The Problem with most non-physicalists in this sub

TLDR: Non-physicalism is largely misrepresented by the abundance of a spiritual crowd. And this misrepresentation causes newcomers to misunderstand the subject matter.

If you examine the posts/comments in this sub trying to defend non-physicalism, you are likely to encounter terms like "NDE", "psychedelics", "out of body experience"... and other spiritual terms I cannot quite recall. This is what I refer to as the "spiritual crowd".

The problem with this group is that they will use the arguments of respected philosophers: Chalmers, Levine, Block, Kripke... to argue for non-physicalism, but they will also add on their personal spiritual opinions, and claim things that the philosophers mentioned would not necessarily claim. The newcomers, naturally, group these all together. And the arguments themselves become devalued in the community. Thus, non-physicalism in general is misunderstood as being a necessarily spiritual position.

The proof of this misunderstanding is often in the physicalists' replies. Mentioning that it is proven some mental faculty is connected to some brain area. Or pointing out what a damage to the brain can cause. This is a problem for people who truly do believe an account similar to cartesian dualism. But for most non-physicalist philosophers today? No. So what do most non-physicalist philosophers actually claim?

The claim essentially comes down to a criticism, that there is something missing in the physical description. It is usually agreed that consciousness supervenes on the brain, and said that the physical facts *plus* some other facts are needed to get a complete description of reality. The disagreement is over what the other facts are (and whether they exist). I won't provide a full argument here for why some people think the physical is insufficient. I think I've captured what I wanted to say.

And no offense to the spiritual crowd. This is just an unfortunate consequence of them being the majority of the non-physicalists here.