Today Show Sybill Shepherd and NDEs

[Esquilax]

That stock objection is a straw man. Imagine a single sensible body like a boat. It has both a material of which it is made, say aluminum, and also partakes of a particular form. Anyone can see that the form 'acts' on the material by giving it properties, like buoyancy, and that the material allows the form to manifest. Form and material are inalienable and yet distinct, i.e. dualism.

Um, except that the properties of a boat aren't conferred upon the object once it gains boat form, they are interactions between the materials that make up the boat and the materials that make up the world around it that are pre-existing and predictable, allowing us to put our knowledge of those reactions to use constructing objects for certain purposes like, indeed, boats. Buoyancy is a property that all objects have in varying degrees, and by testing this we can determine which objects would best fit for the construction of a vessel; the components of a boat didn't gain buoyancy the moment they became boat-like, so this idea that the boat "form" acts upon the materials to grant them buoyancy is patently false... Unless you're asserting that all those materials contained within them components of the boat "form" that became whole once they became a boat?