@Dave,

My impression (I'm no expert) is that while there are Advaitists who present an eliminative picture, there are nondualists who do not. One example of the latter is Kashmir Shaivism. To put it in Buddhist language, it is to identify Nirvana with Samsara. In this vein, I would translate "Maya" not as "illusion" but as "delusion". What we perceive is real, but we are deluded into thinking it exists separately from ourselves.

My argument for non-eliminative nondualism: To start with, follow the Augustinian argumment to establishing that fundamental reality is One, Intellect, and Good, which for convenience can be called God. Next, establish Divine Simplicity, and so God is Intellect is Love is Willing etc. As Intellect, all things are thoughts of God, and exist if and only if God is thinking them. I would argue, then, that this is nondualism. God is Thinking, and there is only Thinking (though it can be differently named, e.g., as Creativity, Love, etc.), and all that exists are always and only thoughts of God. That we think of ourselves and things as separate from God is delusion. It is non-eliminative in that thoughts are real, not illusions.

The difficulty with this is that it cannot be understood within the confines of Aristotelian logic. This is because one can only understand thoughts (i.e., forms), while the power that produces thoughts is not a thought. Yet the power that produces thoughts does not exist independently of its thoughts. And so one needs something like Coleridge's "polar logic" to think about this. I have given my way of thinking about this in a draft essayhere, for those interested.

What nondualism solves. As described above, that is, as a non-eliminative nondualism, it solves the traditional metaphysical dilemmas: one/many, permanence/change, and so forth. These are what I call in my essay "tetralemmic

RomanJoe wrote:

But you do affirm the existence of forms, no? I mean with regards to reality in general, not just the human being.
 

Yes, but I'm not sure what it would mean to deny that there are forms. A denial has a form, after all. I am not a nominalist, if that is what you are asking. As an idealist, I hold that there are only ideas (= forms) and that which thinks them (actualizes them) into existence.
 

My red pill moment happened when I was in a seminar on the foundations of cognitive science. At the time I was somewhat of an agnostic as far physical reductionism is concerned. In the seminar, what was called the "homunculus problem" came up -- what I think now would be called the hard problem of consciousness. On the way home from the seminar, I was thinking that what makes the hard problem hard was the question of how micro-events (nerve firings or what have you) become awareness of big events (what I later learned was the unifying objection to reductionism). It then struck me that the only way that micro-events, each of which is separated by space and time from all other micro-events, could be unified as a whole, was if ordinary consciousness transcended space and time. And that was only possible if eternity (that is, the non-spatiotemporal) was real. This I then connected with two other considerations: that if eternity is real, then a lot of quantum weirdness makes more sense (e.g., how there can be superpositions of states, the uncertainty principle, and above all, non-locality), and that mystics have been saying for millennia that space and time are not fundamental. Thus I realized that the proper arena of questions of philosophy of mind was religious philosophy.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

What do you mean by known? Do you mean proven? 

I mean experienced.

That seems a somewhat different issue to the interaction problem.

Yes, but related, since the question of what kinds of causation there are depends on what kinds of things there are.

Immaterial-immaterial causation is questioned by the materialist (who denies the immaterial) and the property dualist (who denied immaterial, or at least mental, causation).

They can deny the claim that mental activity is irreducible to material causation, but not mental activity itself, since denying is a mental activity. There is then the question of whether mental activity is reducible to non-mental causation, and it is there that the materialist is stopped, since he cannot explain how it is reduced.

The substance dualist would presumably say that his account show the existence of immaterial-immaterial causation.

Yes, but his problem is showing that there is also immaterial-material causation, and that cannot be shown, since no material effect existing outside of experience can be shown.

 

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

How does what interact? Descartes had a problem because he implied what is immaterial and non-extended could exert physical force (essentially push-force) on what is extended and material. So, I agree with you in that case, if that is what you are referring to. There is an interaction problem there.

But if you mean all claims to immaterial-material interaction, I don't see the problem. If we don't assume the immaterial has to act as a physical cause, then the how here is just that the immaterial is a cause of a certain kind with certain material effects. I am not sure what more needs to be said.

What more needs to be said, as I see it, is how this gets one passed the "somehow" stage. As the reductive materialist is limited to saying that somehow the brain produces mentality, so the dualist is limited to saying that somehow mind and matter interact. Just positing an immaterial cause with material effects gets one no further.

With idealism, on the other hand, we know of immaterial causes having immaterial effects (e.g., our thinking). If we note that, as we drill down into apparently material things, that what gets moved is just as well described as information (that is, a form, an idea) rather than as as piece of mindless matter, we have an imaginable system of forces and that which forces act upon, all immaterial.