Physicalism is the view that everything in the universe, including us, can be explained in terms of physical laws such as the laws of physics and chemistry. This view is similar to what's called materialism which holds that there are no non-material substances or entities in the universe. Everything that exists is made of material stuff, atoms, or is derived from matter.
These two ways of seeing the world dominated science and philosophy throughout the twentieth century but have become increasingly untenable as evidence continues to pile up that there's more to reality than just matter.
A recent post on VP borrowed from a discussion on the evidence that convinced pioneering neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield that something besides just our material brains was involved in our cognitive experience and that materialism and physicalism could not explain conscious experience..
The following video is put out by Inspiring Philosophy and takes the discussion a few steps further. It assesses a number of additional lines of evidence that point to the existence of an immaterial mind that works with the brain but is independent of it.
The video is a bit long, but if you're interested in the reasons why substance dualism (the view that there are two disparate substances responsible for our mental phenomena - matter and mind) is gaining renewed acceptance among philosophers and neuroscientists then you'll want to watch as much of it as you have time for.
The question of whether materialism is correct or not has important consequences for one's religious beliefs. The beliefs that we have a soul, that we have free will, that we have a self which perdures through time, that there's life after death, that there's moral accountability after death, and that God exists are all much more compatible with dualism than they are with materialism/physicalism..In fact, most materialists deny all of these beliefs.
Here's the video:
Here's the video:
