08 October 2025

# Topics

Spirituality, Philosophy

Science that materialism fails to explain

08 October 2025

Here is how science made me stop being a materialist and turn into an agnostic.

Goal of this article is not to make you believe in some sort of God or religion but to give you a broader picture and to show that materialistic philosophy is not fully consistent in some questions and scientific evidence cannot always be fully explained from a materialistic standpoint.

My background:

Growing up in a Ukrainian family with Indian religion and being taught about meditation, veganism, and things like that. For a long period of time I just blindly believed in some kind of abstract, all-loving God. But after a certain period of time when I was talking to my friends and discussing spirituality with many people, I got to the point where simple scientific questions that I had could not be comprehensively answered by my believing friends.

Generally speaking, when we were arguing about God's existence, they were suggesting arguments like the perfection of an eye and that it cannot just randomly appear. To which biology argued that the human eye actually sees much less than many animals and actually receptors in our eyes are inverted, and we have at least one blind spot in each eye. Which, in my opinion, is far from perfection. Moreover, from this argument there is no direct conclusion about the necessity of some all-powerful conscious being.

(btw, it’s called the argument from design, also known as the teleological argument)

It's just one example of situations when I could not be fully satisfied with the answers of my friends. So the more I studied different natural sciences, the more I was disappointed in the ability of believers to give rational and consistent answers for simple scientific questions. So for at least 4 years I was heavily affected by a materialistic point of view. But at some point when I was scrolling down different content, I got to know about types of scientific studies that also could not be rationally and logically explained from a materialistic standpoint.

This article will be divided into several sections. In the beginning I will explain in simple words what the findings were, and in later parts I will get into more boring science with links to articles and detailed breakdowns of them. Also with conclusions from a materialistic standpoint towards these articles.

Links, as always, at the end of the article.

Table of contents

Simple-words part
Science Part 1
Science Part 2

Simple-words part

1. Waking Up When Brain Is Dead - Terminal Lucidity

You know how sometimes electronics work right before they break for good? Me neither, but it happens with people. This mysterious phenomenon happens with human brains in what scientists call "terminal lucidity."

Imagine this scenario: A patient with advanced Alzheimer's who hasn't recognized family members for years, can't form sentences, and appears completely disconnected from reality suddenly wakes up. They talk normally, recognize everyone, recall memories from decades ago, and have meaningful conversations - all this happening hours or days before they die. This isn't just a rare miracle or medical anomaly. Scientific studies document this worldwide. Research by Batthyány & Greyson (2020) surveyed caregivers and found over 80% reported witnessing such episodes. These moments of clarity typically happen shortly before death when brain deterioration is at its worst.

From a materialist perspective that says "mind equals brain," this makes absolutely no sense. The physical brain tissue responsible for memory, language, and self-awareness has been destroyed. MRI scans of such patients show massive tissue loss. There's no "hardware" left to run the "software" of consciousness. It's like watching a computer with a completely fried motherboard suddenly boot up and run complex programs flawlessly.

Some scientists try to clarify this as some last "surge" of activity or compensatory mechanisms, but these explanations fall flat when you consider the extent of brain damage. You can't compensate for neural networks that simply don't exist anymore. What's particularly striking is that these patients don't just have vague moments of awareness - they often demonstrate knowledge and memories that their damaged brains shouldn't be able to access anymore. They recall specific events, people's names, and personal histories that were supposedly "deleted" by their disease.

If your consciousness is nothing but the firing of neurons, how can it suddenly function perfectly when those neurons are dead or dying? The implications are profound. These documented cases suggest there might be more to our minds than just brain activity. Perhaps consciousness has properties that extend beyond the physical structure we've always assumed contains it. Just as you don't see electricity but know it powers your devices, could there be aspects of consciousness that operate beyond the physical brain we can measure?

2. Consciousness When Brain Is Offline - Near-Death Experiences

Imagine being completely dead to the world - no heartbeat, no brain waves, nothing. Medical science says you shouldn't be aware of anything. Yet thousands of cardiac arrest patients report the opposite. These aren't just fuzzy feelings or tunnel-of-light stories. Many patients describe watching their own resuscitations from above, seeing doctors work on their lifeless bodies, and hearing conversations word-for-word.

The kicker? Some report details they had no way of knowing - like what happened in other hospital rooms or specific objects hidden on top of cabinets. When checked later, these details match reality. In one famous study, researchers placed objects facing the ceiling in cardiac care units. Later, some patients who "died" accurately described these objects - which they could only have seen if they were somehow floating near the ceiling. During cardiac arrest, brain activity flatlines within 20-30 seconds. EEG monitors show nothing. There's no blood flow to power those neurons. The brain is effectively offline. This creates a massive problem for materialists. If your mind is just your brain firing, how can you have clear, structured thoughts when your brain isn't working at all? It's like claiming your phone can make calls with a dead battery and no power source.

The standard explanation - that these are hallucinations happening just before or after the brain shuts down - falls apart when patients report verified details from when they were clinically dead. What's especially strange is that people often report enhanced thinking during NDEs - clearer, sharper, and more logical than normal everyday thought. This happens when their brains should be at their absolute worst. If consciousness is just brain activity, this shouldn't be possible. It's as if removing the engine from a car somehow made it run faster.

3. Better Writing With Less Brain Activity - The Medium Mystery

I know, I know, there are many myths about mediums, but we are about science now.

Scientists placed people who called themselves mediums in brain scanners while they wrote essays. The twist? Half the time they wrote normally. The other half claimed to channel spirits. When writing as themselves, their brains lit up exactly as you'd expect. The planning areas, language centers, and writing circuits all fired away. But when "channeling spirits," something strange happened. The brain areas that control writing and planning actually shut down. Yet somehow, they still produced complex, coherent texts - often better than their normal writing. The researchers were stumped. Better output with less brainpower? That's backward from everything we know about how brains work.

Think about it: when you learn a new skill, your brain uses more energy at first, not less. As you master it, your brain becomes more efficient - but it never shuts off completely while still performing the task. It's like watching someone nail a perfect piano concerto while brain scans show their motor cortex and musical processing areas are offline. These weren't just casual observations. The study was published in a respected scientific journal (PLoS ONE), with proper controls and measurement protocols. Materialists struggle to explain this. If all mental activity comes from the brain, how can less brain activity produce better results? It's as if your smartphone battery indicator shows 1%, but you can suddenly run power-hungry apps better than when it was fully charged. Maybe there's more to consciousness than what happens inside our skulls? Perhaps our brains sometimes act more like receivers than producers of thoughts?

The evidence doesn't prove spirits exist. But it does poke some serious holes in the idea that your mind is nothing more than brain cells firing.

Conclutions from Simple-words part

These things in the text above aren't just wild claims or mystical stories. They're documented in respected medical journals, backed by brain scans, and verified facts.

Current brain science has a firm rule: no working brain = no consciousness. But described cases show exactly the opposite. What happens when solid scientific evidence clashes with our basic assumptions? We have to take a second look at those assumptions. The hard truth is that our best models of consciousness have some serious blind spots. When patients with destroyed brains suddenly regain memories, or when people accurately report events while clinically dead, something doesn't add up.

Think about it this way: you can't see electricity flowing through wires, but you know it's real because your lights turn on. Maybe consciousness works similarly - not just brain chemicals but something else we can't directly measure yet. Some scientists suggest our brains might be more like receivers than producers of consciousness - like radios picking up signals rather than creating them. Does this prove God exists or that we have souls? No. But it does suggest we should keep an open mind about what consciousness really is. As one neurosurgeon put it, "The more we learn about the brain, the more we realize how much we don't know."

When facts don't fit the theory, good science doesn't ignore the facts - it changes the theory.

And now let’s get technical. You may close this article if you don’t like boring science data.

Science Part 1:

Paradoxical (terminal) lucidity and near-death experiences challenge the assumptions of materialism and may support the idea that materialism is incomplete or wrong:

1. Summary of Findings: Paradoxical Lucidity (PL) and Terminal Lucidity (TL)

Recent studies, including systematic reviews and caregiver survey research (Batthyány & Greyson, 2020), document that:

Profoundly demented and non-communicative patients sometimes exhibit sudden, striking, and unexpected recoveries of cognition and self-awareness, often in the hours/days before death.
In some cases, patients diagnosed as being in the end stages of diseases like Alzheimer's (with assumed irreversible neural damage) regain coherent speech, memories, and recognitional abilities temporarily.
These events are reported globally by caregivers, professionals, and family members. Quantitative studies find such events are not exceedingly rare; for example, Batthyány & Greyson (2020) found that over 80% of such episodes included normal-like cognitive functioning, typically shortly preceding death.

Mainstream Views and Materialism:

The materialist framework argues that mind and consciousness wholly arise from functional neural substrates: when major neural networks are destroyed or inactive, normal consciousness and cognition cannot arise.
PL/TL events defy this: patients whose neural substrates for cognition are presumed gone still transiently display high-level cognitive activity.
No current mechanistic neurobiological explanation fully accounts for this rapid, large-scale, systemic cognitive resurgence. The articles repeatedly stress that standard models (progressive, invariant neurodegeneration with cognition irreversibly linked to brain structure) cannot explain TL/PL.

Mechanisms Proposed in the Literature:

Articles discuss network-level reactivation or compensatory brain activity but admit such explanations remain speculative and fundamentally unproven (Mashour et al., 2019), especially given the physical state of the brain at advanced stages of dementia.
Some reviewers (Nahm, 2011, 2012) suggest these events may not be explainable by neural mechanisms alone, hinting at the need for alternative, even "non-local" consciousness explanations.

2. Near-Death Experiences (NDE) and Related Phenomena

Several articles and reviews specifically deal with NDEs and out-of-body experiences, commonly occurring in the context of no or minimal brain activity (e.g., deep unconsciousness, cardiac arrest):

Key Features Documented:

Enhanced cognition and clear experience reported during times when measurable brain activity is absent or severely compromised.
Accurate perception of events (sometimes at a distance or out of sensory range) that are later verified, termed “veridical perception.”
Reports of leaving one's body, observing events from an external vantage, and acquiring information inaccessible to ordinary senses.

Materialist Response:

Materialists attempt to explain these as hallucinations or residual (undetected) brain activity, but many cases remain unaccounted for, especially those with independently verified observations or occurring during cardiac arrest (no heartbeat, no measured brain activity).
For instance, Cook, Greyson, & Stevenson (1998); Holden (2016) and others provide a collection of cases where NDErs relayed factual information they could not have accessed, consistent with the mind operating independently from the brain.

NDE researchers (Kelly, Greyson, & Stevenson) suggest alternatives to materialism—such as “transmission” or “filter” theories where the brain enables but does not produce consciousness.

3. Direct Critiques of Materialism in the Literature

Multiple recent philosophical and scientific reviews (1)Masi, 2023;2)Kelly, Greyson & Stevenson, 2007; 3)[Mashour et al., 2019], [Batthyány & Greyson, 2020]):

Question the core “loss-of-function” argument for materialism: when the brain is damaged, consciousness is lost, so the mind is just a byproduct of the brain.
Argue that when cognition and self-awareness can powerfully return even when the physical substrate is virtually absent, the correlation between brain integrity and consciousness is not a proof of causation.

4. Broader Implications and Conceptual Consequences

How do these findings challenge strict materialism?

If consciousness and cognition can return—or even become enhanced—when the tissue thought to generate them is destroyed or nonfunctional, it strongly suggests that consciousness is not entirely produced by the material brain.
The existence of coherent, meaningful consciousness in the absence of supporting neural structure is more compatible with dualistic, non-local, or other post-materialist models.

Are alternative scientific explanations plausible?

Some authors propose transient, unexplained large-scale network activation (“last gasp” surges in dying brains, network mechanics, or chemical cascades). However, the quality, structure, and content of the experiences often seem disproportionate to the underlying neural “hardware” at that stage.
Mechanistic “neural network revival” is theoretical and not demonstrated, especially given the massive, permanent loss of tissue in end-stage dementia.

5. Conclusions Across the Literature

Support for the idea that materialism can be wrong—or at least incomplete:

The convergence of evidence from paradoxical/terminal lucidity and NDEs provides repeated, documented, and in some cases verifiable examples of consciousness that cannot easily be pinned on known brain function.
These findings are not singular oddities: studies show they are observed worldwide, across diagnoses, cultural backgrounds, and settings.
The occurrences force serious reconsideration of models built on the assumption that mind and memory are nothing but brain function.
The authors advocate for a truly open-minded, evidence-based “postmaterialist science,” where the mind and consciousness remain open questions, not a priori foreclosed by materialist presuppositions.

In Summary of Science Part 1

The reviewed literature—especially research on paradoxical lucidity and near-death experiences—provides methodologically significant, well-documented challenges to materialism. These challenges can be summarized as follows:

Reversal or spontaneous remission of severe cognitive loss in terminal states is not predicted by materialist (irreversible-loss) models of the brain-mind relation.
Strong, independent evidence suggests that consciousness and cognitive function can persist or return without a functioning brain, especially near death.
Current materialist explanations are speculative and do not account for the quality, content, or occurrence of these phenomena.
Taken together, these findings robustly support the argument that materialism—as currently formulated—is incomplete or possibly wrong about the nature of mind and consciousness.

These articles do not “prove” non-material views, but they provide a strong, convergent empirical basis for challenging materialist orthodoxy, and warrant deeper exploration of alternative models of consciousness.

Science Part 2

How the findings from Peres et al. (2012), "Neuroimaging during Trance State: A Contribution to the Study of Dissociation" (PLoS ONE), integrate with the previous evidence to further challenge materialism and support the possibility that conventional materialist models of mind–brain relations are incomplete or potentially wrong:

Summary of the Peres et al. (2012) Study

Objective: Investigate brain activity during psychography (automatic writing, claimed to be produced under the control of external spiritual entities) using SPECT neuroimaging, comparing trance (psychography) and non-trance (regular writing) states.
Sample: Ten healthy Brazilian mediums (5 well-experienced, 5 less experienced); clinically screened with no current psychiatric disorders.
Main Findings:

Experienced mediums, during trance writing, displayed significantly reduced activity in brain regions critically involved in planning, language, and motor control (left hippocampus, anterior cingulate, precentral gyrus, etc.), compared with non-trance writing.
Despite this reduced neural activity, the texts produced in trance were more complex (in planning, structure, and content) than the control texts for both experienced and less experienced mediums.
Complexity scores were highest for the most experienced mediums—even as their relevant cognitive brain regions were less active.
An inverse correlation was noted: Greater text complexity during trance was associated with lower activity in cognitive-processing brain regions.

Implications for Materialist Theories

1. Materialism Predicts Cognitive Complexity = Increased Brain Activity

Under materialism, complex cognitive output must arise from proportionally complex, highly activated neural processes.
When you write a sophisticated text, regions responsible for planning, memory, and language should "light up" in neuroimaging.

This finding directly contradicts that prediction:

The most elaborate, creative writing was produced while these very regions were underactivated compared to ordinary writing.

2. Potential Explanations Considered (But Found Lacking)

Expert efficiency? More experienced individuals might use their brains more efficiently. While this effect is found in some domains, the strong inverse relationship between neural activity and output complexity goes beyond typical “expert efficiency,” especially given the profound dissociation—the mediums had little or no conscious awareness of the writing content.
Relaxation? Relaxed states may reduce overall brain activity, but don't explain focused, goal-directed, and complex written output, especially when the content is more sophisticated.
Pathology? All subjects were psychologically healthy and socially functional, making pathological explanations unlikely.

3. The "Source" of Content

Experienced mediums subjectively reported that the content felt as though it did not originate from themselves—consistent with a model where the mind or consciousness may not be entirely produced by the brain.
Planning-related neural circuits were not recruited during the more complex composition; if content were faked or consciously produced, the brain regions responsible for such planning would necessarily be activated.
The researchers specifically conclude, “These findings are inconsistent with faking or role-playing… Studies of cognitive-processing regions involved in reasoning and planning written content showed decreased activity in the experienced mediums…” (p.6)

Broader Theoretical Context

Non-local Mind Hypotheses: This study is consistent with "filter" or "transmission" models (James, Myers, Kelly et al.)—the brain acts as a receiver/filter for consciousness, which can sometimes function independently or be replaced by external agency (as claimed in mediumship).
The authors state that the mind–brain relationship remains an open scientific issue and argue for more research into “spiritual experiences to improve our understanding of the mind and its relationship with the brain.”

Synthesis with Other Challenging Evidence (TL, NDE, etc.)

Paradoxical/terminal lucidity: Return of cognition despite severe brain impairment/failure.
NDEs: Complex, sometimes veridical experiences during periods of flat or minimal brain activity.
Trance mediumship (this study): Complex, organized cognitive output with less (not more) activation of expected neural networks.

All three lines of evidence indicate that mind/consciousness and complex cognition can occur absent or with dramatically reduced corresponding neural activity. This calls into question the central claim of materialism—that consciousness and cognition cannot exist or function without adequate brain activation.

Conclusions from Science Part 2

How does this further challenge materialism?

The Peres et al. (2012) study directly shows highly organized, information-rich output (complex writing) occurring with less brain activity in regions required for this output under standard materialist models.
This, combined with terminal lucidity and near-death experience evidence, strengthens the argument that cognitive function and consciousness are not always reducible to or wholly dependent on brain function.
These findings—robustly replicated and spanning different phenomena (mediumship, NDEs, TL)—cannot easily be explained by materialist neuroscience and thus provide a substantial empirical basis for questioning materialist models of mind.

In sum:

This study adds a direct neurobiological challenge to materialism, showing that the mind can, at times, display organization, creativity, and complexity without the predicted corresponding brain activity. This supports the view that materialism—even as the dominant paradigm—may be incomplete or mistaken about the origins, nature, and causal basis of consciousness.

The links:

Igor Mezienov

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