In the philosophy of mind, materialism (in my interpretation) typically refers to the idea that everything that exists is essentially of some kind of material substance behaving by some laws of nature. Among educated people in contemporary times, this metaphysical view is — often unconsciously — widespread. And this is for good reason, I think. Modern empirical sciences — physics most clearly — teach us that there are material objects and that there are laws by which these objects behave. And their results have tremendous success in quantitatively describing and predicting real-world phenomena, doing the groundwork for technological inventions that fundamentally transform(ed) human society.

Nevertheless, I don't agree with the materialist view that everything can be reduced to laws and matter. In fact, it must be false. And I attempt to prove it here in a simple two-step argument.

Note: One might intervene and ask what something "to exist" should even mean on a more abstract level, i.e., what ontological framework one assumes. But I think it should work the other way around: By discussing materialism, we can find that some ontological frameworks are preferred over others. (Btw., I find Gabriel's Fields of Sense quite compelling, which would make materialism false by definition.)

Step 1: There is at least one mind.

Let's start with Descartes's cogito ("I think, therefore I am"). It is the conclusion to his famous thought experiment of radical doubt. If you radically doubt everything you know, you'll eventually end up believing nothing. Except that there is something that thinks, the I.

I mostly agree with the cogito. But, technically, it is an epistemological thought experiment, not an ontological one, i.e., it tells us that we cannot doubt the fact that we think. It cannot immediately tell us that there is something like the I.

But to get existence into the picture, intuitively, it wouldn't make much sense to have doubts and knowledge without there being a subject having them. This is why there should be at least one mind: the subject, the I in the project of radical doubt.

Note: This is not saying that the mind is something non-material. At this point, it could turn out to be a material thing after leaving radical doubt behind.

Some meta-thing: Maybe I could put an interesting tangent on epistemological "things" (do facts exist?) and the (pragmatic) meaning of "existence" here. (If something is declared to not exist, we tend to feel it is not worthwhile thinking about it. It is a showstopper, a gatekeeper for thought.)

Step 2: Empirical sciences are inherently flawed in explaining the mind.

To make things easier: I will attack physicalism specifically and not materialism in general, although I believe this argument holds analogously for all other empirical sciences without assuming they can be reduced to physics. I just won't bother doing the work in showing this explicitly. ;)

To make my point, we need to ask what empirical sciences even are.

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