Posted on 07 November 2024, 9:17

What are we, physical body or personal consciousness? Most of us would agree it’s the conscious self. The self does the knowing, the feeling, the deciding, the loving, the hating. It makes us who we are. It goes to the essence of our identity. The body can be viewed as a kind of housing with which it interacts in a wonderfully felicitous way.

Where does our consciousness come from? Materialists say from the brain. Electrochemical events in the brain create consciousness. In contrast, dualists think the brain transmits consciousness but doesn’t generate it. For dualists like me, the conscious self, or soul, is different from the physical brain.

For dualists, the brain can be compared to a TV that tunes into specific electromagnetic waves and converts them into image and sound. The brain doesn’t generate consciousness. Rather, the brain is the self’s instrument.

When the brain goes bad, as in Alzheimer’s or a severe injury to the head, the self is not damaged, though it appears to be. It can’t navigate the physical world in a normal healthy way, in the same way that a computer with a virus can’t work properly. The electromagnetic waves don’t stop or slow down when they bombard the computer. They are in no way damaged. In the same way the self is not damaged by a dying or damaged brain. It’s just trapped inside and dependent on a failing instrument and can’t manifest itself in the normal way.

At death the instrument, the brain, fails absolutely. What happens to the conscious self at death according to dualism? It frees itself from the brain and moves on. This freeing is what constitutes death.

Materialists disagree. But they can’t account for the brain’s ability to create consciousness; they call it “the hard problem,” which to date remains “the insoluble problem.”

Materialists can’t explain how paranormal phenomena arise either. Materialists usually dismiss the paranormal as superstition; they often deny it even exists. For them, the afterlife is another superstition. It never happened or can happen. Dualists, however, have no problem accommodating the afterlife. The “hard problem” disappears. The consciousness that we all have—just is. It doesn’t owe its existence to the brain. Thus it doesn’t have to suffer the same fate as the brain at death. It can cut and run. And it does. It survives death.

Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying?  and Heaven and Hell Unveiled. His latest novel, Guardians of the Afterworld is published by White Crow Books.

Stafford can be found at www.staffordbetty.com.

Dear David,

Regarding the principle of parsimony (Occam’s Razor), I simply don’t see this is as a binding argument.  It is, at best, a non-binding suggestion regarding good practice.  That is all.  Relative complexity is, to a certain degree, in the eye of the beholder.  Sometimes the simpler explanation is too simple and false or partial in consequence.  Sometimes more rounded complexity is needed to fully capture a matter.  By way of example, no one considers James Clerk Maxwell to have bungled the job because he couldn’t reduce his four canonical equations of electromagnetism down to one, or even two.  So it goes.

Nevertheless, accepting your premise, and staying within the confines of discussing idealism vis-à-vis dualism, it would seem evident on its face that a view that posits two ‘substances’ – consciousness and matter – is less parsimonious than one that posits only one – consciousness alone.  Further, if one tentatively accepts the view that ‘non-physical’, ‘discarnate’ domains are of consciousness and in consciousness, as per the quotes I offered in my originating post – quotes that could be multiplied from the literature – but that this physical world is comprised of both matter and consciousness, again, this is less parsimonious than the view that all domains of existence – ‘incarnate’ and ‘discarnate’, ‘physical’ and ‘non-physical’ – are of consciousness and in consciousness.

All this is very much secondary to the principal point I brought up in my previous post, namely that you are presupposing, in your replies, this ‘stuff’ called matter, which forms the first of two ‘substances’ inherent in the dualist position that you (and Stafford) are forwarding.  Without the reality of matter, dualism, along with materialism, is undermined.  One of the strange curiosities of physics is that under classical and relativistic physics, the ‘stuff’ called matter is measured by an ascribed property ‘mass’, which is only measured indirectly according to either inertial behavior or behavior under a gravitational field.  In other words, matter, far from being this concrete ‘stuff’ is an abstraction known only indirectly.  Under quantum physics, matter fares even more poorly, dissolving – like the Cheshire Cat – into waves, fields and probability distributions.  The problem is worse than this, however, for philosophically, all we know of ‘matter’ or of ‘stuff’ – as Kant saw clearly – are perceptions and sensations, apprehensible to our awareness.  We never get, and in principle can never get, at whatever might be ‘behind’ these perceptions and sensations.  Thus matter – that bedrock ‘stuff’ on which both materialism and dualism are mounted – far from being the most concrete, is in fact doubly abstracted in our scientific and philosophic experience.

As for your concern for “all these complicated ‘arisings and appearances’”, which, you suggest, require “numerous auxiliary hypotheses implementing additional complicated features and functions of Idealism” I would simply say that first, your description in that para implicitly assumes your position, namely that there is an independent ‘body and brain’ out there in physicality for consciousness to be separated from – the very point undermined by an analytic study of idealism as per Berkeley, Goode and others (among contemporary writers, one might also mention Bernardo Kastrup, Göran Backlund and Mark Gober) – and, second, that the dream analogy provides a useful point of reference in which all sorts of ‘arisings and appearances’ may, in a completely convincing manner, be fashioned from the dreaming mind, having the appearance of vivid, objective physicality and yet being nothing of the sort.

The description you give regarding NDE OBEs recalls to my mind the more general principle of OBEs as described by seasoned OBE explorers such as Jurgen Ziewe or Mike Marable who speak quite plainly regarding ‘moving’ between ‘layers’ or ‘levels’ of reality by a ‘shift in consciousness’.  As Ziewe comments “the slightest shift in Consciousness can transport us into a completely different world” [‘Vistas of Infinity’, p.165]  Often, as both Ziewe and Marable explain, this shift is achieved through a kind of symbolic enactment.  From Ziewe: “Although we can enter higher dimensions via a shift in Consciousness, we can also literally travel towards them. As seen in my previous report, people simply crossed a bridge to move into the next dimension. In my previous book, ‘Multidimensional Man’, I initially used buildings, and by using the stairs in order to reach the top floor I sometimes found myself in a higher dimension. On other occasions, I would try to break through a ceiling to advance. My conclusion was that by using such powerful ‘feeling visualisation’ we trick Consciousness into relocating us on a higher level.” [‘Vistas of Infinity’, p.134]  As Ziewe further observes, “symbols can be deployed as focus points to shift awareness from one state to the next.” [Ibid.]

Similarly, Marable, who often gets involved in ‘rescue work’ while out of body, describes helping a group to shift to a ‘higher level’: “I was surrounded by what I guess to be about fifteen of them. I informed them that I could get them out of this place if they wanted to come. I told them to follow me, and I looked around for a building with a light source. I have noticed that it can be no more illumination than what a single candle might put out, but any amount of light is helpful. I find it to be the only reliable indicator for places where I can exit. When I arrive at a light source, I look for stairs or, even better, elevators so I can move out of these locations by going upward. Some who travel can do it with their mind.” [‘How To Have A Good Life After You’re Dead’]  [As an aside, there are some great dialogue videos between Ziewe and Marable here: ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y08Bypf3BzA&list=PL5wjegQ74FiMAJrHtEUAfLIsSZd_HI74b]

Again, what is in play is a kind of symbolic enactment – where upward movement or greater illumination are active metaphors for moving into finer grades of existence – that has real effects in altering one’s consciousness and thereby one’s experienced reality.  In similar vein, the passage through the tunnel into a beautiful, light-filled realm characteristic of the classic NDE OBE, although involuntary – in comparison to the deliberate techniques of Ziewe and Marable – nevertheless has the same association of symbolic enactment of upward movement or greater illumination leading the individual to a finer grade of existence.  In the case of Ziewe and Marable, one is shifting from, say, a lower discarnate level to a higher; in the case of an NDE OBE, one is shifting from the ‘physical’ level to a discarnate level, but the symbolic enactment and associated shift in consciousness and associated experience is fundamentally the same.  The obvious conclusion for why this should be is that the ‘physical’ level of reality, while obviously ‘coarser’, ‘denser’, more ‘resistive’ than other levels and in this sense to be distinguished from them, is nevertheless not fundamentally different in kind, but rather part of the same overarching reality. One doesn’t require dualism to explain the shift in consciousness between different discarnate levels, and in similar measure, one doesn’t require it to explain the shift in consciousness between the ‘physical’ and discarnate levels in an NDE OBE.

Dualism has its points of philosophic attraction, but it is not consistent ultimately with our own immediate experience, which is entirely mental, or with the best testimony of discarnate-related literature.  With that said, it can be useful to speak of matter in a kind of conventional way and I certainly have no objection to that.  In that sense, one might employ a kind of dualist language or description for the sake of convenience within a supervening idealism, so long as one is not seduced by such a usage into considering its categories as representing what is ultimately real.

Best,

Paul

Paul, 

You seem to deliberately avoid engaging with my point about the difficulty for Idealism and Monism imposed by the Occam’s Razor principle of parsimony. You say, regarding an NDE OBE:

“But both bodies, the ‘physical’ and the ‘double’, are not other than arisings and appearances in the field of awareness or consciousness of the individual undergoing an NDE.  In other words, an idealist view can fully accommodate for this scenario without any need to evoke dualism.”

Yes, an Idealist philosophy of mind can be greatly elaborated to accomodate generating the actual complicated experiences of the NDEr in two apparently vivid different realities of the experientially separate worlds of the physical and the mental/spiritual. 

But why all these complicated “arisings and appearances”? Yes, presumably Idealism can do so, but only at the cost of it assuming numerous auxiliary hypotheses implementing additional complicated features and functions of Idealism, that would enable the Idealist metaphysic to arrange a perfect (contradictory to Idealism) illusion during the NDE OBE in which the NDEr experiences a total separation from his body and brain and observation of his body and brain from a physical distance in the physical world, leading sometimes by transportation through a “tunnel” of some sort into another experientially much higher spiritual realm where a great light and presence is encountered, deceased loved ones perhaps encountered, etc. , all while experiencing a “realer than real” greatly enhanced and expanded sense of consciousness, all while the physical brain is dysfunctional. An experience perfectly conforming to interactional Dualism.

A general observation: a lesson from all this is that a great body of evidence always trumps theory (and philosophy). 

If this is a complicated illusion created by Idealism being the correct theory of mind, it is an illusion so compelling that it totally convinces the experiencers and profoundly changes their subsequent lives.

And by the way the NDEr generally doesn’t “experience two bodies” (except during the very beginning of the NDE) a “dual” existence as inhabiting both the moribund physical body and a “light body’ - instead he experiences a process of completely separating from the physical brain and body and experiencing himself now as some sort of mobile center of consciousness, and usually a great reluctance to return to it. This experience and its vividness and “realer than real” nature is exactly what would be expected from interactional Dualism. 

Again, why would an Idealist world reality so elaborately arrange such a thing as the NDE OBE experience, so contravening its true nature?

Anyway, such a complicated set of auxiliary hypotheses surely qualifies Idealism in this context to probably be invalidated as rather unlikely per the well-known Occam’s Razor principle of parsimony, which in the history of science has proved to be very useful in predicting the truth among competing theoretical explanations. 

This major problem with Idealism contrasts with the one main problem of interactive Dualism, which is of course the question of how two supposedly existentially different “substances” can still intricately interact in the brain’s neural structure in order to allow embodiment by human beings. My answer is that the “powers that be” have evidently dictated that there be such an interactional mechanism as a fundamental part of the way our world reality works, by simple fiat, a special case exception from the way 99% of the world actually works, accomplished simply in order to acheive their desire to enable human life on the Earth, with all its joys and challenges. 

By the way, the so-called “Hard Problem” demonstrates that there is in true fact a fundamental existential gulf between the physical and the mental, which latter consists of all its aspects such as qualia, subjective awareness, thought, intentionality, emotion, etc. The mental and spiritual are totally immaterial and have no physical properties (i.e. the perception of Red has absolutely no weight, physical energy, velocity, physical dimensions, etc.), directly implying some sort of Dualism theory of mind, and directly implying the falsity of Materialism in theory of mind, since there then would be the problem of how can the physical neuronal structure consisting of billions of material neurons and their incredibly complex interactions generate fundamentally existentially immaterial consciousness. 

As I mentioned in my last post, this general criticism also applies to the claim that Monism may be the correct theory of mind, not interactional Dualism.

Thanks,

David Magnan

Dear David,

I can’t do the work of Berkeley, Goode or other authors in the context of a short reply, but let me at least attempt to suggest a reply that might motivate you to dig deeper.  You are presupposing, quite naturally and understandably, in your reply that there are “mental and physical realms”.  But this is precisely what idealist philosophy challenges.  The usual place to start is with an analysis of perception, through which one comes to ascertain that what had been considered an ‘external world’ is in fact an appearance or arising in one’s field of awareness or consciousness.  The body, too, although both persistent and centered upon one’s locus of conscious being identity, is also not other than such an appearance within the full modality of one’s sensorium: vision, sound, touch, …  It is quite possible to bring this into one’s immediate conception-experience through a kind of informed perceptual inversion not unlike the kind of figure-ground inversion that characterizes certain optical illusions.

As you bring up OBEs as a countervailing example to forward a dualist position, the individual experiencing an OBE, say in the context of an NDE, experiences two bodies: the ‘physical’ body lying on the surgical table, say, and the ‘etheric body’ or ‘double’ which occupies, instead of the ‘physical’ body, the immediacy of his experience.  But both bodies, the ‘physical’ and the ‘double’, are not other than arisings and appearances in the field of awareness or consciousness of the individual undergoing an NDE.  In other words, an idealist view can fully accommodate for this scenario without any need to evoke dualism.

A word about monism, the term you bring in, is perhaps necessary.  It is quite as possible to be a materialist monist – in fact, this is the ‘official view’ of modernity – as it is to be an idealist monist.  I find the term monism to very often lead to misunderstanding as it is typically conceived of as a single ultimate ‘thing’ that would disallow relative distinctions, differentiations or multiplicity.  ‘Panentheism’ or ‘non-dualism’ might serve better, but really, any kind of ‘ism’ is going to tend to freeze one’s understanding into rigid categories that are very often unhelpful.  Contra Aristotle, when one grapples with metaphysical understanding, one discovers that there is what might be termed the law of the ‘included middle’: there is an absolute unity that nevertheless admits of differentiation, just as there is a transcendent reality that is nevertheless fully immanent.

A final word regarding your suggestion “Monism could be interpreted as the highest ultimate existential reality which at a lower level subdivides into a subsidiary lower realm of a different local reality.”  This is precisely what the ‘two truths’ doctrine of ultimate and conventional reality developed in both Buddhist and Hindu schools handles.  See, for instance, in Advaita Vedanta, the pāramārthika and vyāvahārika levels and the doctrine of sublation that relates the two.

I could say more on all these points, but let me leave it there.

Best,

Paul

Hats off to David Magnan’s excellent analysis of the pitfalls of philosophical idealism and monism.

I agree that there are philosophical challenges to Dualism, but I feel that there are even greater challenges to Idealism and Monism. 

Idealism, monism and dualism are philosophical ideas that greatly contrast with each other in how they view the nature of reality.

Idealism is the view that all of reality is essentially spirit or consciousness - in other words physical matter/energy is consciousness and is actually the same single  metaphysical transcendental “substance”.

Monism is the idea that all things in existence are part of a single essential oneness or whole. Monism holds that mental and physical phenomena are different manifestations of an ultimate single reality, which is transcendentally above consciousness itself.

But Dualism is the idea that there is a fundamental difference between the mental and physical realms. Dualism maintains that the mind and body are two distinct principles. This just happens to be the way the world we live in actually works at our level of existence.

When the actual empirical evidence from prominent paranormal phenomena indicative of survival and an afterlife is applied to Idealism and Monism, these two philosophies of mind just don’t fit these data - for instance the phenomenon of NDE OBEs, where much veridical evidence attests to the NDEr actually when in deep trauma literally experiencing himself as separating from his physical body and brain as some sort of mobile center of consciousness, to make various observations in the physical and spiritual realms that can be later checked by investigators such as his observations while hovering above of his body being worked on by the resuscitation team, or travel through some sort of “tunnel” or transporting/transitioning means into a spiritual realm where the NDERr may encounter deceased loved ones sometimes not known to be dead. All these experiences are usually in an enhanced form of consciousness and while the physical brain is dysfunctional.

These sort of real existent phenomena clearly imply the existence at least at our level of reality of two fundamentally separate “substances” - the physical, and the spiritual/mental.

To summarize, paranormal phenomena such as NDE OBEs seem to perfectly fit interactive dualism  as a theory of mind, and do not fit idealism and monism, unless these other theories are complicated and extensively modified by a number of auxiliary hypotheses generated to get them to fit the incompatible data. For instance Monism could be interpreted as the highest ultimate existential reality which at a lower level subdivides into a subsidiary lower realm of a different local reality - the interactional dualism by which the world actually works. This would seem to be the unnecessary multiplication or complication of explanations advised as being unlikely by the Occam’s Razor principle of parsimony. Idealism also could be modified by auxiliary hypotheses to make it to better fit the observed interactional dualistic behavior of the human world, but that also runs into the principle of parsimony.

Dear Stafford,

Dualism, whether substance dualism or property dualism, is at best a ‘halfway house’ vis-à-vis materialism (particularly in its typically implicit ‘eliminative’ formulation).  Further, there are significant philosophic challenges to that position, most notably the ‘binding’ or ‘interaction’ problem.  What is even more curious for one such as yourself who has studied widely in the posthumous literature and respects it, in the main, as a vital source of truth, is that the dominant position one finds in that literature is neither materialism – although there is certainly discussion to be found in terms of finer grades of matter comprising discarnate reality – nor dualism, but idealism.  As I was considering a reply to your post, I was dipping into the book ‘Gateway’, communicated via the discarnate Roger Whitby in part to Paul Beard (author of ‘Survival of Death’, ‘Living On’ and other authoritative classics of the field).  The following Q&A exchange (p.44) is precisely on point here:

Q: You seem to say that really there is nothing but consciousness, layer after layer, and that outer material things, there and here (including our bodies, there and here) are really only concretizations of individual and group consciousness at a particular level?
A: Exactly right.
Q: Discarnate teachers often say the next world seems solid, which seems to support a Berkeleyan view.  Comment please?
A: Yes, consciousness is all-pervading: if you like, we are all part of the consciousness of God.

One could easily expand on such an understanding elsewhere in the literature, as when F.W.H. Myers, in his two posthumous books through Geraldine Cummins, refers to his seven levels of reality as “levels of consciousness”, as the discarnate soul as ascending the “ladder of consciousness” and of the highest reality, his final seventh level, as that in which: “The spirit and its various souls are now fused and pass into the Supreme Mind, the Imagination of God, wherein resides the conception of the Whole, of universe after universe, of all states of existence, of past, present and future, of all that has been and all that shall be. Herein is continuous and complete consciousness, the true reality.”

A strong argument may be made that if one respect the posthumous literature, then acceptance of philosophic idealism should naturally follow.  Of course, one hardly needs to go through this particular inferential path.  One could simply, say, read Bishop Berkeley directly.  His ‘Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous’ is perfectly approachable and broadly irrefutable.  Alternatively, one might look East, to, say, Atmananda Krisna Menon and his philosophical heirs, such as Greg Goode.  Goode’s ‘The Direct Path: A User’s Guide’, does much of the same work as Berkeley’s ‘Three Dialogues’ and complements it well.

As a final note, for myself, I find that the emphasis on the overarching reality of Divine Consciousness needs to be balanced with an equal emphasis on the overarching reality of Divine Being.  In Advaitic terms, the perspective of ‘chit’ (Divine Consciousness) needs to be balanced, complemented and completed with the perspective of ‘sat’ (Divine Being).  Taken together, one might speak of the Divine Consciousness/Being as the ‘Divine Presence’.  Here, let me insert an interesting quote from a book and author I’d never heard of, ‘The Nameless Faith’ by Lawrence Hyde:

“The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. We are at length restored to consciousness by awakening in a real universe, the universe created by the One Mind as opposed to that perversion of it which has been created by our egocentric selves. We then see the visible universe as the expression of the immanental life of God, the Divine, in manifestation. In relating ourselves to it, we live objectively within the sphere of the Presence, just as we live in that Presence subjectively in the depths of our mystical being. And in the properly integrated personality the two processes have become one.” (p.59)

This is a fine description of a practice that may be taken up by us here and now: “We then see the visible universe as the expression of the immanental life of God, the Divine, in manifestation. In relating ourselves to it, we live objectively within the sphere of the Presence, just as we live in that Presence subjectively in the depths of our mystical being.”  Or, as Brother Lawrence wrote long ago, practicing the Presence of God.

The above passage by Hyde regarding the Divine Presence and the ‘immanental life of God’ necessarily recalls to my mind the passage from the discarnate William James in Jane Roberts’ ‘The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher’:

“Nowhere have I encountered the furnishings of a conventional heaven or glimpsed the face of God. On the other hand, certainly I dwell in a psychological heaven by earth’s standards, for everywhere I sense a presence, or atmosphere, or atmospheric presence that is well-intentioned, gentle yet powerful and all-knowing. This seems to be a psychological presence of such stunning parts, however, that I can point to no one place and identify it as being there in contrast to being someplace else. At the risk of understating, this presence seems more like a loving condition that permeates existence and from which all existence springs….
While I mention this [atmospheric] presence as itself, so thoroughly does it pervade everything that attempts to isolate it are useless. All theological and intellectual theories are beside the point in the reality of this phenomenon. I know that this presence or loving condition forms itself into me, and into all other personalities; that it lends itself actively to seek my good in the most particular and individual ways; yet that my good is in no way contrary to the good of anyone else, but beneficial.” (pp.162-3)

The problem with both materialism and dualism is that they both assert the reality of ‘matter’, but, upon analysis, matter is found to be a) definitionally tautological, b) epistemically unknowable, and c) metaphysically unreal.  To unpack that would require another long comment and I’ve said enough.

Best,

Paul

It seems that the Tv analogy can be extrapolated as a universal blanket that surrounds all that is, probably in all dimensions.

Humans, ET’s, animals and even plants experience consciousness.  Chandra Bose (1858-1937) did many experiments proving that even plants have a (lower) consciousness and react to many stimuli such as gravity, light, temperature, sound and touch.  And mind? Steve Backster experimented with living shrimps, who were boiled alive in his absence, to which plants stress-reacted in their moment of demise, as they did also when Backster emited evil thoughts to them like ‘I ‘ll put you on fire’...

R Sheldrake has done many experiments with animals and humans (dogs that know when their owner returns home, ESP, telepathy, the feeling of being   stared at from behind etc), all unexplainable but for a wave theory of ‘extended minds’...

Parapsychology with phenomena such as apparitions,  reincarnation (+2500 cases!), mediumistic communications etc, all point to a dualistic world, where consciousness is primal and life is forever evolving.

How can I be so certain?  I had an OBE. 42 years ago.  It still stands out in my mind. Best thing ever!  It was a PROVOKED OBE, by professor Jose Thomas Zeberio (1912-2007), in Belgium in october 1982.  He treated some 12 people this way.

In about 5 to 10 minutes per person, he pushed our mind out of our body, by rubbing this thumb and forefinger, about 30 cm from our hart.  This lead to some of us suddenly hanging against the high ceiling.  It felt as if our shoulders were pushing against it, whilst looking down in elated surprise (!) on ourself and Zeberio on the floor.  Another was instantly on an island where she got married many years ago.  I interviewed some of the 12 participants immediately after their OBE, and again some 30 years later.  They all stood by their life changing experience…

Alas, isn’t all belief personal (consciousness)?

I fully agree. I just would add that basically, everything is consciousness - even our physical body is strictly speaking transformed-down consciousness (God Spirit) because there is nothing else.

The best most complete and concise statement of my own much predominant philosophy and metaphysics that I have ever seen. Of course I view interactional dualism as the most correct philosophy of mind available, especially when considering the great body of evidence for paranormal phenomena indicative of survival and an afterlife.

I argue for this thesis in my 4 German books.
http://www.reinkarnation.de

I absolutely agree with Stafford. It’s the only logical explanation. It is so obvious to me.

So simple, yet so difficult for the skeptics to grasp.  Thanks, Stafford