2022-08-08, 10:42 PM
(2022-08-07, 05:25 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ].....................................................
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".
"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.)"
Yes, I agree. To be plausible and the best choice it needs to be what you term "hyper spatial" dualism where the soul or spirit has extension in the three spacial dimensions, even though it is immaterial and can effortlessly interpenetrate matter, and even though the spirit can apparently physically observe the world even though not having physical eyes, and other seeming impossibilities. Just following the data, it strongly appears to me that some form of modified Cartesian interactive Dualism must be the case.
"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..."
As I have said, I think that the interaction problem can be easily solved by what could be called the Designer Hypothesis, that such interaction mechanisms must be intentional purposeful exceptions engineered into the design of Reality by the powers-that-be to enable certain important design requirements. The primary requirement would be to enable embodiment of immaterial souls in material bodies. Analogous to the fact that the laws of physics have clearly been designed and contrived to have the necessary extremely exact "fine tuned" values of the constants and coefficients of the equations to enable the existence of life in our physical reality.
It's true that the paranormal empirical evidence problems of Idealist Monism and other Idealist philosophies can similarly be solved by the Designer solution, but the deeper problem here is the great additional complications necessitated by such a solution in the Idealism case.
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"
I just think that here, the "hard" empirical data of parapsychological phenomena like NDEs has to trump theory, regardless of seeming illogicalities or irrationalities. The data is the data and whatever Reality really is, it absolutely must fit that data.