiable virtual particles and miracles like wave-particle duality to work. Is it realistic that matter particles with no physical size spin (4.7.1)? Or that massless gluons create most of an atom’s mass (4.7.3)? What is realistic about thinking that matter can be infinitely dense (5.4.6), or that the future can affect the past (3.8.3), or that massive particles from empty space decay neutrons (4.4.6)? The standard model is many things but its claims aren’t realistic at all.
Even worse, using virtual particles to explain physical events denies science because they can’t be verified. Science is based on empiricism, verifying facts by physical tests, but virtual particles appear and disappear in a way that isn’t testable, giving a fairytale physics that predicts what doesn’t occur and can’t explain what does (Baggot, 2013). The standard model assumption that equations alone satisfy science is false, as its current stagnation shows, because equations aren’t theories.
Why then is physicalism still widely accepted? The answer seems to be that everyone thinks it is needed. Physicists think that science needs physical causes but actually science verifies theories by physical results, so quantum theory is a science despite its non-physical causes because it is testable. Scientists also think that the equations of physics need physical causes but actually the laws of gravity work whether it is physical or not. The following story illustrates the situation:
A father and son would meet to discuss the meaning of life over a meal. Each time they were joined by a third man who ate most of the food and dominated the conversation but left when the bill arrived, so he paid nothing. One day the son said “Your friend eats a lot and never pays!” to which the father replied “He’s not my friend, I thought he was yours!”.
Father and son accepted the third man because he was the other’s friend, but he wasn’t, just as science and physics accept physicalism thinking the other does, but they don’t. Physicalism sits at the table of science proclaiming that particles cause everything, but when the bill of evidence comes it can’t pay because its virtual particles have no scientific value. It is an impostor that pontificates but doesn’t deliver when the reality check arrives, so physics and science are better off without it.
In conclusion, consciousness is just one of many facts of our world that physicalism can’t explain, from the two-slit experiment (3.1.3) to non-physical detection (3.8.4), so the hard problem is just another of its failures. What then of dualism (1.2.2), its main opponent?