Dualism or idealist monism as the best model for survival after death data

[Ninshub]

I find this quite exciting as a very promising answer. Far from being repulsed by it because I am a card-carrying Dualist with an aversion to Indian philosophy, I agree that Shankara's version of Advaita Vedanta as you describe it seems to me to solve the primary problems, and seems to me to fairly well approach the truth and adequately explain the paranormal data along the lines (in Western philosophy-speak) of a modified Realism and modified Cartesian Interactional Dualism combined with a form of ultimate Monism.

Also, as being a form of Monism it addresses Valmar's criticism that my modified Cartesian Interactional Dualism doesn't deal with the Monistic implications of my Designer Hypothesis solution to the interaction problem. This is that the required spiritual/material interaction mechanisms must be rules of exceptions to the laws of our Reality specially set up by the Designer or Designers for specific purposes, primarily to enable embodiment of immaterial souls in material bodies. And that this set up of interaction mechanisms as part of the "brute facts" of our reality clearly implies the existence of an existentially ultimate frame of Reality at its most basic, below the real but subsidiary levels of spiritual and physical. In other words a form of Monism. It could even be (clumsily) termed "Trinism".

I'm glad you think so!

One of the sub-chapters of the King book in which he talks about AV is called "Perception in Advaita Vedanta: Reconciling the Everyday World and Monism".

In that case, I think your aversion to Indian philosophy is probably unwarranted, if we stick to Hindu rather than Buddhist philosophy. In that sense all the Vedanta schools involve Realism, and most other Hindu schools as well, including the explicitly dualist Samkhya school of thought. Hence the title of that book referred to as Indian Realism.

Again I think our conception of Indian philosophy is colored by contemporary representations that gloss over the details and specifics of those ancient philosophies to the point of misrepresenting their essence.

I recommend that book I've referenced that I'm currently reading: Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought (Richard King, 1999), to those who may be interested. It summarizes the different schools and their conflicts with one another, does a good job of cleaning the cobwebs of our erroneous views and the problems of the Western perception and treatment of Indian philosophy, and the latter half of the book goes by 5 major themes across the schools and the differing views: ontology, epistemology, perception (do we see things as they are?), consciousness & the body, and creation & causality.