(2023-12-21, 08:16 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]Indeed it does look like there ultimately must be an all encompassing single mother medium out of which our experienced separate spiritual and physical domains are crafted. I already mentioned that the evidence indicates the existence of a modified interactional dualism emerging from some sort of a ground of being composed of "mind stuff". Monistic dualism?
To me the challenge is once we have a single mother substance, isn't the best explanation that this substance exists on some spectrum of continuity?
This would give us a range on which to put mystic visions of being a Cosmic Consciousness* to being an apparition that seems caught up in some patterned behavior. It also gives us a spectrum from the visions of Divine Light to ectoplasm to what we call "material"/"physical".
*Ties into the idea that our bodies are inside our souls.
This could arguably be the
"Pan-Spiritism" of Steve Taylor combined with Animism. Why is the Native American shaman Rolling Thunder able to take the disability of a child and put that sickness into a pair of steaks? Because the illness is due to some hunger/desire of a spirit that can be transferred to meat that isn't part of the boy's body.
Arguably then there is a potential hierarchy of agents, from the Cosmic Fine Tuner(s?) to some "small" spirits or agents that might provide the indeterminism we see in QM.
Of course for some this is a disturbing proposal, to imagine so many events in our lives are due to entities that invisibly act upon us. But for myself this is a natural conclusion, since it seems to me all causation is best explained as being mental causation.
(2023-12-21, 08:32 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]*Ties into the idea that our bodies are inside our souls.
Apologies for a very selective quote - I don't intend to comment at length here*. However I can't help but note that the idea you mentioned is very much at odds with typical descriptions from those having an NDE of the process of re-entering the body.
* the topic as a whole doesn't appeal to me, hence my limited engagement.
(2023-12-21, 08:32 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ].........................................
Of course for some this is a disturbing proposal, to imagine so many events in our lives are due to entities that invisibly act upon us. But for myself this is a natural conclusion, since it seems to me all causation is best explained as being mental causation.
I look at it more from the standpoint of the analogy of a clock: it tells time via the physical contact-induced behavior of gears and wheels of a simple mechanical computer - a causal machine, whether or not the essence of "causation" is ultimately understood. Mechanical parts are predictably interacting through contact forces which are ultimately electrostatic at the atomic level. But at the same time the clock exists because it was intelligently designed and crafted by a conscious intelligence. To follow the analogy, so it is that our reality goes along behaving deterministically (at least at the human macro level), with the rules and equations determining this behavior having been designed by some colossal intelligence. It seems to me postulating sentient entities as keeping all of this in motion moment to moment is unnecessary.
(2023-12-21, 08:40 PM)Typoz Wrote: [ -> ]Apologies for a very selective quote - I don't intend to comment at length here*. However I can't help but note that the idea you mentioned is very much at odds with typical descriptions from those having an NDE of the process of re-entering the body.
No apologies necessary though you'll have to refresh my memory - is this experience of re-entering the body close to universal or more selective in NDE cases?
There is obviously a return to the body in all cases otherwise these would be DEs, but I am trying to recall if there is a vast number of cases of the "subtle body" / soul slipping back inside the physical body in the way I'd think of a sword "re-sleeved" into its sheath.
(2023-12-21, 09:25 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]No apologies necessary though you'll have to refresh my memory - is this experience of re-entering the body close to universal or more selective in NDE cases?
There is obviously a return to the body in all cases otherwise these would be DEs, but I am trying to recall if there is a vast number of cases of the "subtle body" / soul slipping back inside the physical body in the way I'd think of a sword "re-sleeved" into its sheath.
My view, which could be taken as either opinion or evidence-based, is that the body acts as a container, like a bottle or something, into which one is compressed in order to fit inside.
At a risk of over-simplification, the description which I consider to be quite common, perhaps typical, is of squeezing an enormous self into a very tiny body. The feeling associated with that is not surprisingly one of great discomfort, feeling constrained and restrained. Though in some cases there isn't any mention of this stage of entry, more an instantaneous relocation inside the body, and often, depending on circumstances of course, a resumption of pain caused by injury or sickness.
Of course the leaving of the body is described as a ceasing of physical pains and so on, but the disparity in size may not seem so significant, a feeling of freedom may be the most overriding sensation, the other aspects may not be describable in everyday language.
What I'm not able to do is offer links or references, but I accept that my ideas are based on a smallish selection of cases, I don't have a comprehensive survey or anything like that.
(2023-12-21, 09:56 PM)Typoz Wrote: [ -> ]My view, which could be taken as either opinion or evidence-based, is that the body acts as a container, like a bottle or something, into which one is compressed in order to fit inside.
At a risk of over-simplification, the description which I consider to be quite common, perhaps typical, is of squeezing an enormous self into a very tiny body. The feeling associated with that is not surprisingly one of great discomfort, feeling constrained and restrained. Though in some cases there isn't any mention of this stage of entry, more an instantaneous relocation inside the body, and often, depending on circumstances of course, a resumption of pain caused by injury or sickness.
Of course the leaving of the body is described as a ceasing of physical pains and so on, but the disparity in size may not seem so significant, a feeling of freedom may be the most overriding sensation, the other aspects may not be describable in everyday language.
What I'm not able to do is offer links or references, but I accept that my ideas are based on a smallish selection of cases, I don't have a comprehensive survey or anything like that.
This sounds good, and I do know of non-NDE OOBE cases of people slipping their astral bodies into their physical ones.
And of course Replacement Reincarnation, arguably one of the best pieces of Survival evidence we could hope for*, seems to align with this idea.
For myself, I'm not trying to make a definitive case for cosmic souls that contain our bodies but proposing that if we accept such mystical claims we can account for them with the idea of a singular medium that can manifest in a spectrum of ways.
I do suspect the core of the Self is not the "subtle" or "astral" body of the OOBE, as these still seem "material" to me if on a different (higher?) level of matter than the physical world.
*By this I mean the
type of case, I accept that currently there are too few cases in the literature of varying quality.
(2023-12-21, 08:48 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]I look at it more from the standpoint of the analogy of a clock: it tells time via the physical contact-induced behavior of gears and wheels of a simple mechanical computer - a causal machine, whether or not the essence of "causation" is ultimately understood. Mechanical parts are predictably interacting through contact forces which are ultimately electrostatic at the atomic level. But at the same time the clock exists because it was intelligently designed and crafted by a conscious intelligence. To follow the analogy, so it is that our reality goes along behaving deterministically (at least at the human macro level), with the rules and equations determining this behavior having been designed by some colossal intelligence. It seems to me postulating sentient entities as keeping all of this in motion moment to moment is unnecessary.
I agree there need not be any consciousness to particles moving about randomly in the sense that each particle is conscious. And there need not be spirits for every individual domain - however we carve the world into such domains - of causal relations.
Or to say it succinctly, neither Panpsychism nor Animism has to be true.
I would object however to the idea that clock goes on a temporal sequence of cause-effect relations without any mentality involved. I think this runs into issues ->
- We know that, as per our current best evidence, that the matter which supposedly forms the clock is indeterministic. We also, as per our best current evidence, know the clock is subject to varied forces which will break it down over time.
- Even if the underlying foundation of physical reality were not indeterministic, and there were [no] "entropic" forces acting on the clock...why do the cause-effect relations hold over time?
- How does a Designer impart Its mental intention to the non-mental stuff such that these relations hold. This just leads us back into the apparent necessity for a "mother substance", as you aptly call it or at least some commonality in the substance of the Designer's mentality and the non-mental substance of the clock.
Now I do think one could potentially say a Designer set the cause-effect relations, but I also think said Designer has to hold these relations across time. In fact this is one of the key reasons I started to lean toward some kind of theism...
(2023-12-21, 10:36 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]I agree there need not be any consciousness to particles moving about randomly in the sense that each particle is conscious. And there need not be spirits for every individual domain - however we carve the world into such domains - of causal relations.
Or to say it succinctly, neither Panpsychism nor Animism has to be true.
I would object however to the idea that clock goes on a temporal sequence of cause-effect relations without any mentality involved. I think this runs into issues ->
- We know that, as per our current best evidence, that the matter which supposedly forms the clock is indeterministic. We also, as per our best current evidence, know the clock is subject to varied forces which will break it down over time.
- Even if the underlying foundation of physical reality were not indeterministic, and there were [no] "entropic" forces acting on the clock...why do the cause-effect relations hold over time?
- How does a Designer impart Its mental intention to the non-mental stuff such that these relations hold. This just leads us back into the apparent necessity for a "mother substance", as you aptly call it or at least some commonality in the substance of the Designer's mentality and the non-mental substance of the clock.
Now I do think one could potentially say a Designer set the cause-effect relations, but I also think said Designer has to hold these relations across time. In fact this is one of the key reasons I started to lean toward some kind of theism...
Some kind of anthropic design-centric theism seems to be inevitable here in order to explain such things, such aspects of our reality. The Designer simply designed into our reality the laws of entropy and the consequent inevitable breakdown over time of the clock and all other machines both inorganic and organic. The basic design requirement was that for various reasons having to do with habitability by intelligent creatures living in this environment, matter at the human level of size would basically have to behave deterministically, which included degradative forces of wear, damage and disorganization. If it didn't, complex organic creatures could not develop and thrive. The principles and rules and laws governing our reality included cause-effect relations, and again for various reasons related to habitability by intelligent creatures, this design of the fabric of our reality was designed to remain fixed over time. If it didn't, Man could not exist.
(2023-12-22, 02:12 AM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]Some kind of anthropic design-centric theism seems to be inevitable here in order to explain such things, such aspects of our reality. The Designer simply designed into our reality the laws of entropy and the consequent inevitable breakdown over time of the clock and all other machines both inorganic and organic. The basic design requirement was that for various reasons having to do with habitability by intelligent creatures living in this environment, matter at the human level of size would basically have to behave deterministically, which included degradative forces of wear, damage and disorganization. If it didn't, complex organic creatures could not develop and thrive. The principles and rules and laws governing our reality included cause-effect relations, and again for various reasons related to habitability by intelligent creatures, this design of the fabric of our reality was designed to remain fixed over time. If it didn't, Man could not exist.
I agree that the the problem of Cosmic Fine Tuning is very serious for the materialist-atheist.
What I am saying is that when we talk about "designing" a law, or even just some stochastic regularity like in QM, we enter [into a] host of subsequent questions of how this can be done. It's less problematic than the physicalist simply accepting Laws of Nature as part of their faith, but questions remain ->
- What is the nature of reality that keeps a law from changing? If I make a video game with certain rules/laws of reality, what keeps the laws in place is the continual application of the code I wrote to the game's state. So there is an ongoing support for a law of video-game nature.
- For the computer running the video game, what keeps the computer from flying apart or turning into solid glass? Or even having a slight shift in its structure to create a power outage or memory corruption? If we say a law of nature placed by the designer, what is enforcing this law across time?
- What does it mean for a designer to create a law? Does the Designer create matter from Nothing with certain properties? I would say this introduces a Something from Nothing issue. If the Designer uses the "Mother Substance"...how does this Designer add/remove qualities until we get to what we would consider the entities studied by physicists?
One answer that I like, but am not wedded to, is that the Designer is both creator and participant, and the material of Its artistry is a portion of its own Body. (Panentheism)
Of course our universe need not be directly created by the God who is the Ground of All Being, and some lesser spirit(s?) are responsible. But the overarching question of how these spirits are able to create a universe I think leads us back to the God-who-is-Ground. Admittedly I use "God" here because it seems like the best cross-cultural term, though perhaps Divine Light or Tao or Brahman or some other word is less charged...
I fully accept my strong leaning toward the Perennial Wisdom Tradition and Hermeticism could be influencing me here, but I think if we look at the paranormal evidence this idea of Panentheism gets us pretty far in incorporating a lot of the varied cases.
"The Gnostic Error is to hate the Material World. The Material World is the part of Heaven we can touch."
-Grant Morrison
We've discussed a lot of philosophy, but I do think the other part of this is Survival cases and paranormal cases in general.
I've mentioned ectoplasm and shamanic healing a lot because I think these challenge both Dualism and Idealism. Here are some other cases of potential interest (special thanks to Jack Hunter and others who put the effort to finding these in the literature as
part of their work in Paranthrpology ) ->
Quote:As I watched them I became intensely aware of their back-and-forth motion. I began to see the goka and the corpse tied together in the undulating rhythms of the singing, the beating of the iron hoes, and the movement of feet and bodies. The I saw the corpse jolt and occasionally pulsate, in a counterpoint to the motions of the goka. At first I thought that my mind was playing tricks wit my eyes, so I cannot say when the experience first occurred; but it began with moments of anticipation and terror, as though I knew something unthinkable was about to happen. The anticipation left me breathless, gasping for air. In the pit of my stomach I felt a jolting and tightening sensation, which corresponded to moments of heightened visual awareness. What I saw in those moments was outside the realm of normal perception. From both the corpse and goka came flashes of light so fleeting that I cannot say exactly where they originated. The hand of the goka would beat down the iron hoe, the spit would fly from his mouth, and suddenly the flashes of light flew like sparks from a fire. The I felt my body become rigid. My jaws tightened and at the base of my skull I felt a jolt as though my head had been snapped off my spinal column. A terrible and beautiful sight burst upon me. Stretching from the amazingly delicate fingers and moths of the goka, strands of fibrous light played upon the head, fingers, and toes of the dead man.
The corpse, shaken by spasms, then rose to its feet, spinning and dancing in a frenzy. As I watched, convulsions in the put of my stomach tied not only my eyes but also my whole being to into this vortex of power. It seemed that the very floor and walls of the compound had come to life, radiating light and power, drawing the dancers in one direction and then another. Then a most wonderful thing happened. The talking drums on the roof of the dead man’s house began to glow with a light so strong that it drew the dancers to the rooftop. The corpse picked up the drumsticks and began to play.”
- Grindal, B.T. (1983). “Into the Heart of Sisala Experience: Witnessing Death Divination”. Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 39, No. 1, p.68.
Quote:And just then, through my tears, the central figure swayed deeply: all leaned forward, this was indeed going to be it. I realised along with them that the barriers were breaking - just as I let go in tears. Something that wanted to be born was now going to be born. Then a certain palpable social integument broke and something calved along with me. I felt the spiritual motion, a tangible feeling of breakthrough going through the whole group. Then Meru fell - the spirit event first and the action afterward...Quite an interval of struggle elapsed while I clapped like one possessed, crouching beside Bill amid a lot of urgent talk, while Singleton pressed Meru's back, guiding and leading out the tooth - Meru's face in a grin of tranced passion, her back quivering rapidly. Suddenly Meru raised her arm, stretched it in liberation, and I saw with my own eyes a giant thing emerging out of the flesh of her back. This thing was a large gray blob about six inches across, a deep gray opaque thing emerging as a sphere. I was amazed - delighted. I still laugh with glee at the realisation of having seen it, the ihamba, and so big! We were all just one in
triumph. The gray thing was actually out there, visible, and you could see Singleton's hands working and scrabbling on the back - and then the thing was there no more. Singleton had it in his pouch, pressing it in with his other hand as well. The receiving can was ready; he transferred whatever it was into the can and capped the castor oil leaf and bark lid over it.
It was done."
-Turner, E. (1998). “Experiencing Ritual”. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 149
Quote:“One day I was talking to a ... witch-doctor. I was waiting for my paddlers to bring provisions and I spoke of this to the fellow while wondering aloud if they were far away and if they would bring me the things I’d asked for. “Nothing could be easier to find out!” he cried. Then he took his magic mirror and with great concentration pronounced some incantation. The he said: “At this moment the men are rounding this bend in the river (it was more than a day’s paddling away), the tallest man has just shot a large bird, it falls into the water. They’ve caught it. They’re bringing you back what you asked for.” In fact everything was true: the provisions, the shooting, the bird, and, as I said, they were a day away!”
-RG Trilles as cited in E. de Martino (1972). “Magic: Primitive and Modern”. London: Tom Stacey Ltd. p.17
Quote:It was the height of market day and both shops and street vendors had a lively trade going when the thing appeared. It was a three-wheeled open coffin apparently steering itself into the midst of the crowd. There were three lively vultures perched at one end and a dead arm hung limply over the side. As if that weren’t enough, a hollow voice issued from the coffin’s interior repeatedly inquiring the location of one Jim Brown. Hundreds of people saw it - and heard the voice.”
[Joseph] Long was not among them; he was in a nearby area doing other work. Arriving on the scene shortly after the event, he lost no time in questioning those who had seen, and heard, the incident.
[Long noted:]
Quote:It was incredible. There were literally hundreds of people in that square and they all saw it, and heard the same words. More than that – and infinitely more important – they had all instantly reacted with behavior that showed they saw it. Within minutes the shops were empty, even of storekeepers. Everyone ran out to see the coffin and then just milled around, the way people do when they have seen something that has had a powerful effect on them...
...To this day, I can’t explain it except to say there must have been some kind of unique mass telepathic hallucination That's pretty weak, I realize, but how else to explain that several hundred people are in agreement about an event that cannot occur? As for a prank or purely physical explanation: If the CIA got all their geniuses together and developed the most diabolical mind-control device they could think of – well, it would equal that scene. And even if it could, would they pick Mandeville, Jamaica, to try it out?
None of it makes much sense even now.
- Boulders in the Stream: The Lineage and Founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness
Of course one could explain these cases under Idealism, but one can also take Arvan's Dualist position regarding higher and lower frames in the Peer to Peer Simulation Hypothesis. Both would have to say that there is a kind of deliberate rule set up that makes it seem like the spirit and physical have some continuity while also manifesting with certain distinctions.
Personally I dislike that type of explanation, at least to some degree, because you can explain any and every case with this kind of reasoning. As such it seems to me what we call "mental", "spirit", and "physical" are either ultimately the same substance or there is a bizarre Pluralism, an intersecting of varied realities that results in these oddities.
While I'm not against Pluralism [as per my prior posts], [ultimately] it seems difficult to explain how conscious entities could move between or even experience these realities that only have limited causal relations without some kind of fundamental underlying reality. And if we accept the Interaction Problem it would seem that some kind of Monist explanation would be better even if Idealism isn't satisfactory.