Dualism or idealist monism as the best model for survival after death data

Isn't this almost semantics though?

I mean she would agree with you that the cases in Self Does Not Die should be taken seriously. Is the contention that you see Idealism as erasing individual identity which only applies to a sub-category of Idealism?

Because in the thesis, or at least what I recall of it, she definitely offers the option that the soul is immortal and everlasting.

It's not just semantics. The standard definitions of dualism and idealism in philosophy of mind are that they are two fundamentally different philosophical perspectives on the nature of reality. Dualism posits that reality is composed of two fundamental substances, mind and matter. Idealism asserts that reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual in nature, and that the physical world exists only as an appearance of or expression of mind, or as somehow mental in its inner essence.

Mandoki, in order to espouse Idealism in the context of NDEs, would seem to have to dismiss all the empirical evidence from veridical NDE OBEs, that actually in physical life in human experience the soul or spirit essentially inhabits the brain and body, and can and does under certain special circumstances (usually extreme trauma) temporarily separate from the matter of the brain and body to travel elsewhere in the physical world and in spiritual realms, and return afterwards to reinhabit the brain and body, and report on the experiences and observations. Other such evidence exists from many cases of the reincarnation type (CORTs). 

Thus many actual paranormal human experiences at least seem to unfold exactly as if dualism is the case, and substantially validate dualism as the correct philosophy of mind.

Some of this veridical evidence is what I cited in the post, evidence that seems to conclusively show that that dualist model to be experientially actually the case. The Occam's Razor principle of parsimony of explanations steps in here, because idealism can be shown to require a number of special complicating auxiliary hypotheses to be added in order to explain the NDE data, making idealism less likely by far.

These necessary to idealism but ultimately superfluous in the case of dualism auxiliary hypotheses would include ones that would dictate that for idealism to be true, under the special circumstances of NDEs the actual mind and brain behave exactly as if dualism is the case and exactly as if there really are two fundamentally separate and different substances. I don't think Mandoki deals with this problem.

I think matter is created by consciousness - the physical universe is like a simulation running in consciousness.

So dualism as a model to explain spirits incarnating in physical bodies works, but ultimately at the most fundamental level there is only consciousness.


"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. "
- Max Planck

"Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else."
- Erwin Schrödinger

https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/e...esearchers

In his treatise The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, John von Neumann deeply analyzed the so-called measurement problem. He concluded that the entire physical universe could be made subject to the Schrödinger equation (the universal wave function). Since something "outside the calculation" was needed to collapse the wave function, von Neumann concluded that the collapse was caused by the consciousness of the experimenter.[22]

I think matter is created by consciousness - the physical universe is like a simulation running in consciousness.

So dualism as a model to explain spirits incarnating in physical bodies works, but ultimately at the most fundamental level there is only consciousness.


"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. "
- Max Planck

"Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else."
- Erwin Schrödinger

https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/e...esearchers

This would be a sort of two-tier metaphysics, where the immediate experiential reality of human beings behaves exactly according the interactive dualism model, but the ultimate reality (only accessible via rare experiences like episodes of "cosmic consciousness") consists of pure consciousness. Some might call this Consciousness God. I guess this scheme might be classed as some esoteric version of Idealism.

It seems reasonable to me.