Consciousness and the End of Materialism: Seeking identity and harmony in a dark era

The paper argues that modern science, particularly materialism, has wrongly reduced human consciousness to an illusion and humans to unimportant parts of a cold universe. It contends that materialism is an obsolete dogma and that prevailing interpretations of brain research are biased by anti-spiritual prejudices. The author calls for a paradigm shift toward idealistic theories, proposing that consciousness is not a by-product of matter but its master. The goal is to re-establish the notion of an immaterial spirit, compatible with religious ideas, as a valid foundation for understanding the self and our place in the cosmos.

Study at a glance

Abstract

“I am me”, but what does this mean? For centuries humans identified themselves as conscious beings with free will, beings that are important in the cosmos they live in. However, modern science has been trying to reduce us into unimportant pawns in a cold universe and diminish our sense of consciousness into a mere illusion generated by lifeless matter. Our identity in the cosmos is nothing more than a deception and all the scientific evidence seem to support this idea. Or is it not? The goal of this paper is to discard current underlying dogmatism (axioms taken for granted as "self-evident") of modern mind research and to show that consciousness seems to be the ultimate frontier that will cause a major change in the way exact sciences think. If we want to re-discover our identity as luminous beings in the cosmos, we must first try to pinpoint our prejudices and discard them. Materialism is an obsolete philosophical dogma and modern scientists should try to also use other premises as the foundation of their theories to approach the mysteries of the self. Exact sciences need to examine the world with a more open mind, accepting potentially different interpretations of existing experimental data in the fields of brain research, which are currently not considered simply on the basis of a strong anti-spiritual dogmatism. Such interpretations can be compatible with the notion of an immaterial spirit proposed by religion for thousands of years. Mind seems that is not the by-product of matter, but the opposite: its master. No current materialistic theory can explain how matter may give rise to what we call “self” and only a drastic paradigm shift towards more idealistic theories will help us avoid rejecting our own nature.