Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

Written by Bernardo Kastrup

Narrated by Stephen Graybill

The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally-viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. It lays out a coherent framework upon which one can interpret and make sense of every natural phenomenon and physical law, as well as the modalities of human consciousness, without materialist assumptions. According to this framework, the brain is merely the image of a self-localization process of mind, analogously to how a whirlpool is the image of a self-localization process of water. The brain doesn't generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn't generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness. The book closes with a series of educated speculations regarding the afterlife, psychic phenomena, and other related subjects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jul 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666130027

Reviews for Why Materialism Is Baloney

[gramsell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent writing, informed, erudite and engaging. Well worth a listen.

[Brian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is said to uncover the absurd implications of materialism.  Unfortunately, Kastrup misses the most absurd implications of all: 1) We live in an age when we prefer to shock the brains of the depressed rather than to let them use godsend medicine that would cheer them up.  2) We live in an age when we will let the depressed kill themselves with drugs but we will not let  them cheer themselves up with drugs.  3) We live in an age when 1 in 4 American women are dependent upon Big Pharma's "scientific" drugs for life.  These downsides are all due to the myopic reductionism of the modern materialist, who ignores the obvious in favor of the microscopic. Such scientists want objective proof that drugs work and are deaf to glowing user reports about drugs (not to mention the historical accounts  which credit some of these drugs with inspiring entire religions!).  Dr. Robert  Glatter was typical of such materialist blindness when he asked in Forbes magazine in June 2021: "Can laughing gas help people with treatment resistant depression?"  Answer: He's not sure!

What?! Of course laughing gas could help. But reductive materialism makes Glatter indifferent to all the laughter he hears from users, nor does he consider the fact that anticipation of occasional use would improve attitude. Presumably such evidence just comes from consciousness, which to the materialist is "just" an epiphenomenon, after all.

Such downsides appear whenever the drug war ideology of substance demonization meets the materialist's disdain for conscious states of mind. Unfortunately, critics of materialism are either unaware of these connections or afraid to point them out.  In fact, when I tried to make these points on Kastrup's discussion page, I was told to beat it.  The moderator told me that I should find a "drugs" forum to discuss such things.  That's how we normalize the drug war and ghettoize its opponents. And so Kastrup takes the credo of materialism to court while refusing to use the most damning evidence against it: namely, the reductio ad absurdum that results from our society's current anti-patient drug policy.  Not only does he thereby weaken his own thesis, but his silence about drugs helps to further normalize the drug war by implying that the outlawing of mind-aiding medicines has no negative implications. He thereby joins the vast majority of other science writers of our age who reckon without the drug war, thereby implying that the unprecedented Christian Science prohibitions of our time can be taken as a baseline from which to deduce the truths about science and philosophy.