The intellectual hegemony of the current Western “Scientific Materialist” (SM) paradigm is starting to dissolve, in both science and philosophy. Thomas Kuhn in his seminal book: “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” published in 1962 defined a scientific paradigm as:
universally recognised scientific achievements that, for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners i.e., what is to be observed and scrutinised.
But as knowledge increases and new information comes to light it is sometimes found that the new data and the accumulation of anomalies become incompatible with the existing paradigm, or some revolutionary innovation or discovery comes along to force the paradigm to gradually change.
How did the current paradigm come into being?
Some of the major paradigms shifts in mankind’s history were the changes in the belief from the Earth being flat to the Earth being round, from the Sun orbiting the Earth to the Earth orbiting the sun, from the Earth being the centre of the Universe to a realisation of our planet’s insignificance in the vastness of the Cosmos. Then we had Darwin showing us that we were just sophisticated animals and were not directly created and Freud who pointed out that there are many human behaviours over which we have little control.
These paradigm changes gradually began the death knell of the man-made religions, which were based on myth, superstition and alleged “revelations,” and which had controlled the paradigm for centuries. Our current culture is in thrall of “SM” due to its extraordinary skill and tremendous success from a scientific, health and technological point of view. This “SM” paradigm has progressed human life from being “poor, nasty, brutish and short”, as Thomas Hobbes said, to the present luxurious lifestyle to which so many of us in the first world have become accustomed. The scientific method which undergirds the paradigm is currently seen as the only method of gaining knowledge to the extent that “SM” is itself idolised and become a dogma.
What does the current paradigm imply?
“SM” conflates science with materialism. The present “SM” dogma claims that science will explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry and that there is no need to explore anything further. It is the paradigm that there is nothing only matter and things such as qualia and consciousness are epiphenomena of matter. Everything can be reduced to interactions of matter and energy. Man is just a biological machine. There is no God or Cosmic Mind, everything in the Universe is here through blind chance with neither purpose nor design. This paradigm is put forward as an incontrovertible fact.
What does the current paradigm imply?
“SM” conflates science with materialism. The present “SM” dogma claims that science will explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry and that there is no need to explore anything further. It is the paradigm that there is nothing only matter and things such as qualia and consciousness are epiphenomena of matter. Everything can be reduced to interactions of matter and energy. Man is just a biological machine. There is no God or Cosmic Mind, everything in the Universe is here through blind chance with neither purpose nor design. This paradigm is put forward as an incontrovertible fact.
Harvard’s, Edward O Wilson, defines Scientific Materialism as:
the view that all phenomena in the Universe, including the human mind, have a material basis, are subject to the same physical laws, and can be most deeply understood by scientific analysis.
Physicalism which is part of this paradigm, is the belief that physics is the foundation of reality. Physicalism asserts that reality includes forces as well as material objects. “SM” says that things which appear to be non-physical such as thoughts, beliefs, desires, feelings and perceptions are actually either physical in origin or can be explained in physical terms. Everything can be explained in terms of the interactions of matter. “SM” works principally on the basis of reductionism, viz that all reality can be understood by breaking down physical phenomena to their simplest parts and processes: the social sciences and psychology can be reduced to biology, biology can be reduced to chemistry, and chemistry can be reduced to fundamental physics. This approach has undoubtedly been hugely successful and has given us some of our greatest scientific theories, explanations and technology. In this “SM” paradigm the Universe is chaotic and completely impartial to the complex accidents we call “sentient beings”. Life is a temporary statistical fluctuation from the general trend of increasing entropy. In the words of the astrophysicist David Lindley:
we humans are just crumbs of organic matter clinging to the surface of one tiny rock. Cosmically we are no more significant than mould on a shower curtain.
And yet this “SM” paradigm, even though it is so dominant, ingrained and inculcated into our brains is unable to explain the basic questions that even children ask: “where did we come from, and why are we here”? Although the paradigm tries to explain everything in terms of matter and energy through physics and chemistry, it does not itself know what matter or energy are. The “SM” paradigm does not believe in miracles and yet accepts the Big Bang without having any understanding of how, where, or why it came to be. It refuses to have anything to do with what is referred to as “transcendent” issues, such as where the singularity was prior to the Big Bang and how did it arise in the first place or what is the universe expanding into? Such questions are pushed aside with answers such as time and space only came into existence with the big Bang and prior to that there was nothing. However, logically nothing can come from nothing. This “SM” paradigm is based on objective science “but objectivity is the illusion that observations are made without an observer”.
The problems now occurring which the current paradigm cannot deal with.
It is at the very bedrock of physics and philosophy that the paradigm is now being breached, particularly with regard to Evolution, Consciousness and the Nature of Reality.
Evolution
Darwin’s theory of evolution is one of the mainstays of the current paradigm. Darwin assumed that all life-forms descended from a common ancestor via random, heritable variation and natural selection. Darwinism was later modified by the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics, and later molecular genetic discoveries, to become Neo-Darwinism. However, the number of anomalous and aberrant flaws in Darwinism are constantly increasing as science delves deeper into the world of the cell. Some of the issues with Darwinism include the fact that after 160 years the theory is still unable to either explain or show how life itself originated. There is absolutely no evidence of macroevolution. There are major problems with the fossil record - statistically it has been shown that the probability of complex life arising by chance is exceedingly slim. The information content and genetic complexity of living organisms cannot be explained by natural selection acting on random mutations alone, as over 99.9% of mutations are harmful.
The final controversial issue in Darwinism I will mention is “irreducible complexity” by which is meant that certain biological systems require multiple components to function. The criticism here is that such systems could not have evolved gradually via small successive changes as the intermediate stages would have no survival advantage. There are other anomalies, in the theory but the ones above are sufficient to show why the paradigm is being forced to change. There is no doubt that evolution has taken place. The question is not whether evolution has happened, but how it has happened. The philosopher of science Karl Popper said: “I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme”.
Consciousness
Consciousness connects our outer experience with our inner experience. In the current paradigm, consciousness is assumed to be an epiphenomenon of matter - a product of the brain. This is an assumption, there is no evidence that this is so. Like materialism itself, this requires faith. Part of the problem in consciousness studies is conflating association with causation. When the philosopher David Chalmers made the distinction between what he called the hard problem and the soft problem in consciousness studies in 1994, it hugely increased the divisions in consciousness studies. The hard problem in consciousness deals with “qualia”, which are some of the content of our subjective experiences - what we are aware of when we see, hear, taste, smell or touch. Subjective experience cannot be described objectively. Up to that time consciousness studies were mainly neurological studies of correlations between electrochemical actions in the brain and human behaviour.
Neuroscience is necessarily continuing, but it is becoming obvious to many in the field that neuroscience cannot answer questions regarding the hard problem of consciousness.
The decade of the brain from 1990 to 1999 which was given enormous funding failed to progress this issue further and progress is still failing to provide any answer.
Roger Penrose says:
Consciousness
Consciousness connects our outer experience with our inner experience. In the current paradigm, consciousness is assumed to be an epiphenomenon of matter - a product of the brain. This is an assumption, there is no evidence that this is so. Like materialism itself, this requires faith. Part of the problem in consciousness studies is conflating association with causation. When the philosopher David Chalmers made the distinction between what he called the hard problem and the soft problem in consciousness studies in 1994, it hugely increased the divisions in consciousness studies. The hard problem in consciousness deals with “qualia”, which are some of the content of our subjective experiences - what we are aware of when we see, hear, taste, smell or touch. Subjective experience cannot be described objectively. Up to that time consciousness studies were mainly neurological studies of correlations between electrochemical actions in the brain and human behaviour.
Neuroscience is necessarily continuing, but it is becoming obvious to many in the field that neuroscience cannot answer questions regarding the hard problem of consciousness.
The decade of the brain from 1990 to 1999 which was given enormous funding failed to progress this issue further and progress is still failing to provide any answer.
Roger Penrose says:
my position (on consciousness) demands a major revolution in physics . .. I’ve come to believe that there is something very fundamental missing from current science … Our understanding at this time is not adequate, and we’re going to have to move to new regions of science.
Niels Bohr commented:
we can admittedly find nothing in physics or chemistry, that has even a remote, bearing on consciousness . . . quite apart from the laws of physics and chemistry, as laid down in quantum theory, we must also consider laws of quite a different kind.
Werner Heisenberg, similarly observed:
there can be no doubt that consciousness does not occur in physics and chemistry, and I cannot see how it could possibly result from quantum mechanics.
There is absolutely no evidence that consciousness arises from matter and so the paradigm must shift. In the words of David Chalmers:
On the one hand, it’s a datum that we’re conscious. On the other hand, we don’t know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. So, I think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don’t yet see how. Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, and I think that we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically.
In the words of Erwin Schrödinger:
Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
The fact that the subjective experience of consciousness, such as the feeling of being aware, the sense of self, and the experience of qualia, cannot be explained by the materialist view that consciousness is simply a by-product of physical processes in the brain, has led to the development of alternative theories within materialism, such as panpsychism, which posits that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of all reality.
The Nature Of Reality.
Matter in the normal sense used in the “SM” paradigm is now found to comprises only 4% of the Universe. Dark Matter and Dark energy account for the remaining 96% and nobody knows what they are. Hydrogen the simplest and most abundant element in the Universe and the ultimate source of all the other elements in the periodic table is 99.9999999999996% empty space. What then of solidity? The current paradigm, shows us that taste, smell, sound, colour and touch are creations within the brain. These perceptions do not exist outside our brain. Reality itself seems to be just a seething mass of particles. The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman has shown that the world of our perceptions is nothing like reality. “Evolution maximizes survival fitness by driving truth to extinction”.
Quantum theory, the most tested theory in the history of science, is also forcing science beyond the current paradigm. The particles of which matter is composed are actually waves of probability until such time as we interact with them and only then do they become a particle. There are many other strange issues in quantum theory which I cannot go into here and which the “SM” paradigm cannot explain. The pioneers of quantum theory - Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Bohr and Pauli - all realised they were trespassing into metaphysical territory and they all delved into various philosophies, both Eastern and Western in their attempts to grasp the subatomic world they were exploring. The generally accepted explanation of Quantum Theory is called “the Copenhagen Interpretation”, which proposes that the act of observing, or measuring, creates reality out of what was previously a state of possibilities. Thus, Quantum physics shows there is no observer-independent world. The physical world is fundamentally nonlocal. By nonlocality is meant that it is impossible to isolate an unobserved quantum object, such as an electron, in a bounded region of space. John Wheeler says:
quantum mechanics implies that our observations of reality influence it's unfolding. We live in a ‘participatory universe’, in which mind is as fundamental as matter.
Quantum Theory as well as Einstein’s relativity theories, proving that both time and space are relative, are part of the anomalies within the current paradigm which are forcing change. There are also issues regarding teleology and design which are coming to the fore in both science and philosophy and causing problems to the paradigm and well as the realisation from physics that matter was not solid and fixed but mostly empty space and dynamically probabilistic.
The realisation of the limits of science
It is the success of science itself which is undermining the “SM” paradigm, and particularly so in quantum physics with its implication there is no observer-independent world, and that all elements of experience are interconnected. It is the objectivity of science which has brought it to this point. At its foundation science has now found that the universe and its contents are subjective - and subjectivity is not presently allowed in science. As Sir James Jeans said:
The realisation of the limits of science
It is the success of science itself which is undermining the “SM” paradigm, and particularly so in quantum physics with its implication there is no observer-independent world, and that all elements of experience are interconnected. It is the objectivity of science which has brought it to this point. At its foundation science has now found that the universe and its contents are subjective - and subjectivity is not presently allowed in science. As Sir James Jeans said:
the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter…we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.
It is man’s inextinguishable thirst for knowledge, along with the assistance of ingenious modern tools and technology such as supercomputers, space telescopes and particle accelerators which has allowed science to probe the Universe at both macro and micro levels that previous generation could never have even imagined.
As both qualia, quanta and various other issues are being forced to be discussed and researched, extreme ideas such as panpsychism and multiverses, none of which are testable, are now being used to try and block the gaps in the paradigm, and so the paradigm must change to fit the increasing knowledge. The “SM” paradigm asserts there is nothing but physical reality. That assertion is false as physics currently does not include any account of consciousness, nor does it include experience, and yet we know they both exist.
At this point the current “SM” paradigm can only deal with about four per cent of the known universe, the remainder involving Dark energy and Dark Matter are completely obscure. Neither can it deal with consciousness.
The philosopher Mary Midgley said:
As both qualia, quanta and various other issues are being forced to be discussed and researched, extreme ideas such as panpsychism and multiverses, none of which are testable, are now being used to try and block the gaps in the paradigm, and so the paradigm must change to fit the increasing knowledge. The “SM” paradigm asserts there is nothing but physical reality. That assertion is false as physics currently does not include any account of consciousness, nor does it include experience, and yet we know they both exist.
At this point the current “SM” paradigm can only deal with about four per cent of the known universe, the remainder involving Dark energy and Dark Matter are completely obscure. Neither can it deal with consciousness.
The philosopher Mary Midgley said:
The whole reductive program - this mindless materialism, this belief in something called ‘matter’, as the answer to all questions, is not really science at all. It is, and always has been, just an image, a myth, a vision, an enormous act of faith. As Karl Popper said it is “promissory materialism”, an offer of future explanations based on boundless confidence in physical methods of enquiry. It is a quite general belief in ‘matter’, which is conceived in a new way as able to answer all possible questions. And that belief has flowed much more from past glories of science, than from any suitability for the job in hand. In reality, not all questions are physical questions or can be usefully fitted to physical answers.
Likewise, Professor Richard Conn Henry finishes his famous article, “The Mental Universe”, with the words: “The Universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy”. And Niels Bohr when he was referring to the difference between science and reality said: “it used to be thought, that physics refers to the universe, but we now know that it refers to what we can say about the universe”. By this he meant that physics refers to our math and our experiments, but reality is a philosophical concept about “the true universe”.
Materialism today is generally assumed to be a scientific fact, but this is false. Materialism is a metaphysical position, not a scientific one. Metaphysics is a philosophical term that, in general, refers to efforts to offer a comprehensive rational account of the most fundamental aspects of all reality. And materialism, which claims that only matter is real, is a philosophical position that is not empirically validated through science. Materialism can never be validated empirically - how can you empirically prove that there is no non-empirical reality? As materialism’s doctrine is that matter is the only reality, consciousness ought not to exist. How do you get the non-material from the material?
Current science cannot deal with anything outside of the perceived world, neither the unobservable nor the indescribable. Special relativity shows that time and space are dependent on the observer, as is also the case in quantum theory. The world of science presently takes the place of the objective world. Our world is presently the scientific picture of the world, which comes to us through laws, signs, languages, and tools. But this world of artifacts is worthless without us, and without us, these laws, signs, languages and tools have no meaning As Iain Mc Gilchrist said:
Materialism today is generally assumed to be a scientific fact, but this is false. Materialism is a metaphysical position, not a scientific one. Metaphysics is a philosophical term that, in general, refers to efforts to offer a comprehensive rational account of the most fundamental aspects of all reality. And materialism, which claims that only matter is real, is a philosophical position that is not empirically validated through science. Materialism can never be validated empirically - how can you empirically prove that there is no non-empirical reality? As materialism’s doctrine is that matter is the only reality, consciousness ought not to exist. How do you get the non-material from the material?
Current science cannot deal with anything outside of the perceived world, neither the unobservable nor the indescribable. Special relativity shows that time and space are dependent on the observer, as is also the case in quantum theory. The world of science presently takes the place of the objective world. Our world is presently the scientific picture of the world, which comes to us through laws, signs, languages, and tools. But this world of artifacts is worthless without us, and without us, these laws, signs, languages and tools have no meaning As Iain Mc Gilchrist said:
there will always be considerable resistance to revising a paradigm, especially if it has been successful in many respects” and the SM” paradigm certainly has.
The new post-materialist paradigm must include subjectivity in its explorations unlike “SM”, as well as the realisation that the world we live in is our own creation, and that true reality is presently unknown to us. It is obvious that the new paradigm will have to incorporate philosophy, as it realises the limits of science in certain areas has been reached and is not in a position to answer all questions. Science has insisted on dealing with matter and objectivity, but reality is more than that.
At this point we cannot say what the “Postmaterialist” paradigm will be other than that “immaterial science” will have to be included so that consciousness and subjective experience can be properly explored and explained.
At this point we cannot say what the “Postmaterialist” paradigm will be other than that “immaterial science” will have to be included so that consciousness and subjective experience can be properly explored and explained.
⏩ Noel Byrne is a retired Civil Servant and a Humanist, with a principal interest in Philosophy, and a particular interest in Ethics and Morality.
That's a great piece. One to be read more than once.
ReplyDeleteAlways had reservations about Popper, though... would you buy a used car from a philosopher that kneels in front of a monarch?
It is a good piece but most of which I find myself at odds with. TPQ, with its eclectic character, is pleased to have it. Must give my view on some of the points over the coming days.
DeleteI don't pretend to understand many of the ideas in this article - maybe I am just too old to understand theories of quantum physics, dark matter and negative energy. But the article does seem to confirm that the only big questions remaining for Man are the originsof the Big Bang and nature of human conscioussness.
ReplyDeleteScience has the measure of the big bang and explains it convincingly. Penrose raises some interesting points about it but noting that disputes it.
DeleteConsciousness - can it really be anything other than the emergent property of matter? Can it be shown to exist independent of matter? Roger Penrose, and Stuart Hameroff put forward an explanation (RP not going anywhere near as far as SH) which sought to locate consciousness in microtubelets - but even then it could not exist outside matter. Nor was the idea met with critical acclaim.
This is interesting, thoughtful, and important, but not very convincing. In essence, it's more informed sophistry than scientific argument. For almost every assertion or premise the author presents, there are equally reasonable alternative ones, etc. For example, the statements that science finds the question "why we are here" unanswerable or the existence of "consciousness" to be unexplainable are false, and ideas like astrophysicist David Lindley's statement that "we humans are just crumbs of organic matter clinging to the surface of one tiny rock. Cosmically we are no more significant than mould on a shower curtain" is scientifically untenable, because the objective meaning of "significance" is unelaborated. What does "significance" even mean? This is one of the reasons why there's a renaissance occurring now in research on psychedelics, which I'm surprised isn't mentioned (or did I miss it?) in this article. While not entirely, this is significantly driven by people who are, in my view, desperate to find some way to introduce "spiritualism" into the scientific model so that they can convince themselves and others that, to be blunt, "science proves that god exists," if you give the very broadest meaning to "god" as any sort of "cosmic consciousness" or "spirit." That is, they have a bias that they want to prove that "naturalism" and "supernaturalism" or not contradictory principles.
ReplyDeleteHe's went the long way round to suggest simulation theory, and that consciousness isn't emanating from "within" our brains but rather it is external. Boiled down there's a body of work that suggests that our existence is the product of a computer program.
ReplyDeleteThere is some evidence of very weird things going on that main stream 'Science' can't quite understand so ignores ( think the CIA continuing the Stargate programming; if it didn't work why'd they keep at it?), or the "Spooky Action at a distance" of two quantum entangled particles separated by enormous distances spinning in the same direction when one is rotated in certain way. It could be that consciousness isn't bound by our brains, that the whole universe is a cosmic soup existing all at once, everywhere.
Life is a lot weirder that most people realise.
I don't think he is suggesting simulation theory. But your closing words suggest panpsychism.
DeleteI prefer just being weird Anthony!
Delete1/ Scientific Materialism is a term not often seen outside of Creationism/Intelligent Design even though its usage predated ID. Much of the reasoning in Noel’s piece is to be found in the ID movement and Discovery Institute. I have never been remotely attracted to ID, rejecting it as unalloyed pseudo-science. While Noel, an atheist, does not come at it from the religious perspective of ID, the current piece is replete with ID briefing points, many of them made during the 2005 Dover Trial – something which has previously been covered on TPQ.
ReplyDeleteI see no paradigmatic shift or sign that the current paradigm is dissolving. There has been a debate about consciousness but for the most part within the existing paradigm. Same for evolution. Natural science does not claim to have solved the problem of consciousness, it simply does not delve into the supernatural. What physics holds to is that any explanation will always be found in the natural world. For this reason I fail to see any SM dogma. It is a reasonable assumption to make that science will (not has) in time explain consciousness. What else can? Theology or philosophy will not.
Is consciousness reducible to matter or is it an emerging property of matter? I think the latter. I can see no reason to feel that it is an autonomous entity with no causal relationship with matter.
Man is just a biological machine. There is no God or Cosmic Mind, everything in the Universe is here through blind chance with neither purpose nor design.
That seems a pretty straightforward statement. If there were a god or cosmic mind, science would have already discovered it or would strive to do so through the scientific method. It would hardly block out material evidence of the existence of God. Science being rooted in the natural world is not going to look at the supernatural world of gods and fairies.
Science does not have the answers to where did we come from. It has not yet shown how life started. It might never be able to do so although I suspect it will. But no other discipline has proved any more successful. Nor shall they.
Science rejects miracles but accepting the Big Bang is not a belief in miracles. Science can demonstrate the Big Bang. Much of religion accepts it also – the difference is that as Hans Kung stated religion believes that there was something that caused the Big Bang, that existed prior to it. He does not argue that the Big Bang did not take place. But that leads to the matter of infinite regress: of what caused the cause of the Big Bang: turtles all the way down. There is no reason for science to deal with transcendent matters when their existence is indemonstrable. If there is some material way of getting beyond the Big Bang using the scientific method science is hardly going to ignore it.
Observations are always made through an observer but the observer need not be the human eye. And when the same observations are repeatedly made regardless of what or who is observing, the subjectivity element is considerably lessened. Quantum Mechanics and Schrodinger’s cat is an interesting thought experiment but so too is string theory.
It is not a problem of Darwinian analysis that it has never shown how life started. Darwinian biology shows how life evolved, not how it came into being. That is a work in progress.
2/ There is absolutely no evidence of macroevolution.
ReplyDeleteThis, I found to be the most unsustainable claim in the piece. Evolutionary biology is not premised on microevolution but macroevolution for which there is what Jerry Coyne calls pervasive empirical evidence for which he provides in his literature numerous examples of transitional forms. If there was only microevolution, as argued by ID, humans must have come into being as humans after which there were a few tweaks along the way. Microevolution rules out speciation. The fruit fly reference is probably one of the least sustainable arguments against macroevolution. It is one of the few examples where speciation can be observed unlike other areas where it takes a very long time. 35 cycles, if I am not mistaken, produce a new species of fruit fly – the 36th no longer being able to mate with the first. Fruit flies have not been called Darwinism’s workhorse for nothing.
If life did not arise naturally by chance then by what other mechanism could it have arisen? Popper was right on quite a lot of things but his statement that Darwinism is not a testable is a forerunner to ID.
Same with irreducible complexity – which Michael Behe relied on in the Dover case. The science for it, he acknowledged, was on a par with astrology. His position was comprehensively refuted in the court. Barbara Forrests book Creationism’s Trojan Horse is an excellent exposition of the critique of the Behe perspective. Ken Miller refutes the irreducible complexity case easily. But there are so many evolutionists who have destroyed the Discover Institute’s irreducible complexity, that it seems quirky to select just one.
Neither Chalmers nor Philip Goff have made a serious dent on the scientific case. I think Dennett dealt quite well with Chalmers, and I half suspected from listening to Goff that he was really searching for a way to introduce religion into science. Since his conversion to Christianity last year, I have felt that suspicion firmed up. In his exchange with Sean Carroll, it seemed he laboured to make his point.
Penrose did not have his finest moment when he collaborated with Stuart Hameroff on the issue of consciousness residing in microtubelets. Unlike Goff, who was on a religious journey, Penrose was not and his experience in the world of science means he cannot be taken lightly. He is a serious scientific thinker, maybe on a par with Einstein. But he refused to go anywhere near as far as Hameroff.
Given that science has not yet satisfactorily explained consciousness Penrose has a point that it might have to move to new regions of science. The crucial point is that he wants this to be a scientific journey not an expedition into the supernatural. Panpsychism hardly fits into that.
Brian Greene, in my view, summed it up perfectly when he said all you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics
I don’t think science tries to prove that there is no non-empirical reality. Much as it does not try to disprove the existence of God. It looks at the empirical physical evidence not the non-empirical metaphysical claims. It treats them much as it treats theology. And I think it should remain that way.
In sum the above article is that idealism (in the Hegelian sense) created matter. I see it the other way around. Matter creates ideas and consciousness. How that is done is beyond what little scientific knowledge I have.