Top Physicist: “Reality Is Not Physical”

[Socrates]

We are slowly but surely making progress in science, and I'll use this video as a starting point to address materialism and share my contemplations. 

@Leo Gura If I want to fully exhaust the debate between materialism and idealism — not just scratch the surface, but master it to the point where I can dismantle any materialist argument — should I even bother studying mainstream physics? Or should I focus solely on deep philosophical and nondual understanding?

I notice that most materialists immediately retreat to the standard scientific script when challenged. They never drift into deeper territory; they never question the script itself. It's as if they're protecting the narrative more than seeking truth.

After years of consciousness work, the primacy of consciousness is clearer to me than my own existence. It's obvious. It’s reality itself.
Yet the debate is often reduced to appeals to authority, endless references to secondhand "evidence," and a rigid worship of what other humans have said — without firsthand verification or genuine contemplation.

When one side is operating from direct experience of truth and the other from stories and hearsay, it's laughable to even engage on their terms. Their castle is made of playing cards, and they don't realize the wind is coming.

My deeper frustration with the current scientific culture isn't just that it often breeds falsehoods. It's that science — which once stood for courageous truth-seeking — has been neutered into a competitive status game. It’s now a glorified credential mill, where students and academics posture for superiority, where qualifications outweigh insight, and where complexity masks emptiness. And this is amplified the more blue a society is (like my country, Greece, for example).

This is capitalism's shadow embedded into knowledge production — but that's another conversation.

More urgently, this decayed version of "science" has infected society with a dangerous bias against consciousness work. The very practices that could revolutionize human flourishing — self-inquiry, direct awareness, nondual exploration — are ridiculed or ignored, dismissed because they don't come with double-blind placebo studies.
God forbid you thought something through for yourself rather than citing a paper written by a stranger in a lab coat.

Our culture has been so gaslit that people no longer trust their own direct experience — the most fundamental tool of knowing anything — unless it’s rubber-stamped by an institutional authority.
 

[Leo Gura]

14 hours ago, Socrates said:

If I want to fully exhaust the debate between materialism and idealism — not just scratch the surface, but master it to the point where I can dismantle any materialist argument — should I even bother studying mainstream physics? Or should I focus solely on deep philosophical and nondual understanding?

It's not an issue of physics. It's an issue of metaphysics and interpretation.

No data nor scientific experiment is enough to tell you how to interpret or make sense of the data. So this issue is not about data or knowing physics. No amount of doing of physics can tell you how to properly make sense of it.

Scientists are not interested in metaphysics. They just want to collect data. So it becomes impossible to get them to question their latent metaphysical assumptions.

You can't get a man to understand a thing he isn't interested in or sees no value in. Scientists do not see value in metaphysical inquiry because they assume reality just is material. If scientists were interested in such questions they wouldn't be scientists, they would philosophers and mystics. Their commitment to science makes it impossible for them to understand ultimate reality.

It's a catch-22.

Edited 16 hours ago by Leo Gura