Cultivating Genuine Happiness and Mental Balance

As a fellow scientist who for the vast majority of my life and career shared your purely materialistic view of the universe before being awakened from my dogmatic slumber (to plagiarize a famous phrase) several years ago now by none other that Dr. B Alan Wallace himself – representing one of the most game changing eye opening moments I have ever experienced (in the spirit of Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure id Scientific Revolutions”), I would like to pose the following questions:

Is the scientific method based on a set of unassailable assumptions such as for example an a priori belief in philosophical materialism? Or is it more compatible with the scientific method to be open to any and all reasoned arguments which challenge to our current beliefs and our own past assumptions? And, is spirited arguments between opposing viewpoints foreign to the debates that advance scientific discovery — in contradistinction to the practice of dogmatically reasserting ones own beliefs while summarily ruling out of court all empirically based reasoned arguments advanced by ones opponents?

For it is within the context of the above admittedly largely rhetorical questions that I would like to point out that rather than dogmatically asserting anything at all, whatsoever, Dr. Wallace’s reasoned, empirically based argumentations, as far as I understand them, rest almost entirely on the following dual points:

1) that quantum mechanics which represents perhaps the best tested modern day scientific theory of all necessitates the long replacement of material objects with statistical probability functions which, as the founders of QM themselves clearly stated, should never be reified. Yet together with the above clearly supported scientific hypothesis, such phenomena as superposition, and quantum entanglement leading to such paradoxes as Schrodinger’s Cat which have long since proved difficult to reconcile with classical 19th century philosophical materialism, and

2) that those who continue to dogmatically defend materialism despite the well documented aforementioned results from experiment have likewise failed to provide a scintilla of evidence that brain states produce consciousness (which constitutes the most undeniable reality that human beings experience)
nor do they propose any mechanism for how this occurs but instead resort to hand waving arguments claiming that the problems too complex but we will solve it eventually while they continue to ignore thousands of years of repeated rigorously applied introspective investigations into mental activity, which clearly constitute one of the most important contributions of Eastern societies to world culture.

Thus, while I hugely admire the beautiful humility which practicing Buddhists like Dr. Wallace exhibit, under the pressure of the above circumstances it is hard for me to avoid not at all that humbly but nonetheless politely suggesting that those who choose to defend materialism would do well to seriously respond to Dr. Wallace’s above points if they are, in reality, capable of so doing.