Materialism doesn't adequately explain what we see, which is why the term died long ago. Now we use physicalism or naturalism.
Isn't that just playing games? I mean the two terms boil down to the same thing because both have the idea that consciousness - and everything that goes with it - is created by physical processes. Materialism (or whatever you prefer to call it) seems to hold on - at least among the general public - by hiding its radical heart. For example, it sells itself to the general public as common sense, concealing its downgrading of free will, or the conclusion that a sufficiently powerful computer would be conscious.
It seems to me that the argument for materialism really amounts to this:
Physics and sciences derived from it have explained a lot of things in the world.
The argument on the other side amounts to:
Yes, but in the process it has pushed aside more and more tricky questions (politicians over here refer to that tactic as kicking an issue into the long grass).
Picking and choosing which questions to answer is all very well, but if you use that tactic, it isn't logical to claim that you could in principle explain everything. Look back in science. There was a time when Newton's laws of motion were known, but electricity and magnetism wasn't understood at all. The physicists back then could claim that they could in principle explain everything if they avoided all the questions that they could not answer!
Physicists could make a decisive experimental contribution for a microscopic fraction of the cost of the LHC by taking some of the best attested ψ experiments, and testing them to exhaustion. That means doing their damnedest to demonstrate the effect - e.g. presentiment - as rigorously as possible. Obviously if they came out claiming the effect did not exist, it would be vital to explain in excruciating detail why it appeared to exist.
If you read Rupert Sheldrake's "The Science Delusion", you will read plenty of cases where science has fudged this question. For example, he describes in detail experiments to test if people satisfied the laws of thermodynamics. The experiment was done, and it was claimed that they did, but he discovered that in reality some subjects seemed to be a sink for energy, others seemed to create energy. This was simply covered up by choosing the subjects so as to balance out the averages! The variations from individual to individual were far greater than the standard errors in the experiment.
David