2022-08-07, 05:25 PM
(2022-08-07, 11:40 AM)David001 Wrote: [ -> ]Well the physicist Henry Stapp has already addressed that, assuming that consciousness really is required to collapse wave functions (or at least that it can do it faster than might otherwise be the case).
But suppose by hypothesis that is not how mind and body interact - you have the problem of selecting the philosophical position before the science is settled! You need a theory that matches the state of science - which is still fairly primitive in the case of consciousness.
Maybe this is the real problem here - trying to select the philosophy ahead of establishing the relevant science!
To me, the real blockage is that without a simple theory that can be tested, people end up reporting anomalous results. That implies to many that the experiment was simply done badly, and should be ignored. In turn, that makes people avoid doing experiments that might return anomalous results.
This is not a trivial problem. Most of us here accept that there are masses of 'anomalous' results building up and never taken seriously - just because they can't be classified as evidence for a particular theory.
Most science treats its theories in a much more pragmatic fashion - such as using Newton's theory for most purposes, and SR or GR only if absolutely necessary!
Stapp has written about Whitehead's Panpsychist-type beliefs in accordance with his ideas relating to mind-matter interaction as well as co-authored an article on Idealism being supported by physics.
How can one test dualism, and how would it help promote the varied Psi phenomenon? Most scientists seem to reject Dualism outright. Even many prominent philosophers seem to have no interest in reviving Dualism.
I don't even know if science could show us which metaphysical position is correct, though it could help eliminate the likelihood of bad ideas. But in mainstream academia materialism has been seen to be problematic in recent years due to philosophical considerations rather than parapsychogical ones.
Beyond that, I think one would need to elaborate on what they mean by Dualism - to suggest Cartesian Dualism where Mind is extensionless seems like a non-starter that would be outright rejected by the vast majority of scientists?
(2022-08-07, 04:00 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]It seems to me, Idealist Monism has the massive problem that its detailed structure has to be so excessively complicated and cleverly contrived to create the necessary illusions so as try to account for the massive amount of empirical paranormal data accumulated with veridical NDEs, reincarnation cases, many mediumistic communications, and as I have recently found out, the epilepsy brain surgery findings from the over 1000 neurosurgical operations of Wilder Penfield, and the free will and "free won't" experiments of Benjamin Libet. Much or most of this empirical evidence and more can be fairly easily and simply explained by interactive Dualism, where these phenomena and others are pretty much what they look like, which is that the soul or spirit is basically an immaterial mobile center of consciousness ultimately independent of and separate from the physical brain, that in physical life "inhabits" the physical brain and body .
As you mention, the interaction problem remains, but I think it is fairly simply handled by a solution where the interaction mechanism is a purposeful special case in the laws of our reality (a "brute fact" of reality established by the powers-that-be for their own purposes, similar to the laws of physics being "fine-tuned" for the existence of life) that primarily is designed in to enable physical embodiment of souls in human bodies, and where this mechanism is optimized for the requirements of the neuronal brain structure/spirit interface interaction. There is so much data that would very much be expected to exist if this hypothesis were the truth.
Whereas in Idealist Monism, a very complex set of contrived auxiliary hypotheses have to be invoked in order to explain the who, why and how of there being so many human experiential phenomena consisting of the illusion of there being a separate mobile center of consciousness able to leave the body/brain and travel to other locations in the physical world, observe there and be observed and recognized, and also travel some apparently very great "distance" to a spiritual realm and to there encounter and interact with spirit entities some of which are deceased loved ones. Plus, in the Wilder Penfield and Benjamin Libet work, the strong illusion of the human Self as a hybrid physical/immaterial combination where the physical component is generated by the brain and basically deterministic and not exhibiting free will, and the immaterial spiritual part (the soul or spirit) is independent of the brain and able to travel elsewhere then return to the body and is free, has true free will.
Why such an elaborate charade? The Ockham's Razor Principle of Parsimony dictating against the unnecessary multiplication of explanatory complications has been found to be extremely useful in guiding science to the most likely hypotheses/theories, based on their simplicity, and choosing Idealist Monism very much seems counter to this principle. Of course, Idealism could still be true, but it would very much be an outlier in that this choice would have to ignore this core principle in scientific enquiry.
Of course there is also Sci's interesting Pluralistic hypothesis of there being a multiplicity of many varyingly intersecting different Realities, not just immaterialspiritual and physical. It seems to me this is promising, even though it on the surface seems to invoke much of the apparently unnecessary complexity problem.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are suggesting here more of a "hyper-spatial" Dualism, where both the mental/spirit and the physical are extended rather than a Cartesian Dualism where the mental is extensionless and thus has no spatial properties. I assume the former because if NDEs are visiting a place beyond this w[o]rld that place itself is extended. (There's also Hylemorphic Dualism but that just gets us into newer weeds that I don't think you or David intend for us to wander through.)
It's still not clear to me why you think the evidence is more for Dualism than another option? One has to consider not just anomalous data from parapsychology but also basic facts like alcohol consumption affecting thoughts. But even things like verdical NDEs require the subtle-body/soul to observed the physical which implies continuity of information from the mundane world to the spirit/mental form. PK, going in the other direction, suggests not only continuity but even a sense of strained muscular pushing with the effort it often takes to produce effects. In fact for PK to work it suggests that has to be something in matter that is receptive to mental force.
Reincarnation, with the curious fact of birthmarks sometimes matching wounds or other bodily alterations like tattoos, again suggests the physical is not divorced from the mental/spiritual but has at least some axes of causal interaction. Also ectoplasm and conjuration by mediums, "alien" encounters where the aliens seem to have very odd relationships with the physical world, and so on...
I do agree with you that when looking at certain divisions between the mental and physical, Idealist Monism has to set up what looks to be arbitrary rules to try and explain the effort Psi at times takes as well as other issues. However, if Dualism can claim the Interaction Problem is solved by Designers it seems to me Idealism could claim the same thing. Though I don't believe Valmar is proposing Idealism here, but rather something more like the Neutral Monism of the Tao.
One of the challenges here, it seems to me, is we haven't really tried to figure out what it means for there to be a substance? This question actually got me to be more skeptical of the Interaction Problem because it seems difficult to define one substance as distinct from another without using causal interaction as a guide...but this would mean proposing an Interaction Problem may just be begging the question against the Dualist. After all what do fields, forces, matter have in common that they are a single "substance"? How is space-time emergent from physics, when the original conception of the physical world was based in the day-to-day empiricism of our world that would be contrasted with the too-often-invisible spiritual world? Of course, the shift of physics into stranger and stranger realms also makes it seem the "physical" is not altogether different from what we might call the "spiritual" or "mental".
For Hyperspatial Dualism, which avoids the oddity of dimension-less non-spatial minds, I think a problem remains because to make sense of it one has to posit two overlapping realities that have axes of causal interaction but are distinct in some important ways such as the OOBEr not being affected by physical forces in the same way as when they are in their physical body. All the worse for my Pluralism of course, which is why I have some sympathy for the idea that all the realities are ultimately crafted from some kind of transcendent Light that might fit Steve Taylor's "Pan-spiritism".