Materialism versus Non-Materialism in Western Science

In regards to ontology and Metaphysics, there has always been the question of whether or not the nature of reality is fundamentally material or phenomenal, or whether or not mental states emerge from material causes thereby making them causally inert in themselves or whether or not material things are subsets of an underlying phenomenal realm where this has given rise to two branches of philosophy – materialism and non-materialism. Materialism was adopted as philosophy ontologically privileged to exhaustively describe everything that is by Western philosophy starting with an axiom put forth by the Stoics; everything that exists is material where there is nothing that exists that is immaterial. Western Science takes that axiom, along with its implied postulates, for granted, though, now the idea is that there exists nothing that is not physical. This subtle is called physicalism; however, the underlying premise is an inductive argument meaning that it can be disproved via counter-examples to axioms that define what it means for something to be material, so in order to prove non-materialism, one needs to come up with empirical counter-examples where Parapsychology provides empirical counter-examples that support anti-materialism.

Physicalism starts off with the premise that there exists nothing that is not physical where everything that exists is physical; however, how does one define what it means for something to be physical? Intuitively, when one thinks of the word physical, one thinks of things that are material and concrete, but there are things that are immaterial yet physical such as vacuums and fields. The things that are physical that predicate both material objects, such as matter and energy, and immaterial objects, such...

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... in parapsychology where this provides an empirical case for non-materialism and a counter-example to physicalism.

Similarly to how physicalism says that everything that exists is a subset of a physical domain, the non-spatialtemporal nature of precognition, and other psychic phenomena, would imply that the physical world is actually a subset of a non-physical domain where entities in that domain have causal properties where things.

While physicalism is taken for granted within Western science and philosophy where non-materialism is often times looked at as not being true and something that people not educated in science agree with, it is an inductive case where inductive cases can be argued against by showing counter-examples. Parapsychology provides a significant amount of empirical counter-examples to physicalism.