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

While still largely agnostic toward "God", I'm pretty much cool with all of this as possibility, with the exception of the Single True Subject.

I guess to me if one person is carrying another, you have two separate people where one person is helping the other. But if there's only a Single True Subject, doesn't this mean both people are actually One? This seems even more stark when one person is attacking/hurting the other?

That would seem to be the case... which is why the Single True Subject has some big problems, followed to its logical conclusion...

That would seem to be the case... which is why the Single True Subject has some big problems, followed to its logical conclusion...

Going back to the idea of Eternal Individual Selves, from the Monika Mandoki paper that Ninshub posted:

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart has built a similar qualitatively monistic idealist system
in the early 20th century. He classifies himself as a personal idealist to distinguish himself from
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, an absolute idealist, who, in McTaggart's opinion, does not
emphasize the importance of individuality (McTaggart, 1901). According to McTaggart, the
absolute is made up of finite selves, although it is timeless and perfect. This characterization of
the absolute makes selves immortal. Basically, no self can ever perish in the system.

...he defends the idea of multiple succession of lives lived and that these lives are guided by the interest of the selves or spirits which McTaggart believes is love. Thus, McTaggart develops a philosophical system created of spirits only, making him a qualitative idealist, but since he denies any assimilation or unification of these spirits he is not a quantitative idealist. The eternal separateness of spirits distinguishes him from absolute idealists of his time, such as for example Francis Herbert Bradley, who envisions the Absolute as a spiritual unity without parts.

I think I might be somewhat like McTaggart, though I'm not sure one needs to define oneself as an "Idealist" as this question of what the fundamental Ground consists of would be different than what is the immediate relationship between the realms seen in various OOBE journeys (NDEs, Astral Projection, Shamanic Spirit Work) and the consensus world we live on Earth. That I think is an intersection of these spirit realms with a reality that we'd call physical.

However I think this physical is not a world without sensory aspects. I can't recall the name, but there was a Buddhist teacher who suggested something like a flower is actually made up of infinite possible perceptions, with different people and animals seeing a fraction of those possibilities.

Also McTaggart was an atheist, whereas I'm quite comfortable not giving a definitive answer to the existence of "God"...whoever/whatever that is supposed to be.

I think I might be somewhat like McTaggart, though I'm not sure one needs to define oneself as an "Idealist" as this question of what the fundamental Ground consists of would be different than what is the immediate relationship between the realms seen in various OOBE journeys (NDEs, Astral Projection, Shamanic Spirit Work) and the consensus world we live on Earth. That I think is an intersection of these spirit realms with a reality that we'd call physical...

There's an article in an old Edge issue entitled "You’re Not Even in There Now: The Tenuous Tether Holding the Self in the Body" by Julie Beischel (starts on page 6) which might be interest:

This extensive body of research indicates that our sense of body ownership is highly flexible. The self is only casually tethered to the body and requires constant feedback to remain there. Taking these findings into account, the concepts that the self exists beyond the physical body and can acquire information and affect physical matter non-locally seem quite logical.

Again, the ideas that mind can transcend space and time and can survive the death of the body are not actually surprising considering that the relationship between the mind and the body is flimsy at best during physical life. It’s a wonder it stays in there at all.

It's an interesting article because we usually think of the mind wedding rather strongly to the body in this life, but she points to mundane research that actually suggests otherwise. This seems to support that idea that the body, perhaps specifically the brain, is anchoring our consciousness to this reality.

It occurred to me that there is another area of research (in this case in medicine) that very much seems to be in favor of interactive dualism. This is the research and work of Dr. Wilder Penfield, the founder of epilepsy surgery. From https://mindmatters.ai/2021/08/epilepsy-...m-is-dead/:

He operated on 1100 patients with epilepsy and really developed the whole field of doing brain surgery to prevent seizures. His specialty was awake craniotomy. You give the patient local anesthesia so they don’t feel any pain. You inject the scalp with Novocaine, and so on.

Penfield did this operation on over a thousand patients and he noticed two things that were fascinating.

He would do hundreds of stimulations of different parts of the brain in each operation. And he would stimulate all kinds of things. He could stimulate sensations where the patients would see flashes of light or feel tingling on their skin. He could stimulate the brain and stimulate movements where the patient would raise their arm or raise their leg. He could stimulate memories where they would have this vivid memory of their mother’s face or their first day of school or being in college, and he could stimulate emotions where they would have intense emotions, to feel intense pleasure or intense fear.

But he noted, and he wrote a book about it, actually — The Mystery of the Mind (1975) — that never once in hundreds of thousands of stimulations of the brain was he ever able to stimulate what he called “mind action.” He meant by that, “abstract thought.” He was never able to stimulate a person to think about philosophy or logic or do mathematics. And he said, “Isn’t that strange that most of our mental contents entails abstract thought, and that’s the one kind of mental state that I have never been able to evoke by stimulating the brain.”

He said, it kind of makes sense then that maybe it doesn’t come from the brain. Maybe it’s dependent upon the brain for its normal function, but the brain is not what gives rise to it. He thought that was clear evidence for dualism. And he said that he had started out his career as a materialist and at the end of his career he was a passionate dualist. He said that this mind-action, this ability to have abstract thought, clearly does not come from the brain.

Can idealist monism really better accommodate this data than interactive dualism, or is idealism a hypothesis that requires many many more auxiliary hypotheses to explain the actual data?

There's an article in an old Edge issue entitled "You’re Not Even in There Now: The Tenuous Tether Holding the Self in the Body" by Julie Beischel (starts on page 6) which might be interest:

Added the link in.

Also, one thing that makes me wonder about both the Dualist and Idealist options is the effort it takes to manifest the paranormal. PK, for example, seems quite hard to manifest for most.

Ectoplasm seems to at least require specific conditions, have to check how hard it is for mediums to produce.

It occurred to me that there is another area of research (in this case in medicine) that very much seems to be in favor of interactive dualism. This is the research and work of Dr. Wilder Penfield, the founder of epilepsy surgery. From https://mindmatters.ai/2021/08/epilepsy-...m-is-dead/:


Can idealist monism really better accommodate this data than interactive dualism, or is that a hypothesis that requires many more auxiliary hypotheses to explain the actual data?

Penfield's observations and the interactional dualist explanation of them are also in accordance with some of my earlier comments
on this subject in connection with Libet's experiments, re. #12 at https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-s...xperiments:

...Libet's "free won't" experimental observation, that the chaotic memories, thoughts etc. coming from seemingly nowhere, and emotions like fear, which are typically part (but not all) of normal waking consciousness (can best be interpreted as) all coming from the activity of the material brain neuronal structure while in the basically animal body. Modes of activity that were developed for survival over the span of whatever process "evolution" really has been. And where the spirit is very intimately intertwined with the microstructure of the physical brain so as to facilitate the mind-brain interaction essential for physical embodiment.

Your observation that there seems to be no freedom in this phenomenon, in that it is independent of the conscious will, would be a true observation of the inevitable result of the interactive dualistic mind-brain interface while in body, where the conscious will is both an aspect of the immaterial self or spirit inhabiting the physical body, and the sometimes apparently chaotic but ultimately deterministic and non-free data processing of the neuronal structures.

The Self while in body is therefore a complex entity, partly physical and determined by the activity of brain neuronal structures and therefore not free, and part immaterial spirit and truly free.

Of course there is also the large body of empirical evidence afforded by the veridical NDE data.

Added the link in.

Also, one thing that makes me wonder about both the Dualist and Idealist options is the effort it takes to manifest the paranormal. PK, for example, seems quite hard to manifest for most.

Ectoplasm seems to at least require specific conditions, have to check how hard it is for mediums to produce.

It seems to me that it would be expected that a design of reality optimized for the brain/mind neuron/spirit interface required by embodiment would not be optimized for the physical psi phenomena characterized by physical mediums, which would be "going against the grain" so to speak and accordingly require much more effort to achieve.

It seems to me that it would be expected that a design of reality optimized for the brain/mind neuron/spirit interface required by embodiment would not be optimized for the physical psi phenomena characterized by physical mediums, which would be "going against the grain" so to speak and accordingly require much more effort to achieve.

Don't the other non-physical manifestations of Psi take effort at times? In fact it seems either the rules of Psi-functioning are unknown to us or there is some indeterminism involved (possibly due to the interference of other conscious agencies). OTOH it seems people can get better at Psi in the way we can get better at both mental and athletic practices, but Psi seems to vary not just in the difference of its kind (PK, Clairevoyance, Precognition, etc) but also how different individuals access this ability.

Perhaps I'm misremembering the data but it seems there is very little Psi-on-command (for living humans at least), save perhaps in a few gifted individuals (did anyone have a 100% success rate?).

There does seem to greater ease of utilizing mental powers by those who are dead and maybe the "neighbors" [as Vallee calls them] who are aliens or spirits or both or something else entirely. I would agree with you that those of us tied to brains & bodies seem to have less facility for Psi...My best guess is at least two realities are intersecting but not necessarily in a way that would appear as consistent to us as to the intersection of two geometric solids. Additionally their intersection doesn't seem to yield a 100% predictable rule-set of natural laws but rather some odd "habits" of Nature that from our perspective are indeterministic for whatever reason but not wholly random either...

A case that I think challenges Dualism...and maybe Idealism:

The Mist Wolf (Stephen Schwartz)

I go over to Hugh Lynn, who is in animated conversation with a British scientist, Douglas Dean, who has come down from New Jersey to see this. Hugh Lynn asks me, “What did you see?” “Yes, what...?” Dean says. I tell them, and when I say the mist took form, they exchange a look, and Hugh Lynn asks, “What shape?” When I tell them I saw a wolf, another look passes between them, and they tell me that have seen the same thing.

I can see the steaks. Both are withered and gray. One of them hardly looks like meat at all.

“You put whatever is wrong into the steak?”

“That’s right. The fire will purify and release it”

He throws the steaks into the hot coals. The fat crackles and catches fire. The two of us stand there in silence. It doesn’t take long, and they are gone. During those minutes I don’t know what Rolling Thunder is thinking. I am reconsidering how the world works.

What was this wolf in the mist? I doubt a spirit wolf is made of mist, but what does it mean for its body to be formed from mist?

An even bigger question is what the shaman Rolling Thunder [did] by taking a physical illness and putting that wrongness into a pair of steaks. Seems like a concept of illness that is some kind of Universal/Platonic/Essence transferred from a person into [a] physical medium.

A case that I think challenges Dualism...and maybe Idealism:

The Mist Wolf (Stephen Schwartz)



What was this wolf in the mist? I doubt a spirit wolf is made of mist, but what does it mean for its body to be formed from mist?

An even bigger question is what the shaman Rolling Thunder [did] by taking a physical illness and putting that wrongness into a pair of steaks. Seems like a concept of illness that is some kind of Universal/Platonic/Essence transferred from a person into [a] physical medium.

Interesting. At this moment I can only comment that for complex subjects and issues I usually use the type of thinking called abductive reasoning, which is the appeal, for the leading theory or hypothesis, to the explanation having the preponderance of evidence in favor of it. This method applies for instance to the topic of ID versus Darwinian evolution, considering the fossil, morphological and genetic evidence.

There is a lot of empirical evidence for interactional dualism. There appear to be at least three main areas of this evidence - veridical NDEs, the practical experiences during epilepsy surgery of Wilder Penfield, and the free will and "free won't" experiments of Benjamin Libet. Also a scattering of other paranormal phenomena. There are probably quite a few more. So in my opinion a few outliers that conflict won't change the abductive reasoning conclusion. It seems to me that there is considerably less evidence for idealist monism, plus the observation that it seems to require considerably more additional auxiliary hypotheses to explain the evidence mentioned above - i.e. much more complicated.