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

But there are inner experiences involving spirits as well? Certain shamanic visionary journeys involve dreaming experiences with spirit entities. For example a women with a history of being abused said she found great healing via Strassman's DMT experiments due to interaction with odd Harlequin entities.

On top of that if this idea of spirits being Super-Psi creations is meant to fit in some kind of Designed Dualism, the rules for when these Psi powers manifest in the fictional-but-seemingly-real creation of spirits seems like it would rather messy.
 
I think it makes more sense to have a unified explanation for Survival and spirits, with ourselves as a kind of spirit that has chosen to incarnate into a biological body.

Of course if Super Psi was a good theory I could accept it, but the selective aspect of its manifestation and the odd role of subconscious personalities are two big hurdles for it being a workable explanation IMO.

Interactive Dualism (strongly pointed to by the phenomena of veridical OOBE NDEs) is already messy, requiring several forms of special cases and interactions, in addition to the primary one being our own embodiment. Dualism even is appearing to perhaps be just a major emergent mode of reality, somehow arising from some sort of Monistic ground state of being. 

Similary, I think LAP (Super-Psi)-generated entities being manifested sometimes in addition to genuine discarnate deceased and other spirit entities along with our own embodied selves doesn't seem to be much of a complexity stretch from where the theory already is. I think this is just following the evidence wherever it leads. That the Standard Model of physics being combined with quantum mechanics and relativity constitutes a greatly complicated system doesn't prevent it from being at least provisionally accepted despite presumably violating the Ockham's Razor principle of parsimony. It, also, is just following the evidence. It is controversial, but there doesn't seem to be any fundamental law of nature that enforces Ockham's Razor upon it. This is just a general rule that is often but not always followed by reality.

Interactive Dualism (strongly pointed to by the phenomena of veridical OOBE NDEs) is already messy, requiring several forms of special cases and interactions, in addition to the primary one being our own embodiment. Dualism even is appearing to perhaps be just a major emergent mode of reality, somehow arising from some sort of Monistic ground state of being. 

Similary, I think LAP (Super-Psi)-generated entities being manifested sometimes in addition to genuine discarnate deceased and other spirit entities along with our own embodied selves doesn't seem to be much of a complexity stretch from where the theory already is. I think this is just following the evidence wherever it leads. That the Standard Model of physics being combined with quantum mechanics and relativity constitutes a greatly complicated system doesn't prevent it from being at least provisionally accepted despite presumably violating the Ockham's Razor principle of parsimony. It, also, is just following the evidence. It is controversial, but there doesn't seem to be any fundamental law of nature that enforces Ockham's Razor upon it. This is just a general rule that is often but not always followed by reality.

Yeah I think this gives us multiple claims that seem confusing ->

- There are "spirits" in the sense of some Designer(s?) who took the "mother substance" and made this physical world - with all its quantum & relativistic oddities - along with a spiritual world.

- There are "spirits" who are us, and when we die we leave the physical world...sometimes. Sometimes there are apparitions and sometimes there is reincarnation. Sometimes these spirits, as per the Wicklands, can even be sub-personalities...though Controls in mediumship are just subpersonalities that apparently don't have souls of their own.

- There are varied "laws of nature" laid down to ensure some kind of harmony between my thinking of moving an arm and the physical arm moving. There are also laws for PK, wherein my Mind seemingly directly impacts the "physical".

- Humans have subconscious Psi powers, and these can even imitate what seems to be spirits. Sometimes you need, like in the case of Phillip, a particular jovial atmosphere...and at other times you have a more solemn Shamanic ceremony like when Rolling Thunder puts sickness into steaks and burns them. Apparently there are laws laid down by the Designer(s?) for these varied circumstances where subpersonalities can pretend to be spirits or even manifest new spirit entities like "Phillip".

- There remains the question of how physical causation, between say a stone and the window it breaks, works.

..........................................................................................

- There remains the question of how physical causation, between say a stone and the window it breaks, works.

We can follow a "daisy chain" of proximal cause-effect relationships to scientifically determine that "how" down to a certain level of existence, then inevitable mystery. For instance, the contact point of the rock and the window is mutually impenetrable (causing the rock due to its momentum to push the window hard until it breaks it's molecular bonds) because at the atomic level there is a very strong electrostatic repulsion between the two solid surfaces. At the next deeper level, physics and quantum mechanics explains the nature at that level of view of these electric fields. But it stops there - we don't have any way of determining the ultimate how the physical works this way - the ultimate inner nature of these fields and forces at the absolute ground level of existence, or even the ultimate inner nature of cause-and-effect itself. 

But at least we can intelligently speculate on why things are this way in our reality.
 
This is the more (necessarily anthropically) metaphysical matter of trying to understand the reason why matter behaves this way at all. It seems that Design by "the powers that be" inevitably must rear it's ugly head. The reason for this behavior of matter in our reality is presumably because this schema and resultant behavior is required for the existence of sentient beings. If separate objects didn't exist or didn't remain separate and when in impenetrable contact strongly push against each other (generating forces due to this contact and the opposing forces acting on the objects themselves), then all the very complex interactions of our world could not occur, and sentient beings like ourselves couldn't exist.

So actually we are still confronted by a brick wall of mystery in penetrating to an explanation of the how of all this - the ultimate nature of the physical forces responsible for physical causation in our reality. I don't think this mystery can ever even in principle be penetrated by Mankind, because of the inherent limitations of our basic nature. The answer is way beyond our Cosmic "Pay Grade".

One proposed approach to a solution is to hypothesize the existence of countless spirits that simply push things around following the rules of deterministic reality. The problem is, this "solution" would just create another lower level of mystery, of the true inner nature of whatever it is that explains how the spirit beings push things around. This in turn inherently becomes an endless series.

One proposed approach to a solution is to hypothesize the existence of countless spirits that simply push things around following the rules of deterministic reality. The problem is, this "solution" would just create another lower level of mystery, of the true inner nature of whatever it is that explains how the spirit beings push things around. This in turn inherently becomes an endless series.

AFAIK our best scientific evidence says there is no deterministic reality, only an approximation of harmony at the classical/macro level due to decoherence? Regarding the QM level, even Nobel Physicist Penrose has wondered about consciousness down there ->

“An element of proto-consciousness takes place whenever a decision is made in the universe. I’m not talking about the brain. I’m talking about an object which is put into a superposition of two places. Say it’s a speck of dust that you put into two locations at once. Now, in a small fraction of a second, it will become one or the other. Which does it become? Well, that’s a choice. Is it a choice made by the universe? Does the speck of dust make this choice? Maybe it’s a free choice. I have no idea.”

But I agree that each cause/effect relation need not be the work of some lesser spirit in the Animist sense, even if I do hold that all causation is mental causation...this might warrant its own thread actually...

Of course there can be spirits in this world that are not among the human dead without there needing to be spirits making every atom move or even spirits governing all "territories" (bodies of water, regions of land, etc). And if there are not-exactly-physical Designer(s?) who can manipulate the substance of this universe - as they'd have to do for Cosmic Fine Tuning - it becomes plausible that lesser not-exactly-physical entities might do the same on a smaller scale.

Beyond that for myself I am wary of dismissing any cases that seem to come from either a small number of reliable witnesses or those witnessed en masse. I also give credence when, even if we might be suspicious of individual cases, we see a group of cases that fit a similar pattern such as those Vallee has documented in the historical record.

So perhaps not Animism in a "strong" sense of spirits running around making every event happen, but at least in a "weak" sense that entities who aren't as restricted by biological bodies share this world with us.

I think Survival, Psi, and Spirits all have good cases, enough to make me think all are real. OTOH stuff like people having unknown-to-them subconscious personalities seems much weaker, especially if we grant these personalities psychic powers and planning capabilities that allow them to fake evidence of Survival and/or Spirits. Even if we grant the existence of sub-personalities, the work of the Wicklands along with mental models across history suggest these too could be spirits themselves.

Since we're talking Animism, want to see if @Laird has any comments as he has probably thought more about this than I have...

[Laird]

Since we're talking Animism, want to see if @Laird has any comments as he has probably thought more about this than I have...

A quick note before bed just to let you know I've scheduled a more fulsome response for tomorrow. If I can't sleep, it might be sooner.

[Laird]

Since we're talking Animism, want to see if @Laird has any comments as he has probably thought more about this than I have...

Thanks, Sci, for the invitation to comment. I feel like I ought to start by commenting more broadly on the exchange between you and @nbtruthman, but even though I've been reading each post, I don't feel like I have a strong enough grip on the specifics of your disagreement to be able to make a useful comment. Instead, then, I'll start by briefly recapping why I endorse dualism over monism. This repeats a lot of post #605 in the thread Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?, and I debated whether or not it was worth the repetition, eventually deciding that the new contextualisation was useful.

Experience (or experiencing) from the subjective perspective is not, it seems to me, substantive (but nor is it abstract-conceptual nor a mere process either; it seems to be in an ontological category all of its own). Outside of solipsism proper, though, I can't make sense of subjective experience (or experiencing) unless it is entirely correlated from the objective perspective with a substance, in the sense that the objective substance is the substrate of subjective experience, or "what experience looks like from the outside". Note that by "substance" I mean a type of energy, the meaning of which I clarified in my answer to your question here.

Analytic Idealism - also going by cosmopsychism - and similar varieties of monism aka nondualism seem like an attempt at a metaphysical system of free-floating subjective experience without a substantive correlate: Bernardo Kastrup explicitly disclaims the existence of so-called "mind stuff". Substance is, though, snuck in through the back door: it is implicit in the explanation of individual psyches dissociating from the universal mind. Here, we have both explicit references to multidimensional structures (with the causal potency to split out a psyche), as well as implicit ones via simple analogies such as whirlpools, and more complex ones involving mirroring.

In my own analysis of Analytic Idealism, I charitably acknowledged the implied substantive (objective) aspect of experience so as to avoid conceptual problems with Analytic Idealism, but Bernardo might not actually consider that to be charitable: he might consider it to violate a fundamental axiom of his ontology.

Anyhow, that's the fundamental, inevitable dualism for me: that between subjective experience - what it "is" to be conscious from the inside - and the objective, substantive substrate of that (conscious) experience: a type of (mental) energy.

At this point, a question might come up: "You've argued elsewhere that epiphenomenalism is incoherent, but aren't you proposing here a model to which the same arguments apply, in which conscious experience is correlated with a substance?"

The answer is that, no, the same arguments don't apply, because I am proposing the exact opposite of epiphenomenalism: epiphenomenalism posits that the structure of a substance (physical matter) determines (with 100% correlation) conscious experience; I am proposing instead that conscious experience determines the structure (with 100% correlation) of its substantive substrate ("mental energy"). In the former, consciousness "steams off" and cannot interact with the substance which gives rise to it (and thus cannot interact with itself, which is epiphenomenalism's downfall); in the latter, consciousness in a sense "is" the substance of the structure which reflects it (from an external perspective), and thus it can interact with itself causally.

There also exist (at least potentially) those substances which are not (directly) correlated with subjective experiences, the paradigmatic example (from @Merle) in the thread linked to above being that of a nail. Here, then, is a secondary dualism: between those substances (aka "mental energy") discussed above that directly correlate with - and form the substantive substrate of - experience, and those substances that (apparently) do not (physical matter, such as in the form of a nail, etc).

I think it's plausible that no substance in and of "the physical world" is directly correlated with experience, and that it is only via a proxy correlation with "mental energy" (a conscious mind aka soul) that physical matter forms a(n admittedly very tight) relationship with subjective experience. I think that this is plausible because physical matter as we know it doesn't look very much like something that is correlated with experiences: it is hard to see how something made up of tiny little particles could be a perfect correlate of a conscious experience; conscious experience just doesn't seem to be fine-grained in that way.

There, then, are the reasons why I think dualism (at two levels) makes sense whereas monistic idealism doesn't, before even getting to which fits the survival evidence best (and I think dualism does anyway).

Now, to finally answer your question:

In fact, I haven't thought about animism deeply, but I do tend to endorse it, firstly because members of animistic cultures like those of indigenous Australia have experiences with spirits abiding not just in animals and plants, but also in the land itself - the Dreaming explains how they got there - and I find those experiences compelling, and secondly because the dualism (at two levels) that I've defended above provides a perfectly sound basis for this. It even seems possible that the so-called "physical" world is not entirely directly uncorrelated with experience, and that some of what we think of as inert matter in fact natively supports consciousness, such that animistic spirits are more directly "identical" with the physical world, in the sense that supposedly "physical" entities are themselves animate, rather than (merely) "hosting" otherwise disembodied spirits ("mental energy"). This, though, seems difficult to reconcile with the hard sciences, and might require a new metaphysical understanding of physical reality, which perhaps something like Wolfgang Smith's concept of "the corporeal" might help to support.

How all of this relates to, and whether it is of any help in resolving, the disagreement between you and @nbtruthman, I can't say! If you like, I could reread the exchange more carefully and try to identify what needs resolution, and then try to offer that resolution.

Now, to finally answer your question:

In fact, I haven't thought about animism deeply, but I do tend to endorse it, firstly because members of animistic cultures like those of indigenous Australia have experiences with spirits abiding not just in animals and plants, but also in the land itself - the Dreaming explains how they got there - and I find those experiences compelling, and secondly because the dualism (at two levels) that I've defended above provides a perfectly sound basis for this. It even seems possible that the so-called "physical" world is not entirely directly uncorrelated with experience, and that some of what we think of as inert matter in fact natively supports consciousness, such that animistic spirits are more directly "identical" with the physical world, in the sense that supposedly "physical" entities are themselves animate, rather than (merely) "hosting" otherwise disembodied spirits ("mental energy"). This, though, seems difficult to reconcile with the hard sciences, and might require a new metaphysical understanding of physical reality, which perhaps something like Wolfgang Smith's concept of "the corporeal" might help to support.

Thanks for the reply!

So if I understand you there are spirits but they don't control every aspect of causality of the "physical"?  That does seem to be the best interpretation of not just actual claimed spirits but also at least some of the "alien" cases given the deep weaknesses in the nuts & bolts position.

Of course there need not be some sharp division between these entities and the human dead, as there doesn't seem to be a reason why humans couldn't would be unable to choose to be elemental spirits after a particular physical incarnation. Maybe this is why the dead have been seen in UFO and Fairy cases...

I do agree that it seems difficult to reconcile what we normally think of as consciousness as making up the world, one of the reasons I am not an Idealist. Among those the reasons there is also the tricky question of the brain's relation to consciousness, the arguments by Kastrup and WJ Mander about the brain being what thoughts look like isn't all that convincing.

I don't really get what the physical exactly is in your paradigm - is it made of some kind of energy that is an extension of mental energy? I read this as possible supporting a Dual Aspect Monism:

Anyhow, that's the fundamental, inevitable dualism for me: that between subjective experience - what it "is" to be conscious from the inside - and the objective, substantive substrate of that (conscious) experience: a type of (mental) energy.

I say this because it seems you are saying there is one substance but it has an internal feeling?

Regarding:

I think that this is plausible because physical matter as we know it doesn't look very much like something that is correlated with experiences: it is hard to see how something made up of tiny little particles could be a perfect correlate of a conscious experience; conscious experience just doesn't seem to be fine-grained in that way.

I think the particles *could* have their own experiences, as per Penrose's own pondering I quoted above, but I'm not wedded to that since the important thing is all causation is mental causation. As Penrose notes the ultimate selection of a possibility in superposition is a decision of some kind.

But yes my experiences wouldn't be explicable in terms of particles, whether they are conscious or not they can't sum up to my experiences. Bottom Up Panpsychism seems implausible though I rate it a bit better than the nonsensical religion of Materialist/Physicalism.
 
As to the correct metaphysics, I tend to lean toward some kind of ultimate Monism, though I could see reality as having substances that are largely divided save for some overlap that allows for causality in particular circumstances. This could possibly be the best explanation for what a brain is and why it was necessary, but it seems difficult to say exactly what it means to have a specific interaction point in two substances that are otherwise near wholly divorced in nature.

[Laird]

Thanks for the reply!

No worries. Just a caveat up front that I'm not claiming certainty here, neither by proof, revelation, nor anything else; these are just my current best attempts at understanding, and I'm open to revising them.

So if I understand you there are spirits but they don't control every aspect of causality of the "physical"?

Yep.

That does seem to be the best interpretation of not just actual claimed spirits but also at least some of the "alien" cases given the deep weaknesses in the nuts & bolts position.

I'm not well-studied on UFOs, but my impression is that at least some of the cases do involve nuts and bolts phenomena, even if those aren't all the phenomena that those cases involve, and even if other cases don't. Sure, though, at least some alien cases could involve disembodied consciousnesses aka spirits.

Of course there need not be some sharp division between these entities and the human dead, as there doesn't seem to be a reason why humans couldn't would be unable to choose to be elemental spirits after a particular physical incarnation.

It does seem logically possible, albeit that there might be a reason of which we're unaware.

Maybe this is why the dead have been seen in UFO and Fairy cases...

Interesting. I wasn't aware that that had happened.

I do agree that it seems difficult to reconcile what we normally think of as consciousness as making up the world, one of the reasons I am not an Idealist. Among those the reasons there is also the tricky question of the brain's relation to consciousness, the arguments by Kastrup and WJ Mander about the brain being what thoughts look like isn't all that convincing.

WJ Mander is new to me, and I'm not aware of what he's written/said on this, but yep, I agree: looking out at the world, including the soggy lumps of spaghetti-like matter we call brains, the claim "That's all conscious(ness)!" or "All of that is a thought!" or "You're inside The Mind looking at its ideas!" - or however it might be expressed - seems pretty implausible.

I don't really get what the physical exactly is in your paradigm - is it made of some kind of energy that is an extension of mental energy?

Riffing off "mental energy", "the physical" could simply be referred to as "physical energy": whereas "mental" energy is by definition (the objective aspect of) conscious(ness), "physical" energy is by definition not (conscious(ness)). The question as to whether it's an extension of mental energy - say, mental energy with its subjectivity and inner experience stripped from it - or of separate or novel origin is not one that I've attempted to answer so far.

I read this as possible supporting a Dual Aspect Monism:

Anyhow, that's the fundamental, inevitable dualism for me: that between subjective experience - what it "is" to be conscious from the inside - and the objective, substantive substrate of that (conscious) experience: a type of (mental) energy.

I say this because it seems you are saying there is one substance but it has an internal feeling?

I'm saying that with regard to "mental" energy (the outer, objective aspect of the inner, subjective aspect of conscious experience), yes, but I'm also saying that "physical" energy exists too - that which we commonly just call "matter".

So, I'm not in the end saying there's only one substance, although, as indicated above, I'm open to the possibility of the one deriving from the other.

I think the particles *could* have their own experiences, as per Penrose's own pondering I quoted above, but I'm not wedded to that since the important thing is all causation is mental causation. As Penrose notes the ultimate selection of a possibility in superposition is a decision of some kind.

But yes my experiences wouldn't be explicable in terms of particles, whether they are conscious or not they can't sum up to my experiences. Bottom Up Panpsychism seems implausible though I rate it a bit better than the nonsensical religion of Materialist/Physicalism.

Yep, I agree (except for not being sure about all causation being mental causation), although I'm talking more about correlation than summing up: if, say, my experience was one of pleasure while listening to a beautiful piece of music and thinking about how to design an algorithm for a program I'm writing, the perfect correlate (or external appearance) of that full experience would need to include the billions (trillions? quadrillions? I don't know the exact magnitude) of subatomic particles in my brain, which just seems silly. Even an experience as complex as that one just doesn't seem to be divisible to that extent, and so a vast quantity of subatomic particles doesn't seem to be a good candidate for the perfect correlate of (my) inner, subjective experience.

As to the correct metaphysics, I tend to lean toward some kind of ultimate Monism, though I could see reality as having substances that are largely divided save for some overlap that allows for causality in particular circumstances. This could possibly be the best explanation for what a brain is and why it was necessary, but it seems difficult to say exactly what it means to have a specific interaction point in two substances that are otherwise near wholly divorced in nature.

I simply don't see an interaction problem anymore, at least not given my framing of a dualism between "mental" and "physical" energies. There are interactions between different physical energies in the forms of different types of subatomic particles: why not, then, between different energies at the higher levels of mental and physical? As for a "specific interaction point": I don't see the need for one; my model is one of "solvency", in which mental and physical energies are, so to speak, "in solution" with one another, such that the interaction occurs broadly rather than at a single specific point.

..................................................................

I simply don't see an interaction problem anymore, at least not given my framing of a dualism between "mental" and "physical" energies. There are interactions between different physical energies in the forms of different types of subatomic particles: why not, then, between different energies at the higher levels of mental and physical? As for a "specific interaction point": I don't see the need for one; my model is one of "solvency", in which mental and physical energies are, so to speak, "in solution" with one another, such that the interaction occurs broadly rather than at a single specific point.

I try to understand this. Let's use the example of an actual event that does sometimes happen - an NDE OOBE. How to interpret this? The human is apparently a complex combination of an immaterial subjective conscious entity or spirit which is the inner aspect of this spirit's "mental energy", the objective aspect of "Mental Energy" ("Mental Energy" apparently shares aspects of both the objective and the mental/subjective), and the physical body and brain. The spirit therefore can (as sometimes experienced and observed during NDE OOBE) pass entirely freely through material walls. In doing this without any interference it of course must leave the physical body behind.

These observations seem clearly to imply dualism of some kind.

Unfortunately, these observations also seem to imply that this concept doesn't solve the problem of interaction - there is still a basically mysterious interaction between two fundamentally different things, the objective aspect of "Mental Energy", and the immaterial inner spiritual subjective mental aspect or quality of it (which is the seat of subjective experience). And there is a direct causal relationship going both ways.

But two fundamentally different things presumably can't interact, any more than the quale of the color red of an object can interact with the weight of the object. The two things are different fundamental aspects or qualities of the same object, and these two things can't possibly directly interact, since red doesn't have a weight and vice versa.

Sci has suggested that causality is probably mental in its essence, but the suggested existence of "Mental Energy" and our everyday experience of embodiment seem to predict that causation can also be physical-to-mental.
 
My own interpretation of these problems is to accept that at the core this is a fundamentally impenetrable mystery inevitably resulting from our limited human nature. That it is most likely that there is no way sentient beings of our human level can possibly understand the innermost nature of what goes on in these interactions. Or even more fundamentally, with "causation" itself as an even more basic feature of our designed reality. We have to just accept that this mysteriousness of how two fundamentally different things can still interact is simply a fact of our reality, analogous to the fundamentally unknowable mystery of what really goes on when two solid objects come in contact. Collective atomic electric field interactions enter into the observed impenetrability, but that is just the outermost layer of a many-layered whole. The core of this causal onion is a fundamental mystery built into our reality. Another example would be the unknowable innermost nature of the fundamental relationship of the gravity force between two objects to the masses of the two objects and the square of the separation distance between them.

I think it is a shame that Mysterianism is apparently unpopular in philosophy.