I appreciate your thought-provoking comments. I’ve written a lot on these intriguing subjects, so I’ll try to summarize my views here, and provide some links below if you’d like to read further on how I handle these questions.
I’m a weak rather than a strong dualist, as in a property rather than a substance or Cartesian dualist. That’s to say I’m a naturalist who thinks nature divides itself epistemically if not ontologically. Life and especially people are virtually supernatural in being effectively anti-natural, but that’s no more miraculous than a black hole that swallows up the natural order. The dualism that intrigues me is a platform for existential reflections on our condition, so Buber would certainly be relevant. I’m not familiar with Rohr’s criticisms.
The zombie metaphor is tricky, but I think it’s revelatory, at least for my dark pantheistic construal of naturalism. Yes, technically (or at least initially) the fictional zombie monster is a human corpse, so naturally the wilderness in general couldn’t be identical to that kind of monster. But that’s fine since my point about zombies is metaphorical.
More precisely, though, zombies aren’t just human corpses. They’re magically reanimated corpses. The essence of a zombie, therefore, has nothing to do with our species. The horror of a zombie is that its animation is inexplicable. The corpse lives on ultimately for no reason. That’s precisely the situation scientists are in when they posit laws of nature that turn out to be brute rather than supplied by a divine lawgiver.
Sure, we can explain how a natural effect follows from its cause, and so on back to the Big Bang. But we can’t explain how a natural order can come from nothing, so naturalness as such is zombie-like, meaning it’s ultimately inexplicable and therefore alienating and horrific to social mammals like us who expect the finality of psychological explanations (as in “She acts that way because she chose to,” and that’s the end of it in folk psychology).
Yes, process metaphysics is interesting, but I don’t think it’s decisive. Regardless of whether we talk about objects or events, the key point for me is their equal physicality and therefore their inhumanity. (I wrote a relevant article recently on scientific objectification of nature that will be coming out in a week or so.)
I’ve also written on Buddhism (some links below). In short, I respect Buddhism and the other Eastern religions more than the monotheistic ones, but I’ve got some issues with Buddhism. True, the Buddhist concept of everything’s emptiness in terms of the illusoriness of their essences (the latter are just our conceptual constructions) might be consistent with the zombie metaphor for naturalness.
I aim to build up an aesthetic account of morality from this dark pantheistic ontology, and I wonder whether the objectivity of aesthetic judgments might be squared with the pragmatic orientation of Buddhist therapy for sufferers. Intriguing stuff!
Here are some of my articles that explore these questions:
Dualism:
Zombies and godless physicality:
Pantheism:
Buddhism:
