Widespread Reports Of Near-Death And Out-Of-Body Experiences

Regardless of whether or not these things [near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences] veridically occur, people around the world have been reporting them throughout recorded history and regarding them as being in a separate category to everyday occurrences. This pattern of consistent ascription is an important indicator of the cross-cultural stability of such experiences….

People often also change their beliefs following their own NDE [near-death experience]. Notably, that includes atheists who neither believed in an afterlife nor expected to have an NDE….

In whatever culture it occurs, the OBE [out-of-body experience] is by definition always and unambiguously considered a dualistic state in which consciousness is separated from the body….

Not only are explicit descriptions of OBEs found in Eastern and Western narratives throughout history, but mind-body dualism, often exemplified by descriptions of OBEs, is a common element of nearly every branch of Egyptian, Ancient Near Eastern, Zoroastrian, Graeco-Roman, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and numerous other theologies (see, for example, Badham 1997, Bremmer 1983, Couliano 1991, Metzinger 2005, Pilch 2011, Zaleski 1987). Dean Shiels (1978: 699) found that of the 67 small-scale indigenous societies he reviewed, 95 percent believed in OBEs, and they were consistently described in remarkably similar ways. He concluded that the most likely explanation for this wide cross-cultural occurrence of OBE belief was that it "results from a common experience of this happening" (Shiels 1978: 699). McClenon's fieldwork (1994, 2002: 106-31) provides a mass of cross-cultural evidence that demonstrates that NDEs and OBEs often lead directly to beliefs in an afterlife and in mind-body dualism.

From a neuroscientific perspective, Thomas Metzinger (2005: 57) also theorizes that dualistic beliefs cross-culturally originate in OBEs. He stresses that OBEs "can be undergone by every human being and seem to possess a culturally invariant cluster of functional and phenomenal core properties." They "almost invariably lead the experiencing subject to conclude that conscious experience can, as a matter of fact, take place independently of the brain and the body." Metzinger (2005: 78 n. 8) cites other studies that support his hypothesis, including one (Osis 1979) in which 73% of survey respondents claimed that their beliefs had changed as a result of their OBEs, and another (Gabbard and Twemlow 1984) in which 66% claimed that their OBEs caused them to adopt a belief in life after death.

(Gregory Shushan, The Next World [United States: White Crow Books, 2022], approximate Kindle location 3474)

Why Richard Dawkins Thinks AI May Replace Us

https://mindmatters.ai/2020/05/why-richard-dawkins-thinks-ai-may-replace-us/

Dembski on Eben Alexander's "heavenly" NDE

I'm going to discuss Dembski's analysis of Eben Alexander's reported NDE:

https://billdembski.com/theology-and-religion/faces-of-miracles-chapter-4/

This is one of the most interesting cases for all the reasons detailed in Dembski's chapter. I'll begin by laying my cards on the table, although I'm not saying anything I haven't said before:

1. I think some people encounter God, heaven, or hell during NDEs. It's the real thing. 

2. I use the Bible as a benchmark to interpret and assess NDEs. 

3. Another consideration is what they come back as. Does an unbeliever prior to the NDE come back a Christian or a New Ager? That affects whether I think this is from God.

4. I think it's undoubtedly the case that at least some children have heavenly NDEs. That's not based on any particular report, but the fact that children have immortal souls. Their minds don't pass into temporarily oblivion during brain death.

5. That said, I put no stock in reported NDEs about kids. If it was my own kid, then depending on the details, I might find his report convincing–because I'm getting it in his own words. And he's telling me what he remembers right after the event. But when it comes to books by parents, I'm highly skeptical. 

6. Some NDEs reportedly penetrate much deeper into the beyond than others. In many cases it's the tunnel of light, meeting a luminous being, and not much more. In other cases the patient claims to have seen far more. 

7. Some Christians chalk it up to the demonic. That's worthy exploring, but I'm going to pursue a different approach.

8. From what I've read, there seems to be a false dichotomy in the explanatory options. According to physicalism, NDEs are hallucinations. Figments of a delirious brain. 

It is, of course, true, that people hallucinate under certain circumstances, but that typically involves an intact, functioning brain, not a brain with no higher cortical functions or no neurological activity at all.

Veridical NDEs pose another problem for a physicalist explanation. According to physicalism, the only sources of knowledge are instinct or sensory perception. But some NDEs report seeing or overhearing things in the ER, or other rooms of the hospital, or miles away at home. But that requires ESP, which physicalism disavows. Another cliche line of evidence is the patient discovering a relative in the afterlife they didn't know existed. 

9. As a result, Christian apologists argue that these experiences can't be subjective or merely psychological. They can't originate in the brain. So they must reflect objective encounters. 

And I think that's true in however many cases. But it overlooks a third explanation. Either memory and imagination are located in the brain or else they are located in the soul. If we have an immortal, immaterial mind, then in some cases the NDE could still be "imaginary". 

That would explain the cartoonish or unorthodox "heaven" that some patients report. When higher cortical functions shut down or when there's a complete cessation of neurological activity, the mind may remain active, and what they perceive is like a dream. 

Many unbelievers have a preconception of heaven. They don't believe in heaven, but they think that's what heaven is supposed to be like if only it was real. That's "heaven" in their imagination. In this case, the "heavenly" NDE doesn't originate in the brain but the mind. Their mind already has stock imagery and characters about heaven. A generic, pop cultural notion of heaven. 

Boy with no brain

https://www.christian.org.uk/news/boy-with-no-brain-continues-to-defy-expectations/

What's the basis for déjà vu?

Like many people I occasionally experience déjà vu. It's very disconcerting, like you momentarily become lucid enough to realize that you're living in a temporal loop. 

There are "scientific" proposals, which attribute it to a kind of brain misfiring. Perhaps that's correct, but to my knowledge it's just speculation, and speculation based on physicalism. There's no hard science to back up that explanation. 

I have my own conjecture, which may or may not be correct. Perhaps déjà vu is like a momentary out-of-body experience where the mind and the brain become unaligned for a few instants. 

There's also the way we normally process time, but there are situations where that can change radically. Take mountain-climbers who fall but survive. During the interval between falling and landing, the mind processes time at a different rate and they see a rerun of their lives. 

That's one of the mysteries of knowing what time is really like. We're normally so immersed in the temporal process and conditioned by the temporal process that we lack the detachment to analyze it objectively. But there are situations where the way the mind, filtered through the brain, normally processes time, breaks down. In that altered state of consciousness, the perception of time's linearity or uniformity is disrupted. That's disorienting. It's possible that if we continued in that state we'd adjust, sort in out, and experience the psychological passage of time from a different perspective. 

Moreland–is there life after death?

In this post I'll use "dualism" as shorthand for substance dualism. I subscribe to Cartesian interactionist dualism. I don't subscribe to Thomistic dualism (hylomorphism). 

A. This is a fairly useful exchange as far as it goes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmfsZ_-Z_OY

But it tries to cover far too much ground in far too little time. Also, Moreland and the interviewer are talking at cross-purposes for a while, which squanders precious time. 

B. Moreland probably has far more to say about religious pluralism, but due to time constraints, deflected that issue.

C. Up to a point, dualism and physicalism are empirically equivalent explanations. Both are consistent with the data that the interviewer cited, viz. memory loss, inability to form new memories, and loss of cognitive function.

According to dualism, the brain is an interface between the mind and the physical world. It mediates action or information in both directions. If damaged, the brain blocks input or output at both ends. 

If the brain is damaged, that may block new sensory input. That prevents the mind from receiving new information from and about the sensible world.

If, conversely, the brain is damaged, that may block the ability of the mind to communicate with the outside world. Memories are stored in the mind, not the brain. If the brain is damaged, that impedes retrieval. The memories can't get through a washed out bridge. So long as the mind is embodied, that imposes limits on mental activity. 

All things being equal, the scales tip slightly in favor of physicalism as the simpler explanation. All things considered, additional evidence weighs heavily on the dualist side of the scales. 

D. Moreland greatly understates the evidence for the afterlife. I'll begin by proposing a more complex taxonomy:

1. Indirect philosophical evidence for the afterlife

2. Indirect empirical evidence for the afterlife

3. Direct theological evidence for the afterlife

4. Direct empirical evidence for the afterlife

Let's run back through these:

(1)-(2) constitute evidence for dualism. If there's evidence that the mind is ontologically independent of the brain, then that's indirect evidence for the afterlife. That's what makes disembodied consciousness possible. 

1.  Indirect philosophical evidence for the afterlife

i) The hard problem of consciousness. 

Philosophical arguments that the characteristics of consciousness are categorically different from physical structures and events. 

ii) Roderick Chisholm's argument:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/09/body-and-soul.html

2. Indirect empirical evidence for the afterlife

i) Veridical near-death experiences and veridical out-of-body experiences.  

ii) ESP, psychokinesis. If all mental activity takes place inside the brain, then the mind can't know about the physical world or act on the physical world apart from sensory input or the body interacting with its environment. If, conversely, there's empirical evidence that mental activity is not confined to the brain, then that's evidence for the metaphysical possibility of disembodied postmortem survival. 

3. Direct theological evidence for the afterlife

i) The biblical witness to the intermediate state. If there's good evidence that the Bible is a trustworthy source of information, then that's indirect evidence for whatever it teaches. 

ii) The resurrection of Christ

That's evidence, not for the immortality of the soul, but a reembodied state. 

That's what "Christian physicalists" pin their hopes on. However, the immortality of the soul is a bridge to the resurrection of the body. A philosophical objection to "Christian physicalism" is that if consciousness ceases at death, then what God resurrects isn't the same person who died but a copy of the person who died. And that raises questions of personal identity. If your existence is discontinuous, if there's a break or gap in your existence, then what does God restore? Is a copy of you you? 

4. Direct empirical evidence for the afterlife 

i) A subset of near-death experiences report meeting a decedent who wasn't known to be dead at the time. In a variation, the decedent imparts information that could not naturally be known. If the report is true, that's direct empirical evidence for postmortem survival. 

ii) Veridical postmortem apparitions, viz. poltergeists, grief apparitions, crisis apparitions, Christophanies. 

Nature, nurture, body and soul

According to simple dualism, our immaterial souls are the bearers of our mental states and we are these souls. We have bodies, but the bodies are not parts of us. We are wholly immaterial.

http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2019/09/simple-dualism-and-animals.html

I think the relationship between body and soul is analogous to the nature/nurture dynamic. Our nature, both in terms of our generic human nature as well as our individual character traits, constitute our core identity. And that's like the soul. We can survive without the body but we can't survive without the soul. The soul is a synonym for our minds, stocked with memories. 

But although the soul is the bearer or repository of memory, it's not the source of memory. The source of memory is typically embodied experience.

Nurture modifies nature. Although nature isn't a blank slate, there are different ways we might turn out, depending on differing experiences. Although experiences are fed into the soul, they don't originate in the soul. 

Moreover, we are, by design, engineered to function as embodied agents. That's the native medium of the soul.

To take another comparison: memories are a key feature of personal identity, yet that's a matter of degree. Up to a point we can add or lose memories without ceasing to be the same individual. But a memory wipe would reset the kind of person you are. 

By the same token, we can lose our bodies but still exist. Yet the content of the soul is in part the end-result of embodied experience. Of memories and formative influences. 

To take one more illustration: suppose you're a brain in a vat with minimal external stimulus. Say you can perceive the outside world, but you can't interact with the outside world. It goes one way. You're only on the receiving end. That's frustrating–even maddening. More realistically, it's like a severely disabled person whose mind and senses are intact, but they are imprisoned in a dysfunctional body. They can't communicate with others or act on their environment. 

Body and soul

The hard problem of consciousness is the best-known philosophical argument for substance dualism, but here's another argument by the eminent American philosopher Roderick Chisholm:

In metaphysics, he held the view that ordinary objects (tables, chairs, etc.) are ‘logical fictions’, and that what exists “in the strict and philosophical sense” are parcels of matter. Parcels of matter cannot lose parts and continue to exist as the same things, according to Chisholm. But what we think of as ordinary objects are gaining and losing parts all the time, he noted. Some molecules that once composed the table in front of me no longer do so. They have been chipped off, and the table worn away with time. The same holds for human bodies. They gain and lose parts all the time, and thus for Chisholm, human bodies don’t persist through time “in the strict and philosophical sense.” But persons – whatever they are – do persist through changes in the matter that composes a body. Therefore, he concluded, persons are not identical with their bodies, nor with any part of the body that can undergo change.  

https://philosophynow.org/issues/75/On_Roderick_Chisholm

The demon-puppet objection

https://trinities.org/blog/some-additional-thoughts-about-my-demon-puppet-objection/

i) It's hard to make sense of Dale's analogy. Unless you're a physicalist, a body without a soul is a corpse. If a demon takes possession of a fresh corpse, then it's merely piloting a human body. The combination isn't a human being. But from the standpoint of a Cartesian dualist, a body without a soul isn't a human being anyway, whether or not the body happens to be co-opted by a demon. So the demon part of the analogy is superfluous. 

ii) At best the analogy would only apply to Apollinarian Christology. On that view, one could indeed say the Son is merely piloting a human body. The combination isn't a human nature. But so what? W. L. Craig excepted, most Christians reject Apollinarian Christology. 

iii) Of course, the Incarnation isn't supposed to be reducible to a human nature. That's a necessary but insufficient condition. The combination isn't supposed to be just a human nature, but a union of two natures. 

iv) So Dale then has to stipulate that the demon deactivates the soul. Okay, it's his thought-experiment, so he can tweak it however he pleases. If the soul is deactivated, then the demon is merely piloting a body. The combination isn't functionally human. But a body with a deactivated soul wouldn't be a human being anyway. Demonic possession doesn't add anything in that respect. 

v) More to the point, the Incarnation doesn't deactivate the soul. In the Incarnation, the soul is fully functional. A union of the Son with an intact soul and body. 

So his thought-experiment is hopelessly confused. Rather than illustrating the Incarnation, his thought-experiment illustrates Dale's intellectual impediments as a philosopher. He's just not up to the challenge. 

Still Not Living in a Computer Simulation

https://www.proginosko.com/2019/05/still-not-living-in-a-computer-simulation/#more-3785

Iron-man dualism

https://www.proginosko.com/2019/03/iron-man-dualism/#more-3656

The world of the soul

The relationship between body and soul is of great personal and practical importance in Christian theology. I've discussed this before, but now I'd like to approach it from a different angle. 

In part, that's related to the perennial nature/nurture debate. Humans have some hardwired psychological traits. Likewise, there are hardwired masculine and feminine traits. Finally, even as young children, individual humans have distinctive character traits. That' the nature side.

On the nurture side, social conditioning has great impact on our psychological formation. And while that's acquired, it becomes deeply engrained. Second nature. As embodied agents, our physical experience creates formative memories that we retain after we leave the body behind. 

There is, though, something about the relationship between psychology and physical experience that doesn't seem to be reducible to a physical explanation. Take the effect of a beautiful woman on a male viewer. Or consider the mood-altering power of music.

If you think about it, that's rather mysterious, because it's so indirect. It's not like drinking alcohol or popping psychedelic drugs, where you infuse your brain with foreign chemicals which alter brain chemistry. So how does merely hearing or seeing something have a similar effect? 

When a boy hits adolescence, he views women differently–especially pretty girls. Is that just due to hormones? Perhaps. When I die and leave my body behind, will images of women lose their appeal for me? 

What about music? As a young boy I enjoyed boy choirs. When I hit adolescence, I discovered a newfound appreciation for opera divas. Although androgens had a role, does this mean that when I die, I will cease to find the voice of opera divas like Caballé, Sutherland, Crespin, Milanov, Ponselle, Verrett, and Leontyne Price alluring?  Even if that has a physical point of origin, does the experience change the soul? 

But suppose this is backwards. Are hormones and brain chemistry productive or receptive? Is it like opening a window?

To take a comparison, different species have different sensory aptitudes. Some species can sense things other species can't detect. Yet their senses don't create the stimuli. 

Does the maturing brain generate these feelings? Or does it, like sensory enhancement, create new openings that enable the soul to become self-aware of mental states native to the soul, but impeded by physical barriers?

Body, soul, and Incarnation

In some circles it's customary to say that at the Incarnation, God enters time and space. Other Christians say that happened at creation. That's okay for popular discourse, but theologically imprecise. 

If God exists outside of time and space, then there's no transfer of divine attributes to the human nature or human attributes to the divine nature. Rather, it's a relation between the transcendent nature of the Son and the immanent human nature. The two sides of the relation remain distinct. 

To take a comparison, if you're a Cartesian dualist, if you think a human being is an embodied agent consisting of an immaterial soul coupled with a physical body, then ordinarily, you can't directly interact with someone else's mind–unless you're telepathic. Rather, you interact with another person through the intervening medium of their body via the five senses. 

But even though that's indirect, embodied experience, mediated physical interaction, results in a rich, multilayered personal relationship with another individual. Indeed, there are dimensions to that which are missing if we were discarnate spirits with telepathic access to each other's minds. An eternalist model of the Incarnation isn't second best, but analogous to the closest human relationships (e.g. husband/wife, parent/child, siblings). 

Case studies in terminal lucidity

Provides some empirical evidence for dualism:

https://notendur.hi.is/erlendur/english/Apparitions/lucidity%20paper%202012.pdf

Dualism and model airplanes

If dualism is true, our relation to our bodies is analogous to the relation of the operator of a remotely controlled device (such as a radio-controlled model airplane) to that device. Now consider Alfred, who is operating a model airplane by remote control. Suppose that something–an unwary bird or a large hailstone–strikes a heavy blow to the model in midair. If the blow does significant damage to the model, we can expect that both the performance of the model and Alfred's ability to control the model will be impaired. But the blow will have no effect at all on Alfred…but if Alfred's body were struck by a heavy blow, and particularly if it were a blow to the head, this might have an effect on him, an effect that goes beyond his becoming aware of the blow and its damaging effects on his body and his ability to control his body: Alfred might well become unconscious. 

This is just the sort of effect we should expect if Alfred were a certain human organism, for if the processes of consciousness are certain physical processes within this organism, a damaging blow might well cause those processes to cease, at least temporarily. But what effect should dualism lead us to expect from a blow to the body? I submit that if we are non-physical things, and if the processes of consciousness are non-physical processes that do not occur within the body, the most natural thing to expect is that (at the worst) we should lose control of our bodies while continuing to be conscious. The blow to the base of Alfred's skull that in fact produces unconsciousness should, according to dualism, produce the following effects on Alfred: he experiences a sharp pain at the base of his skull; he then notes that his body is falling to the floor and that it no longer responds to his will; his visual sensations and the pain at the base of his skull and all other sensations he has been experiencing fade away; and he is left, as it were, floating in darkness isolated, but fully conscious and able to contemplate his isolated situation and to speculate about its probable causes and its duration. But this is not what happens when one receives a blow at the base of the skull. One never finds oneself conscious but isolated from one's body. 

Dualism, therefore, seems on the face of it, to make wrong predictions about what the human person will experience in certain situations. Here is another wrong prediction that dualism seems to make: if dualism were correct, we should expect that the ingestion large quantitates of alcohol would result in a partial or complete loss of motor control but leave the mind clear. P. van Inwagen, Metaphysics (Westview Press, 4th ed., 2015), 260-61.

i) I wouldn't say that if Cartesian dualism is true, we are non-physical things, simpliciter. Compare it to the nature/nurture debate. I'd be the same individual if I grew up in a different town. However, I'd turn out differently. If I grew up in rural Montana rather than Chicago; on a military base in Germany rather than St. Augustine, Florida; if I was an orphan; if my mother died when I was young; if my father died when I was young; if I had brothers, and so on, I'd be the same individual, but those formative experiences would have a tremendous shaping influence on my personality. I'd have different memories, different friends. Some of my beliefs might be significantly different. 

By the same token, embodied experience has an enormous conditioning influence on our personalities. Even though we can exist apart from our bodies, embodied experience profoundly shapes the mind. 

ii) When the brain is put to sleep (so to speak), people sometimes remain conscious but isolated from their bodies. Stock examples include near-death and out-of-body experiences. Then there's the more dramatic example of ghosts. 

iii) The remote control analogy is useful up to a point, but too superficial. Cartesian dualism is more immersive. Embodied experience is more like someone born into virtual reality, where his awareness is systematically filtered through the artificial stimuli. He has no awareness independent of the simulation unless the simulator is destroyed, and his sensory relays are uncoupled from the simulator. 

The metaphysics of resurrection

There are different models of resurrection. I don't mean the resurrection of Christ, in particular. I mean the more radical case of resurrecting someone whose body completely disintegrated. 

One model is replication. God creates a new body that duplicates your old body. The new body is discontinuous with the old body, although it's indistinguishable in the sense of being an exact copy of the original. (Of course, on any model, the resurrection body will be somewhat different because it lacks the same susceptibility to disease and senescence.)

This raises questions regarding personal identity. Is it the same you? 

Since I'm a Cartesian dualist, I think the soul contains the core person rather than his body. That's not to deny the formative influence of embodied experience, which conditions our outlook. But that's imprinted on the soul (as it were). We take that with us when we die. 

If the soul is immortal, then there's no gap between death and resurrection at that level. The person enjoys continuous existence. Resurrection reembodies the soul. The same soul is transferred to a new duplicate body. 

There are, however, Christian physicalists (I use "Christian" advisedly in this context) who don't have that fallback. For them, brain death cancels out consciousness. On that view, there's a complete gap between death and resurrection. An interval during which you cease to exist.

Even if God recreates your body, the question is whether that's the same you. Due to the break in personal identity, is this still the original you, or is this a copy of you–a doppelgänger? Were you restored to life, or is the original you gone forever, while you were replaced by someone else with the same memories? 

That's eerie, like those body-snatcher scenarios. Since I'm not a Christian physicalist, that's not my problem. But to be fair, I'm not sure that's an insuperable problem for Christian physicalism. If God stores your memories (in his own mind) during the hiatus, then uploads your memories to the new brain, is that still you? Perhaps. 

But I think there's actually more to personal identity, even at a psychological level, than memory. A mind is more than its memories. A mind includes innate character traits, liquid IQ, &c. So a physicalist model of the resurrection requires God to recreate the whole package. 

What is man?

I recently read What is Man? (Elm Hill, 2018) by Edgar Andrews. It's a witty, erudite, wide-ranging monograph that defends biblical anthropology in light of modern scientific challenges. The book has a scientific emphasis, but that's integrated into a broader philosophical and theological context. 

PART 1. MAN AND THE COSMOS

Ch.1. Who Do You Think You Are? 13

(What is Man? A summary)

Ch.2. The Cheshire Cat Cosmos 33

(Can a universe create itself from nothing?)

Ch.3. Small Flat Bugs 51

(Where is Man?)

Ch.4. The Cosmic Cookbook 75

(A fine-tuned universe)

Ch.5. Deutsch’s Dauntless Dinosaurs 103

(Exploring the mega-multiverse)

PART 2. MAN AND THE BIOSPHERE

Ch.6. Death And Taxes 125

(Human uniqueness)

Ch.7. The Devil In The Details 145

(Digging deeper into genes and genomes)

Ch.8. Dem Dry Bones 169

(What fossils really tell us about the rise of Man)

Ch. 9. Aristotle And The Snowball 193

(On human consciousness)

PART 3. MAN AND THE BIBLE

Ch.10. Worldviews At War 217

(On the nature of reality)

Ch.11. Adam And The Apple 239

(The historicity and fall of Adam and Eve)

Ch.12. The Image Of God 263

(Why Man is unique)

Ch.13. The Second Adam 287

(Jesus Christ, the perfect man)

Ch.14. The Resurrection: Fact Or Fiction? 307

(The claim, the evidence, and the implications)

Gays and gender

I've discussed this issue on other occasions. For instance:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/06/gendered-souls.html

But I'd like to make a more specific point:

This goes to the issue of what makes homosexuality wrong. The basic argument is that men and women are psychologically as well as physically different in ways that make them complementary. 

Two apples comprise a couple of apples. They are interchangeable. By contrast, two shoes comprise a couple of shoes without comprising a pair of shoes. A pair of shoes is more than a twosome. It's a specific kind of twosome. A matching pair, where a left shoe and a right shoe correspond to distinctive differences and distinctive needs. 

If souls are essentially genderless, then there doesn't seem to be anything intrinsically wrong with homosexual attachment. But isn't that a pretty superficial analysis? 

A map of the soul

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/06/a-map-of-the-soul

Coloring book

In substance dualism, I'd say the relation between soul and body is analogous to the relation between nature and nurture. The soul is the foundation of human personality. The source of character traits. Where memories are stored. And so on. 

However, embodied experience has a tremendous conditioning impact on personality. Formative influences during maturation. Mood-altering hormones. Interaction with other humans. The sensible world as a frame of reference.

I don't think a soul is a blank slate. But embodied experience affects how we turn out. Take hypothetical scenarios about the kind of person I'd be if my mother died when I was young, if I was born in a different century, if I was born in a different country or different part of the country. Although I'd have the same core personality, I'd turn out differently if my formative influences were different.  

To take a simplistic illustration, the soul is like a coloring book with line drawings. Innate patterns. The body is like palette which colors the line drawings. 

That segues into the question of why the resurrection is necessary. An idealist would say that since a virtual world is indistinguishable from a physical world, what's the advantage of a physical world? 

i) To begin with, if the physical world is illusory, why does God create a collective psychological experience that mimics a physical world, including the natural limitations of physicality? For instance, we can do things in dreams that we can't do in real life. But if idealism is true, why isn't experience emancipated from what's physically possible–like a dream? 

If everything is mental, and God is starting from scratch, why the apparent physicality of the template? Why not something more surreal?

ii) Many saints die before the age when embodied experience informs the soul. The resurrection gives them a chance to catch up.