From Tucker's Before (Life Before Life):
Quote:...In several Asian countries, a family member or friend may mark the body of a dying or deceased individual in hopes that when that person is reborn, the baby will have a birthmark that matches the marking. This practice is known as experimental birthmarks...
Quote:Such birthmarks and birth defects are not rare among our cases. A third of the cases from India include birthmarks or birth defects that are thought to correspond to wounds on the previous personalities, with 18 percent of those including medical records that confirm the match. I should note that the actual percentage of all children reporting past-life memories who have birthmarks might be much lower. We often have to make decisions about which cases to investigate, and since we are particularly interested in the birthmark cases, we are more likely to pursue them than other types of cases. Thus, we end up registering more of them.
Again it seems we have at the very least a preservation of "information" between lives. One could say this is Idealism but it seems to be akin to a "physical" effect rather than something "mental".
This could fit into Weiss' conception of Whiteheadian Occasions, which have mental and physical qualities but are not completely one or the other:
Quote:Now, if we define memory as an experience of past experience, then we realize that any causal transmission is an experience of a past experience, and so it is a kind of memory. This identification of causal transmission with memory will be a useful component of our understanding of personality survival and reincarnation.
Whitehead suggests that all entities in the universe, including us, are composed of actual occasions. If so, and we apply the Hermetic principle one final time, then it follows that all discrete events in the universe are, on the inside, drops of experience.
Weiss, Dr. Eric M.. The Long Trajectory: The Metaphysics of Reincarnation and Life After Death (pp. 107-108). iUniverse. Kindle Edition.
(2022-08-24, 07:39 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]From Tucker's Before (Life Before Life):
Again it seems we have at the very least a preservation of "information" between lives. One could say this is Idealism but it seems to be akin to a "physical" effect rather than something "mental".
This could fit into Weiss' conception of Whiteheadian Occasions, which have mental and physical qualities but are not completely one or the other:
A bit of further consideration by Weiss:
Quote:Many cultures recognized that honoring and dealing with their ancestors was a priority. They built special shrines and rewarded members of their communities who could communicate with the dead. It would be arrogant for us today to assume that these people were unenlightened or primitive. They were genetically identical to us and were at least as smart as we are. Throughout history, they experienced communication with ancestors as not only possible but as effective and valuable.
Furthermore, no pre-modern society made the strict distinction between “inner” and “outer” in quite the same way we do. The idea that reality might somehow exist “out there,” beyond experience, never occurred to them. Earlier civilizations assumed, rather reasonably, that they experienced reality as it actually is. The contents of dreams and apparitions were just as real for them as the contents of sensory perception—just in a different way. All pre-modern historical civilizations also understood the physical world to be accompanied by worlds of divine and demonic beings of various sorts and understood human beings as possessing bodies that could function in those worlds. These beliefs have been exhaustively documented in J. J. Poortman’s Vehicles of Consciousness. These transphysical worlds appear in my fundamental propositions (Proposition II) and are necessary for the existence of personality survival as defined in this book. I will offer arguments for the existence of these worlds independent of the historical evidence, but it is nice to have the support of my ancestors.
Weiss, Dr. Eric M.. The Long Trajectory: The Metaphysics of Reincarnation and Life After Death (pp. 38-39). iUniverse. Kindle Edition.
From the public domain version Weiss put out of his book ->
Quote:We are now in a position to dissolve the bewildering gap between mind and matter played out in debates between materialists, idealists, and dualists. Whitehead invites us to consider the possibility that all of actuality, whether objective or subjective, is composed of just one kind of entity: “actual occasions.” Experienced from the outside, actual occasions are objective events; experienced from the inside, they are drops of experience. Each moment of my experience is an actual occasion in the outer world. Everything I experience outside me is some configuration of other actual occasions. The process of manifesting as an energetic event on one hand, and of coming into consciousness as a drop of experience on the other, are the same process seen from two points of view.
Quote:The awareness of a subatomic particle and the awareness of a human being are evidently very different in degree, but we need not imagine that they are entirely different in kind. Once we realize that “to be aware of something and to respond” and “‘to be causally affected by something and to respond” are, in a deep sense synonymous and complementary phrases, many of the philosophical conundrums of modernity disappear. Consciousness presents itself no longer as an extra-cosmic mystery but as the crucial factor that, by making choices, resolves possibility into actuality and gives to the universe its discrete determinations. I am conscious not because I am miraculously different from all other material entities; rather, I am conscious precisely because I am, in my process of coming into being, structurally similar to all other material entities. Sentience goes all the way down.
Quote:We will now see that the arising of every actual occasion, or “drop of experience,” involves the same dynamic structure that includes experience, imaginative interpretation, and choice. For example, when I deconstruct a moment of my own waking life, I perceive that it grows out of an experience of the past. As I begin each new moment of my existence, I feel the last moment of my existence, and I feel the immediate past of the present situation around me. But my experience is more than that original rush of feeling. Not only do I feel the immediate past—in each moment I interpret the immediate past. This process of generating a coherent interpretation is quite complex. Whitehead has analyzed this in great detail, particularly in Process and Reality.87 For our purposes, we can be satisfied with a general description: the process of interpretation arranges all of the diverse data of the past into a coherent pattern, ordered around the mental pole of the “concrescence” occasion. (“Concrescence” is Whitehead’s technical term for the process whereby a new actual occasion arises out of the diverse occasions of the past and then becomes one of those diverse occasions for future occasions.) The process of interpretation is not uniquely determined by the past. It sometimes happens that in the process of interpreting the data of my experience, I have a new idea, a new way of organizing my perceptions. This capacity to introduce novelty into the interpretation of the past is part of what we mean by “imagination.” Finally, in order to close out, as it were, the interpretive process in any given moment, I must make a decision, a choice among many incompatible possibilities that my imaginative interpretations present. Say I am walking down a path that splits in two. I have a moment of awareness, an actual occasion, in which I must decide which of the two paths to take. I draw the situation into my awareness by a process of feeling the sensory inputs; I interpret the situation (possibly in some novel way); then I make a decision. Thus, we see that, in ourselves at least, every actual occasion of experience involves feeling, imaginative interpretation, and decision.
Weiss, Dr. Eric M.. The Long Trajectory: The Metaphysics of Reincarnation and Life After Death
Just read through this thread because it was linked in one I posted that tackled the same issue. I’m first of all very surprised at the collective intelligence on this forum. A lot of very nuanced and educated takes that dealt with a lot of thoughts I had on the issue. I felt very drawn to the idea on Advaita Vedanta that while there is some sort of unifying reality, there is some kind of functional duality that grounds what we call physicality and mentality.
A little factoid that got me thinking about this thread - Sri Lanka specifically has a good number of unsolved CORT cases because the children don't recall a name.
This isn't the only incident where it seems geography plays a role. Consider the case of Japanese solider reincarnates in Burma, despite Burma at the time having an incredible hostility toward the Japanese.
What does it mean if physical spatial distance seems to have impact on the spiritual? Is that a point for some kind of Monism?
There's this idea that the real dualism is between the Visible and Invisible, that we simply don't see what's going on but we're already in the "spirit world". Recently I've been seeing the appeal of this idea, though it isn't necessarily comforting...
(2022-07-21, 10:42 AM)Valmar Wrote: [ -> ]Pure Dualists just have a different problem... of how mind and matter can interact at all.
Well if you use Stapp's approach, the only influence is on the timing of observations of the physical plane by an entity in the spirit plane.
I quess it is a moot point as to whether that is an interaction, but in any case, as I keep on saying, real science doesn't use its theories in such a nit-picking sort of way. 'They' only want to reject Dualism because it so neatly encapsulates a lot of paranormal data.
David
(2023-06-13, 04:08 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]There's this idea that the real dualism is between the Visible and Invisible, that we simply don't see what's going on but we're already in the "spirit world". Recently I've been seeing the appeal of this idea, though it isn't necessarily comforting...
"...In ‘Ghosts in a Secular Age,’ columnist Ross Douthat began by invoking a report of a widow encountering her discarnate husband. The significant thing here was not so much the discarnate husband (again, we are veritable experts at ignoring the marvelous), but the fact that the couple hailed from the hyper-secular world of the New York literary establishment. The widow was Lisa Chase, and the husband, Peter Kaplan, was editor of the New York Observer. Douthat goes on to reference another essay he had written earlier about an outbreak of ghosts after the recent Japanese tsunami. There he invoked the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor to ask the question of why ghosts no longer appear in the present to the same extent that they seemed to appear in the past. The first possibility is that modern peoples experience the mystical and the ghostly as much as premodern peoples, but their secular culture or ‘immanent frame’ encourages them to privatize these and keep them out of the public culture. Hence the illusion that these experiences are uncommon or anecdotal flukes, statistical blips, as it were.
The second possibility is that what Taylor calls the ‘immanent frame’ somehow ‘buffers’ the self and prevents the numinous from reaching us to the same extent. As Douthat explains, ‘the secular frame somehow changes the very nature of numinous experience, so that it feels more attenuated and unreal, and the human self is more ‘buffered’ against its enchantments, terrors, and pull.’[2] Here, religious experiences are actually being repressed and made less possible, even impossible, by the cultural filter and subsequent heavily buffered self.
In Authors of the Impossible, I lean heavily toward this latter hypothesis, partly through reading Fort, partly through the ‘filter thesis’ of consciousness (which sees the body-brain, in effect, as a kind of buffering or stepping down of consciousness as such), but mostly through the work of the French sociologist and philosopher Bertrand Méheust, whose two-volume history of animal magnetism and psychical research in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century France demonstrates the same thesis in rich and erudite detail.[3] Following Bertrand, I suggest that we have literally made the once possible impossible. We have changed the texture and reach of the real, even if its potential spectrum remains the same as it always was (or is). Jack explores a similar notion in his Introduction through his concept of ‘ontological flooding,’ and many of the essayists return to the same tantalizing idea in their essays. Of course, we cannot prove this notion of a ‘culturally conditioned nature,’ as the Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino had it, but we can certainly think with it and see where it leads."
- J. Kripal, Damned Comparisons & The Real
To me, the real point in this discussion is that physics isn't about producing ontologically correct models - and if that is true of physics, it is true of all the other sciences. If physics had not been pragmatic in this way, it would just have been irrelevant to modern life, which would still resemble the middle ages.
It is about devising models that are as simple as possible (or at least it should be about that) because all anyone can ever do is test an idea to see how well it fits the data and then look for simpler models that might be just as good. It is also prudent to consider a much simpler theory if it fits the data almost as well as the complicated one.
There is no real point in discussing models of consciousness that are more complicated than Dualism unless someone can suggest some experiment that might - at least in theory - fit more data than Dualism already fits.
A few people here seem to get this, the others think I'm missing the point.
As I have already pointed out, physics already has two major theories that it uses routinely, while ignoring the fact that they are mathematically inconsistent.
David
(2023-07-08, 04:31 PM)David001 Wrote: [ -> ]To me, the real point in this discussion is that physics isn't about producing ontologically correct models - and if that is true of physics, it is true of all the other sciences. If physics had not been pragmatic in this way, it would just have been irrelevant to modern life, which would still resemble the middle ages.
It is about devising models that are as simple as possible (or at least it should be about that) because all anyone can ever do is test an idea to see how well it fits the data and then look for simpler models that might be just as good. It is also prudent to consider a much simpler theory if it fits the data almost as well as the complicated one.
There is no real point in discussing models of consciousness that are more complicated than Dualism unless someone can suggest some experiment that might - at least in theory - fit more data than Dualism already fits.
A few people here seem to get this, the others think I'm missing the point.
As I have already pointed out, physics already has two major theories that it uses routinely, while ignoring the fact that they are mathematically inconsistent.
David
Dualism doesn't fit the data IMO, unless you take an isolated set of cases.
Take a "Deep Weird" event -
see this thread - and it becomes hard to see how there are two distinct substances.
Admittedly there is some mundane normal world of the "Visible" and the weird oddities of the seeming "Invisible"...
(2023-07-08, 04:48 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]Dualism doesn't fit the data IMO, unless you take an isolated set of cases.
Take a "Deep Weird" event - see this thread - and it becomes hard to see how there are two distinct substances.
Admittedly there is some mundane normal world of the "Visible" and the weird oddities of the seeming "Invisible"...
It just so happens that I am reading "Deep Weird" right now. That book is full of weird phenomena, particularly the discussion about synchronicity written by Sharon Rawlette.
However, I'm not sure they can't all be explained within Dualism - assuming that time in the other reality either doesn't exist, or is far more flexible than our time. Suppose that a mischievous entity paused Dan's timeline while it pushed (or caused Dan to push) the honey jar inside the tin, letting his time line run a bit from time to time so that he remembered the strange sense of the tin growing heavier - I think something of that sort would explain the end result.
Remember also that most phenomena can be explained (with caveats) inside materialism. Then there are another, much smaller, set of phenomena that require Dualism, and then there are a few phenomena that might or might not require anything more.
David