All posts tagged: Materialism

11 Completely Unnecessary Everyday Items That Most People Can’t Stop Spending Money On

11 Completely Unnecessary Everyday Items That Most People Can’t Stop Spending Money On

Published by Jenni Sidey

While stress in daily life tends to urge people into a survival mindset and conserve their resources — saving more and spending less on non-necessities — there are certain products most people can’t help but purchase over and over again. Whether it’s seasonal decor or overpriced greeting cards, there are many completely unnecessary everyday items that most people can’t stop spending money on. No matter how we try to rationalize and control our spending habits, many are rooted in inherent emotional and social experiences. We spend on things to cope, find comfort, seek community, feel like we belong, or even to grasp on a sense of control we’re missing. It’s more nuanced than “financial irresponsibility,” especially when it comes to these seemingly harmless everyday purchases. Here are 11 completely unnecessary everyday items that most people can’t stop spending money on 1. Candles they’ll never burn DimaBerlin | Shutterstock So many people spend money on nice things and make investments into material goods, only to keep them tucked away from the light of day forever. They …

COSM 2025: Entanglement in Physics —What It Means for Materialism

COSM 2025: Entanglement in Physics —What It Means for Materialism

Published by Jenni Sidey

This article by Casey Luskin is republished from Science and Culture Today. At COSM this week, author Louisa Gilder spoke about her book The Age of Entanglement (2009), about the bizarre quantum mechanics phenomenon where two particles become linked, such that they share the same quantum state. But it gets a lot weirder, because the distance between the two particles doesn’t affect their entangled behavior. Under entanglement, measuring a property of one particle determines the outcome of the measurement on the other particle. It’s been proposed that the correlation between entangled particles happens instantaneously — certainly faster than the speed of light. Einstein famously called this “spooky action at a distance.” This non-distance-related relationship is called “non-locality.”  Initially, many scientists felt that non-locality or “action at a distance” was too spooky to be correct. They proposed that there were “hidden local variables” that cause particles to behave in the same manner. So quantum entanglement wasn’t actually a thing. If these hidden local variables were real, one could explain entanglement-like behavior deterministically, without there truly being some …

Why Materialism Will Probably Drift Into Panpsychism

Why Materialism Will Probably Drift Into Panpsychism

Published by Jenni Sidey

We’ve been covering the buzz around that new French book, forthcoming in English translation, God, the Science, the Evidence. Yesterday, the Spectator published an article by the book’s first author, Michel-Yves Bolloré, arguing that belief in God is a “rationally sound conviction.” Indeed, he argues, it is getting harder for scientists not to believe in God: While the findings of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin created the impression that the workings of the universe could be explained without a creator God, the last century has seen what I call ‘The Great Reversal of Science’. With a number of break-through scientific discoveries – including thermodynamics, the theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics, plus the Big Bang and theories of expansion, heat death, and fine-tuning of the universe – the pendulum of science has swung back in the opposite direction. More and more convincingly, and perhaps in spite of itself, science today is pointing to the fact that, to be explained, our universe needs a creator. In the words of Robert Wilson, Nobel Prize winner for the discovery …

Materialism in Science: Touching Another Hot Button

Materialism in Science: Touching Another Hot Button

Published by Jenni Sidey

IAI.TV offers an article summary sure to raise some hackles: The philosophy of materialism has dominated theoretical physics and neuroscience for decades. In this article, theoretical physicist and neuroscientist Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that scientific gatekeeping of alternatives to materialism is the most dangerous type of pseudoscience. To make progress, he argues, we need to examine what we don’t understand in our current theories. “Materialism is holding science back,” September 16, 2025 Yes. Challenges to a materialist view of, say, human consciousness, have always and only been phrased in terms of the shortcomings of current materialist theories. Better ones, we are assured, are in the pipeline… indefinitely. The underlying premise is never questioned. And now for that very hot button Àlex Gómez-Marín goes on to raise — in the very venue that hosts, say, Roger Penrose and Sabine Hossenfelder — the validity of telepathy research: Totally debunked, you say? Nope: Half a century ago, a research letter entitled “Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding” was published in Nature. The piece was a remarkable anomaly in the …

What If Science Tried Doing Without Materialism?

What If Science Tried Doing Without Materialism?

Published by Jenni Sidey

At Chronicles Magazine, John Zmirak offers some blunt observations, while reviewing The Immortal Mind (Worthy, June 3, 2025): The most destructive implication of materialism is the simplest: that human beings don’t have souls. Our rational minds, our sense of self, our moral intuitions, our loves and hates and loyalties are finally fictions in this view—side-effects, illusions, the shadows cast by what is only really real: mere chemistry and physics. Your sense of “you,” my own experience of “me,” the “love” between two people … all of that is all just smoke and mirrors, produced as epiphenomena of what’s actually happening: neurons in our brains shooting sparks through the meat, driven by iron laws of deterministic causation or the blind whims of random chance. Free will is an illusion and our “selves” wink out at death. This, our children are taught, is the verdict of Science, and it forms the silent assumption of every science program we stream. “Immortal Soul or Meat Machine,” September 4, 2025 The most remarkable fact about this silent assumption, as neurosurgeon …

Isn’t It a Bit Late To Try Retreading Eliminative Materialism?

Isn’t It a Bit Late To Try Retreading Eliminative Materialism?

Published by skeptic

At Big Think, philosopher Jonny Thomson asks us to ponder anew the ideas of Daniel Dennett (1942–2024), whose biography he introduces. Dennett especially popularized the idea that consciousness is an illusion generated by a material brain. Thomson makes clear that he is a Dennett fan: At a time when most philosophers were confined to their offices or lecturing to shrinking pools of students, Daniel Dennett was extraordinary — a rockstar philosopher with a rockstar beard and, perhaps most uniquely, a deep sense of kindness. Known as one of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” he rose to fame along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens as a leading thinker who sought naturalistic explanations for the supernatural. While his fellow horsemen focused mostly on superstition and organized religion, Dennett was always more concerned with the mind. “Daniel Dennett: Consciousness is no miracle. It’s a magic trick,” August 20, 2025 Dennett was an eliminative materialist at a time when the idea that consciousness is an illusion sounded cool and daring. It was the era, after …