2022-08-05, 11:28 AM
(2022-08-05, 06:32 AM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]Depends on what you mean by Dualism. If you mean two frames of reality then it seems OOBEs are somewhere on the intersection. Given the OOBEr/NDEr can see stuff happening in the "mundane" world there seems to be some way for the sensory information to travel from the "mundane" to the soul/astral-body/whatever-we-call-it. Similarly, that people can see the NDEr having an OOBE in some cases suggests people are seeing with their eyes...though apparently there are apparitions that people can see but cannot be photographed which makes things stranger.
As for the Libet/Penfield data, not sure any hard conclusions can be drawn save perhaps that the standard materialist dogma is false. But once someone accepts that the substance of the brain is not governed by naturalist-materialist laws it seems the findings at best suggest some kind of filter/transmitter function of the brain. But something like Kastrup's Whirlpools, Paul Marshall's Monads, and other Idealists' models of reality would work.
I do agree that many cases are problematic for Idealism, insofar as it seems there needs to be a variety of rules added to explain (explain away?) the varied phenomena. That Rolling Thunder needs to shift the illness from the human body into a pair of steaks suggests there is some continuity from the conceptual to the physical, which may be better explained if "Illness" as a concept as well as the "Physical" are all in some kind of Mind or set of Minds.
OTOH there seem to be issues for Idealism as well, where at best we need to say there are a set of rules held by someone/something like God or the consensus of all Minds. These rules would then have to explain why most of the time physics/chemistry/biology seem to govern the consensus world and at other times Rolling Thunder can transfer illness from a human to steaks. Of course Idealism *could* make these claims but it seems that this would be the kind of pseudo-explanation available to a variety of Simulation Hypotheses. It also feels odd that PK (which arguably includes psychic/magical/shamanic healing) would take so much effort if everything was Mind, and again it feels like while one can give an Idealist explanation not sure there is one that satisfyingly explains this.
Right now I think some kind of "hyper-spatial" pluralism might work best, where we reject any worry about what is "mental" and what is "physical" and just think of our situation as being in an intersection point of at least two realities with their own rules. Eric Weiss even suggests this with his Doctrine of Subtle Worlds:
I tend to look at it as there being two quasi-separate designed realms of reality with areas of intentional interactive 'intersection' (as you put it). These would be special case rules built into reality for specific purposes such as achieving embodiment of souls in physical matter, human brains and bodies. There would appear to be analogies to this special case interactive intersection concept, in for instance Maxwell's laws of electromagnetics (derivable from deeper levels of physics), enabling interaction between material conductors like copper and immaterial magnetic and electric fields so as to allow Man to develop most of modern technology, especially electric generators, long distance power transmission, electric motors, and a host of other technologies. These special case rules (laws of physics) would be brute facts of Nature purposely built into reality by the powers-that-be and not necessarily understandable in their essence by Man through science or any other human means of understanding.
Paranormal phenomena would be mostly unintended "leakage" from spiritual realms into the physical realm and vice versa, coming about because of the manifold number of engineering tradeoffs inherently necessary in designing these realities for various functional goals such as physical embodiment of mostly immaterial souls. All complex engineering projects absolutely necessarily result in tradeoffs in the resulting systems, where in principle all the sometimes conflicting engineering requirements can't be simultaneously fully met - there has to be a give and take. Resulting for instance in the difficult to achieve but real psychokinetic powers of certain rare physical mediums, perhaps not intended as requirements for reality but accepted as within certain "error bounds".