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

You seem to lump all branches of Idealism into one blob... when the different branches offer very different perspectives on the nature of mind being the base substance. It irritates me to see you not take these distinctions into account when you criticize Idealism. It makes me puzzle over whether you actually understand Idealism or are strawmanning it so as to cut it down, wittingly or unwittingly. I cannot tell either way, as I don't know enough. But, you do seem sincere, so it would seem to be rather unwittingly, then.

From https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_idealism.html:


Which is why I agree with same stances, and disagree wholly with other Idealist stances. It's like Dualism or Materialism having different branches that have disagree with each other. Dualism has a branch which adheres to, basically, a Materialist stance of reality: Property Dualism (https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_dualism.html), for example.


Below, you criticize Idealism of having contrived auxiliary hypotheses... but don't realize that the proposed interaction mechanism is basically the same thing. It is a gap that is being filled in because of a fundamental shortcoming of Dualism in explaining why and how matter and mind, two alien substances, can interact at all.

Besides... if there are powers-that-be that establish brute facts of reality... then it would imply a form of Monism to me. A true base reality out of which mind and matter are separately fashioned, a base reality that has neither distinct mental nor physical qualities, but can give rise to either.

Having a mechanism at all implies some form of Monist reality in which this "mechanism" resides, allowing communication to and fro.


Ockham's Razor Principle is unsatisfying to me, because it is unclear to why the "simplest" explanation is the "best" explanation. Sometimes, the complex explanation is simply much more parsimonious, because it explains everything neatly and clearly. "Simpler" does not equate to "better". Often, it cannot, as reality is often full of complexities and complications that are irreducible.

I couldn't care less about what is useful to science, as I can far more about what is useful in explaining all of the different parapsychological phenomena that have been observed, directly and indirectly, alongside the usual psychological and physical stuff we know about. For me, science is a tool used for exploring ideas and concepts related to the natural world ~ but it is not something at all useful in exploring metaphysical questions, because it fundamentally cannot answer any, nevermind provide any kind of data or information or knowledge at all about the metaphysical.


I perceive Dualism's interaction problem to merely be a much simpler form of the same issues that plague Pluralism. In Pluralism, as I perceive it, you simply have more than two base substances.

On Idealism, I have had an overall working definition, which avoids getting into the morass of the multitudes of variations on this theme, thought up by legions of philosophers over the years.

From https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_idealism.html:

"Idealism is the metaphysical and epistemological doctrine that ideas or thoughts make up fundamental reality. Essentially, it is any philosophy which argues that the only thing actually knowable is consciousness (or the contents of consciousness), whereas we never can be sure that matter or anything in the outside world really exists. Thus, the only real things are mental entities, not physical things (which exist only in the sense that they are perceived). Idealism is a form of monism."

My own views have always been in synchrony with the doctrines of Realism and Dualism, defined as,

"Realism, at it's simplest and most general, is the view that entities of a certain type have an objective reality, a reality that is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Thus, entities (including abstract concepts and universals as well as more concrete objects) have an existence independent of the act of perception, and independent of their names.
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Dualism in Metaphysics is the belief that there are two kinds of reality: material (physical) and immaterial (spiritual). In Philosophy of Mind, Dualism is the position that mind and body are in some categorical way separate from each other, and that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical in nature.
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Dualism appeals to the common-sense intuition of the vast majority of non-philosophically-trained people, and the mental and the physical do seem to most people to have quite different, and perhaps irreconcilable, properties. Mental events have a certain subjective quality to them (known as qualia or "the ways things seem to us"), whereas physical events do not."

It occurs to me to sort of cut to the chase and attempt to get down to actual detailed examinations of paranormal data, and ask for Idealist Monist explanations in a couple of detailed hypothetical (typical) examples of experiences that at least on the surface very much seem to have a common sense Dualist best explanation.

One hypothetical example based on many actual occurrences would be an NDE in which the subject experiences leaving their body and floating up to the corner of the ceiling of the emergency or operating room, from where they observe the rescusitation team working on their body. A cardiac arrest has stopped their heart, and their body and brain are mostly moribund and nonfunctional. They observe certain doctor's actions and later investigators verify that many details in their account are correct. The experient may also observe a "silver cord" or some sort of etheric umbilical cord still connecting him with his body. The experient also in his account relates how he later floated out through the solid matter of the room's wall and traveled to another location in the world, where he observed a member of his family carrying out some specific action. The investigators later verify this part of the account as also being veridical.

The experience also involves a deep sense of being "realer than real", of much clearer and more vivid consciousness than normal in-body consciousness, and also there are profound long-term changes to his personality centered on a newfound certainty that he is not his body and that there is an afterlife.

The common sense Dualist interpretation is that what actually happened was very much what it appeared to be. That the experient actually physically separated from their body and brain and assumed a physical location considerably above their body lying on the table, and that they somehow were able to observe the goings-on about their body. This interpretation would also be that the self of this NDEer must have been some sort of mobile immaterial center of consciousness that was invisible physically but still had some sort of extension in the 3 spacial dimensions even though it could also effortlessly interpenetrate matter.

What would your Idealist Monist interpretation of this be, of whatever particular subcategory of the philosophy you subscribe to, explaining in detail each of the elements of the experience enumerated above?

It would look to me that it would have to be along the lines of contending that despite the innermost reality of this occurrence being purely mental, the "system" whatever it really is, has contrived to generate the compelling illusion of separate physical and mental/spiritual objects and entities. Then the question is, why the charade? Why fool us or pull the wool over our human eyes, so to speak, and create such a compelling illusion of separateness?

Another example but in an entirely different field would be the typical experience of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield during an open-brain epilepsy operation in which he is electrically stimulating various points on the patient's cerebral cortex trying to find locations that are causing siezures. He finds many points where the stimulation evokes involuntary muscular action or involuntary emotions of fear or anger, childhood memories, etc. The awake patient says, ""I" didn't do that!" But Penfield doesn't find any at all out of the 100 - 200 stimulation points, where the electrical stimulation evokes abstract thoughts or ideas or other properties or elements of higher mental functioning, including self-awareness, thoughts and experiences where the patient just "knew" that they were actually "him". The patient absolutely never said, "Hey, that was "me"!"

This experience repeats itself very many times, over his career of over 1000 such operations. Penfield concludes that this data is best explained by the hypothesis that the mind is a separate nonmaterial entity not generated by the physical brain but still somehow physically occupying and interacting with the brain. Where many lower-level mental functions are generated by the physical brain, but the core sense of self and higher mental functions like abstract thought and knowing, and appreciation of beauty, are properties or functions of this ultimately separate immaterial spirit. In other words, a modified version of interactive Cartesian Dualism clearly suggests itself to Penfield due to his long practical experience with brain stimulation, and this becomes his fervent belief system as a top neurosurgeon and medical scientist who is trying to strictly follow the actual data he
has accumulated.

How would your version of Idealist Monism explain this example? 


On Ockham's Razor: Sure, the simpler explanation, although having a considerably higher chance of being correct, is not always true. Ockham's razor is not intended to be a substitute for critical thinking. It is merely a tool to help make that thinking more efficient.

Even though the Ockham's Razor principle may not always point to the truth, it has a good chance of being right. In the ultimately brutally practical and pragmatic field of medicine it certainly is very useful, where doctors use a version of it — “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras” — to ensure they go for the simplest diagnosis to explain their patient's symptoms.

I think something similar could be said about a lot of shamanic activities.

Maybe these don't fit with Dualism, but that doesn't stop me asserting that science would be a lot better off if it did accept Dualism. I know this sounds awfully pragmatic, but the value of providing a home within scientific discourse for a lot of 'paranormal' phenomena would be so valuable. People could then quibble about phenomena such as shamanic experiences.

I get the feeling there are a lot of bizarre phenomena that are hard to fit into any framework!

How would science be better? Recall that a lot of philosophers and scientists see Dualism as simply giving up and saying there is no way to unify matter & mind.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are suggesting here more of a "hyper-spatial" Dualism, where both the mental/spirit and the physical are extended rather than a Cartesian Dualism where the mental is extensionless and thus has no spatial properties. I assume the former because if NDEs are visiting a place beyond this w[o]rld that place itself is extended. (There's also Hylemorphic Dualism but that just gets us into newer weeds that I don't think you or David intend for us to wander through.)

It's still not clear to me why you think the evidence is more for Dualism than another option? One has to consider not just anomalous data from parapsychology but also basic facts like alcohol consumption affecting thoughts. But even things like verdical NDEs require the subtle-body/soul to observed the physical which implies continuity of information from the mundane world to the spirit/mental form. PK, going in the other direction, suggests not only continuity but even a sense of strained muscular pushing with the effort it often takes to produce effects. In fact for PK to work it suggests that has to be something in matter that is receptive to mental force.

Reincarnation, with the curious fact of birthmarks sometimes matching wounds or other bodily alterations like tattoos, again suggests the physical is not divorced from the mental/spiritual but has at least some axes of causal interaction. Also ectoplasm and conjuration by mediums, "alien" encounters where the aliens seem to have very odd relationships with the physical world, and so on...

I do agree with you that when looking at certain divisions between the mental and physical, Idealist Monism has to set up what looks to be arbitrary rules to try and explain the effort Psi at times takes as well as other issues. However, if Dualism can claim the Interaction Problem is solved by Designers it seems to me Idealism could claim the same thing. Though I don't believe Valmar is proposing Idealism here, but rather something more like the Neutral Monism of the Tao.

One of the challenges here, it seems to me, is we haven't really tried to figure out what it means for there to be a substance? This question actually got me to be more skeptical of the Interaction Problem because it seems difficult to define one substance as distinct from another without using causal interaction as a guide...but this would mean proposing an Interaction Problem may just be begging the question against the Dualist. After all what do fields, forces, matter have in common that they are a single "substance"? How is space-time emergent from physics, when the original conception of the physical world was based in the day-to-day empiricism of our world that would be contrasted with the too-often-invisible spiritual world? Of course, the shift of physics into stranger and stranger realms also makes it seem the "physical" is not altogether different from what we might call the "spiritual" or "mental".

For Hyperspatial Dualism, which avoids the oddity of dimension-less non-spatial minds, I think a problem remains because to make sense of it one has to posit two overlapping realities that have axes of causal interaction but are distinct in some important ways such as the OOBEr not being affected by physical forces in the same way as when they are in their physical body. All the worse for my Pluralism of course, which is why I have some sympathy for the idea that all the realities are ultimately crafted from some kind of transcendent Light that might fit Steve Taylor's "Pan-spiritism".

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are suggesting here more of a "hyper-spatial" Dualism, where both the mental/spirit and the physical are extended rather than a Cartesian Dualism where the mental is extensionless and thus has no spatial properties. I assume the former because if NDEs are visiting a place beyond this w[o]rld that place itself is extended. (There's also Hylemorphic Dualism but that just gets us into newer weeds that I don't think you or David intend for us to wander through.)"

Yes, I agree. To be plausible and the best choice it needs to be what you term "hyper spatial" dualism where the soul or spirit has extension in the three spacial dimensions, even though it is immaterial and can effortlessly interpenetrate matter, and even though the spirit can apparently physically observe the world even though not having physical eyes, and other seeming impossibilities. Just following the data, it strongly appears to me that some form of modified Cartesian interactive Dualism must be the case. 

"It's still not clear to me why you think the evidence is more for Dualism than another option? One has to consider not just anomalous data from parapsychology but also basic facts like alcohol consumption affecting thoughts. But even things like verdical NDEs require the subtle-body/soul to observed the physical which implies continuity of information from the mundane world to the spirit/mental form. PK, going in the other direction, suggests not only continuity but even a sense of strained muscular pushing with the effort it often takes to produce effects. In fact for PK to work it suggests that has to be something in matter that is receptive to mental force.
Reincarnation, with the curious fact of birthmarks sometimes matching wounds or other bodily alterations like tattoos, again suggests the physical is not divorced from the mental/spiritual but has at least some axes of causal interaction. Also ectoplasm and conjuration by mediums, "alien" encounters where the aliens seem to have very odd relationships with the physical world, and so on..."

As I have said, I think that the interaction problem can be easily solved by what could be called the Designer Hypothesis, that such interaction mechanisms must be intentional purposeful exceptions engineered into the design of Reality by the powers-that-be to enable certain important design requirements. The primary requirement would be to enable embodiment of immaterial souls in material bodies. Analogous to the fact that the laws of physics have clearly been designed and contrived to have the necessary extremely exact "fine tuned" values of the constants and coefficients of the equations to enable the existence of life in our physical reality.

It's true that the paranormal empirical evidence problems of Idealist Monism and other Idealist philosophies can similarly be solved by the Designer solution, but the deeper problem here is the great additional complications necessitated by such a solution in the Idealism case.

For Hyperspatial Dualism, which avoids the oddity of dimension-less non-spatial minds, I think a problem remains because to make sense of it one has to posit two overlapping realities that have axes of causal interaction but are distinct in some important ways such as the OOBEr not being affected by physical forces in the same way as when they are in their physical body. All the worse for my Pluralism of course, which is why I have some sympathy for the idea that all the realities are ultimately crafted from some kind of transcendent Light that might fit Steve Taylor's "Pan-spiritism"

I just think that here, the "hard" empirical data of parapsychological phenomena like NDEs has to trump theory, regardless of seeming illogicalities or irrationalities. The data is the data and whatever Reality really is, it absolutely must fit that data.

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Below, you criticize Idealism of having contrived auxiliary hypotheses... but don't realize that the proposed interaction mechanism is basically the same thing. It is a gap that is being filled in because of a fundamental shortcoming of Dualism in explaining why and how matter and mind, two alien substances, can interact at all.

Besides... if there are powers-that-be that establish brute facts of reality... then it would imply a form of Monism to me. A true base reality out of which mind and matter are separately fashioned, a base reality that has neither distinct mental nor physical qualities, but can give rise to either.

Having a mechanism at all implies some form of Monist reality in which this "mechanism" resides, allowing communication to and fro.

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As I indicated to Psi, I think that the interaction problem can be easily solved by what could be called the Designer Hypothesis, that such interaction mechanisms must be intentional purposeful exceptions engineered into the design of Reality by the powers-that-be to enable certain important design requirements. The primary requirement would be to enable embodiment of immaterial souls in material bodies. This isn't just any contrived auxiliary hypothesis, but is an explanatory frame to be expected given the strong or even overwhelming evidences for design in the Universe. 

There is a clear analogy to this in the fact that the laws of physics of our physical Reality have conclusively been designed and contrived by the "powers-that-be" to have the necessary extremely exact "fine tuned" values of the constants and coefficients of the equations needed to enable the existence of life in our physical reality.

It's true that the paranormal empirical evidence problems of Idealist Monism and other Idealist philosophies can similarly be solved by the Designer solution, but the deeper problem here is the great additional complication necessitated by such a solution in the Idealism case.

Your point is well taken that this Designer Hypothesis would itself imply some form of ultimate Monism. But I think that this would not affect the conclusion from the paranormal data that in the higher levels of Reality occupied by humans, some form of modified Interactive Dualism prevails.

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It occurs to me to sort of cut to the chase and attempt to get down to actual detailed examinations of paranormal data, and ask for Idealist Monist explanations in a couple of detailed hypothetical (typical) examples of experiences that at least on the surface very much seem to have a common sense Dualist best explanation.
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To beat the dead horse one more time, and just for the record:

Since no one has chosen to respond to this challenge, I can only surmise that perhaps out of many possible ones the actual reason is that there is no plausible answer within the confines of the philosophy involved (other than generalized hand-waving), meaning an explanation that would not be excessively complicated and convoluted and perhaps hard to develop. Anyway, it's too bad, because I am genuinely curious how Idealism - type philosophies can deal with the nitty gritty details of some of the paranormal empirical evidence. There is an old saying - the Devil is in the details.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to ask for a specific detailed account of exactly what, according to a particular Idealist Monist system of philosophy, is actually going on during one specific experience out of many occurring during an NDE, for instance when the NDEer vividly experiences leaving his body and moving up to the ceiling of the emergency room to observe the physicians working on his body below. If it's not what it clearly seems to be to the experiencer, what really has happened? If it was an elaborate illusion, then created by what or who, how, and why? Maybe it is obvious, but it escapes me. I know that academic philosophical discourse may be unequipped to deal with such a question, but it still seems to be a reasonable one to ask.

Of course the underlying assumption of the question of "what was really happening" is that there exists a reality independent of our thoughts or beliefs about it.

I really would like to know if there is a plausible explanatory scheme for Idealism to deal with such data, and if accordingly I am actually wrong at the paranormal data explanatory level. Certainly that's possible.

[Ninshub]

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to ask for a specific detailed account of exactly what, according to a particular Idealist Monist system of philosophy, is actually going on during one specific experience out of many occurring during an NDE, for instance when the NDEer vividly experiences leaving his body and moving up to the ceiling of the emergency room to observe the physicians working on his body below. If it's not what it clearly seems to be to the experiencer, what really has happened? If it was an elaborate illusion, then created by what or who, how, and why? Maybe it is obvious, but it escapes me. I know that academic philosophical discourse may be unequipped to deal with such a question, but it still seems to be a reasonable one to ask.

Just speaking for myself, I've started this thread through my exploring Idealism, but it doesn't mean I'm wedded to it. I've also not taken the time yet to go over the last several pages of posts here.

Those are very good points you raise.

Is Advaita Vedanta misunderstood?
 
To make a parenthesis which is only maybe indirectly related to the topic... On my own I've been exploring the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, and just to speak for or about that perspective for a moment... I was going to maybe start a thread on it, but I'll just summarize a few thoughts here. One thing that comes across from several (philosophical and religious) scholars is that it's not an idealism per se. Or maybe depending on the philosopher (and we should also distinguish modern Neo-Vedanta, or the varied approaches there) - certainly Shankara's version of isn't described as a full-on idealism. The view has two levels of reality, the empirical and the absolute. Both co-exist and the empirical doesn't collapse into the absolute, even if the absolute is at a more fundamental level "more real".

Sankara's Advaita Vedanta (8th century) therefore distinguished itself from Yogacara Buddhism which was consciousness only (there is no empirical reality), and Sankara critiqued that position. Advaita Vedanta propounds a "realist theory of perception" (Richard King, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought, p. 156).

This website recapitalutes and quotes a scholar on this topic, whereby AV is more like Absolute Idealism (to some extent like Kant), and Yogacara more like Berkeley's subjective idealism.

This is another website devoted to AV that describes the prevalence of Realist metaphysics as opposed to Idealist metaphysics in Hindu thought and how that pertains to AV as well, or at least partly.

Here's yet another one. (Advaita is not Idealism).

The main points are that, yes, at the most profound ontological level, the empirical world is an "illusion", but that does not collapse the empirical world itself, which includes the "afterlife". The world of objects is real, and so are the souls (the jivas).

It seems that whenever AV is brought up, I sense this repulsion coming up from dualist-friendly psi enthusiasts, and I think it's possibly a result of this misreading of AV (surely a result of superficial or erroneous, or Neo-Vedantic understandings, out there in our contemporary culture), both seen erroneously as a through and through idealism, and as if it implies that everything collapses into "oneness" once our bodies die. Clearly when your body and mine will die, our empirical souls will continue to exist, says this view.

Here is an excerpt that I think comes from a book in the 1930s called Indian Realism, which discusses Sankara's AV as opposed to Yogocara Buddhism, and which is quoted in the the first website I referenced earlier up in this post:

He (Sankara) recognizes the Absolute (Brahman) alone as the ontological reality. The Absolute is pure identity. It is not identity-in-difference like the Absolute of Hegel. But still Sankara is not prevented from recognizing the empirical reality (Vyavaharikasatta) of external objects and individual souls (Jiva). Deussen rightly observes: “Just as Kant, along with transcendental idealism, maintained the empirical reality of the external world, and defended it against Berkeley, so the Vedantins are not prevented by their doctrine of Ignorance as the foundation of all Being expanded in name and form from maintaining the reality of the outer world against the Buddhists of idealistic tendencies.”

(...) The Jivas and external objects are not real Sub Specie aeternitatis in the language of Spinoza. They have only an empirical reality. The Yogacara regards the objects of perception such as blue and the like as internal forms of cognitions only which appear like external objects. Sankara, on the other hand, admits the empirical reality of external objects such as blue and the like, which are distinct from cognitions and indefinable (anirvacaniya) in nature.

Further, according to Sankara, empirical objects are known through their practical efficiency (artha kriya). But, according to the Yogacara, objects are mere determinations of cognitions which have practical efficiency.

Jayanta Bhatta also distinguishes between the absolute idealism of Sankara and the subjective idealism of the Yogacara. Both of them are idealists. They recognize the reality of consciousness only. They deny the absolute reality of anything independent of consciousness. But there is a world of difference between them. Sankara’s absolute reality is one, indifferenced, eternal consciousness. The Yogacara’s absolute reality is a plurality of momentary cognitions with no permanent self-abiding in them and with no external objects to produce them.

He does not admit the reality of one, infinite, eternal, self-luminous consciousness or Brahman, but of a beginning less series of momentary cognitions which appear and disappear in individual minds or streams of consciousness.

Sankara’s Criticism of the Subjective Idealism (Buddhism)

• Firstly, Sankara does not offer any direct criticism of the first argument of the Yogacara that an external object cannot exist, for if it exists it must be of the nature of the nature of atoms or an aggregate of atoms but it can be neither. Sankara urges that an external object does exist since it is distinctly perceived by all. In every act of perception, we do perceive an external object such as a post, a wall, and the like. We cannot deny the existence of an external object which is actually perceived. It is as absurd to deny the existence of an external object which is actually perceived through a sense-organ as to deny the act of eating and feeling satisfied when one is actually taking his meal and feeling pleasure. In other words, our perception clearly testifies to the existence of an external object.
  

https://cisindus.org/2022/05/13/the-adva...-idealism/

More to the point of this actual thread, and nb's post: the soul (the jiva) in AV exists and continues after the death of the body. And that individual soul contains the personality and the mind. (It's the subtle bodymind). However the jiva (the individual soul) can transcend its limitations once it realizes its more fundamental level with Brahman, whether while in incarnation or after the death of the physical body.

Here's a 5-minute video that I posted elsewhere where the Advaita Vendantin Swami Sarvapriyananda iscusses this topic specifically. Nothing dies at death except the physical (non-subtle) body.



I am only partly versed in this topic, but so far, if we view idealism (depending on how we define it), as problematic for the understanding of paranormal data, if we talk about Advaita Vedanta I'm not seeing that problem. Now this model or philosophy could be wrong or false, but it seems to me that everything that you describe, nb, could work in this framework. Please let me know if I'm not seeing this correctly.

Just speaking for myself, I've started this thread through my exploring Idealism, but it doesn't mean I'm wedded to it. I've also not taken the time yet to go over the last several pages of posts here.

Those are very good points you raise.



Shankara's version (of Advaita Vedanta) isn't described as a full-on idealism. The view has two levels of reality, the empirical and the absolute. Both co-exist and the empirical doesn't collapse into the absolute, even if the absolute is at a more fundamental level "more real".
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It seems that whenever AV is brought up, I sense this repulsion coming up from dualist-friendly psi enthusiasts, and I think it's possibly a result of this misreading of AV (surely a result of superficial or erroneous, or Neo-Vedantic understandings, out there in our contemporary culture), both seen erroneously as a through and through idealism, and as if it implies that everything collapses into "oneness" once our bodies die. Clearly when your body and mine will die, our empirical souls will continue to exist, says this view.
.......................................
...the soul (the jiva) in AV exists and continues after the death of the body. And that individual soul contains the personality and the mind. (It's the subtle bodymind). However the jiva (the individual soul) can transcend its limitations once it realizes its more fundamental level with Brahman, whether while in incarnation or after the death of the physical body.
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...at the most profound ontological level, the empirical world is an "illusion", but that does not collapse the empirical world itself, which includes the "afterlife". The world of objects is real, and so are the souls (the jivas).
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I am only partly versed in this topic, but so far, if we view idealism (depending on how we define it), as problematic for the understanding of paranormal data, if we talk about Advaita Vedanta I'm not seeing that problem. Now this model or philosophy could be wrong or false, but it seems to me that everything that you describe, nb, could work in this framework. Please let me know if I'm not seeing this correctly.

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 still unconvinced that Dualism - or even my conjecture of Pluralism - is any better for paranormal data.

It really depends on what one is talking about. For example when I speak of Pluralism it's less about different substances in the sense of a "mental" substance or a "physical" substance. Rather I think the "physical" contains qualia and the "spiritual" worlds have empirical solidity & their own extended space. It's more that it seems these different realities have some kind of somewhat consistent rule-sets and in intersections between these realities we get the anomalies we witness in parapsychology.

But if Dualism is about two actually distinct substances, and the argument is there is some Designer that set things up so these two substances can "fake" interaction....that seems to suggest some kind of Monism the Designer(s) worked with.

[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.