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

Allowed by who?

And then how is this entity or entities making it so some things are allowed and some are not? This seems to suggest that ultimately there is some third medium out of which the distinction of Mind and Matter is crafted...in addition to making us wonder why some reincarnation cases retain a physical reminder of a fatal wound and some do not...

Even seeing apparitions with our eyes, this suggests light* is working in the physical way it normally does.

I also think ectoplasm still remains unexplained in this paradigm since that isn't just an example of mind-matter harmoniously being linked. Also what happens in varied shamanic healings when the illness is transferred from the physical body to another physical object.

There's even a case noted by anthropologist Edith Turner where a shamanic healing involves some kind of ectoplasm leaving the body. Who knows how many of these cases stretch across humanity's primordial history.

This isn't to say Idealism fares much better than Dualism, since it also has to give us rules to explain why a shaman can't just psychically heal someone without using any physical medium. I suppose one can use an Idealist-Simulation reference to "physical" reality being akin to the coded rules in a video game but as with all references to the Simulation Hypothesis when you can explain everything and anything you arguably actually weaken rather than strengthen your case...

*I actually think there is a case to be made that everything is made from a spiritual Light that gets "murkier" as it approaches the status of physical light but that's a discussion for later...

These apparent rules are like the laws of physics - just "the way things work" in our reality. The ultimate source of this huge body of complex organized specified information must remain an ultimate mystery. Whatever the source is, it must be unmeasurably intelligent and powerful. Unless you believe that the laws of physics for instance have some sort of unintelligent cause unassociated with consciousness, or have always existed without any form of intelligent creative inventor. Talk about something coming from absolutely nothing.

These apparent rules are like the laws of physics - just "the way things work" in our reality. The ultimate source of this huge body of complex organized specified information must remain an ultimate mystery. Whatever the source is, it must be unmeasurably intelligent and powerful. Unless you believe that the laws of physics for instance have some sort of unintelligent cause unassociated with consciousness, or have always existed without any form of intelligent creative inventor. Talk about something coming from absolutely nothing.

Oh I am saying the opposite here - if these powerful spirit entities are creating and maintaining this divide then what are they composed of and what are they making the "mental" and "physical" out of?

Note I lean toward theism, though more of the Limited God kind...

Oh I am saying the opposite here - if these powerful spirit entities are creating and maintaining this divide then what are they composed of and what are they making the "mental" and "physical" out of?

Note I lean toward theism, though more of the Limited God kind...

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?

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.

*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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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...