I tend to go to yellow alert when I hear phrases like "mere grammatical" or "pedantic" used to describe my participation. Neither is accurate. The reason is ( and I've said this before ), that this is a discussion forum and therefore words are our primary means of relaying ideas. Therefore if we marginalize the importance of words we also marginalize the importance of ideas, in which case we might as well abandon the discussion altogether. The second criticism I run into now and then is that I'm too concerned with the formal rules and details of language. So I pose the question, why should precision be tossed out? Shall we merrily careen down the path of our investigations with a loose steering wheel oblivious to the confusion we leave in our wake? I don't think so. I think we can and should strive to do better.
I didn't mean to imply you were being pedantic or overly concerned with grammar or even failed to use grammar correctly. I understood pretty much everything you said and simply showed what I thought were the "holes in the fishnet" that allowed for our understanding (mine too you know) to leak through an fall into the abyss. This is partially a self-indictment not meant necessarily meant to remove language as a tool, but to help us further find the holes and
refine the tool. So if what I said could be inferred otherwise, then its my fault for reducing a thesis much deserving of its own thread to a single paragraph.
It seems to me that you've framed yourself into a Catch 22, and that the key to your escape lies in how you define the word "you". Suppose for a moment that it's not necessary for "you" to stand in the "presence of the former triad". Suppose instead that what is really happening is that the world beyond your body is perceived via the senses whereupon it's turned to signals that trigger actions within our bodies. In this model, perception is the result of the way those signals are routed and processed. There's no third party "you" watching all this from the sidelines. Instead consciousness arises from a steady flow of signals and is experienced analogous to the way the action of a film is perceived to be fluid.
Between each moment of awareness, signals are being routed and processed, some from memory and some from the senses, and at some point those signals culminate in the phenomenon we call consciousness. Like the frames of a video, our consciousness is literally wiped and redrawn with each new iteration giving the illusion of continuity. This may seem rather contentious, yet there is a wealth of scientific information that supports this model, beginning with those that explore the limits of our perception. Another familiar example that illustrates this is how the spokes of a wheel begin to blur at a certain RPM. This is because after a certain RMP our signal processing isn't fast enough to wipe and redraw the changing positions of the spokes.
On this whole I agree with this model, I don't think what I said contradicts this viewpoint. what I am saying is that the model itself represents the model
as something to answer the question while simultaneously its the object of the model making the question. The result looks something like a "strange loop" (Douglas Hofstadter). Again the dead give away of this
trace is in the suspicious inclusion of the phrase I highlighted in bold above. Remembering the model is the formation of an
idea of ourselves formulating the same
to the end of addressing the question of the model's application to the subject making the question, we are given ourselves over to the direction of the model and possibly losing our grip on the site of the questioning itself.
As you can see from the model I outlined above, the onerousness of duality remains debatable. While there is plenty of evidence to support the model that gives rise to duality, there seems to be very little to support the idea that some third party of yourself is constantly watching from the sidelines. That just puts the whole problem into a house of mirrors. However to answer your question of how I had hoped to work this through with Jeff, you'll find that in
this post, in response to Jeff's suggestion, I posted a link to the standards and elements of critical thinking and began the first step of that process. His response so far has been to dodge the issue ( again ) after making more rather contentious claims. For some, this pattern would now be more than sufficient to suggest that we're just patsies and Jeff is simply playing us for amusement. I guess we'll just have to see how it shakes out.
But--I really hate to use this--what if the model itself is dictating the terms of the duality by the very nature of reference and self-reference? With regards to the third party of yourself, you find this third party in others: in Heideggerian terms, its called
The They (or the One). This third-party takes a back seat and forms the background for all of our activities, it is an aspect of our own existence we take for granted, esp. in a society which overvalues individuality significance. This overvaluing comment is not meant as an attack against the idea, but to show that
it is that on the basis of which we redeem ourselves from the background and become individualized as ourselves. This background of equipment, tools, methods and practices in the infrastructure lies at the basis of our
working and coping with reality. Far from being a house of mirrors in the pejorative, we are the very mirrors of the world both mirroring the world to ourselves and mirroring other mirrors of the same--this has its genetic bases to you know, in the striving of the
extended phenotype, or the otherwise long reach of our genetics into the very framework of the world we build.
(1) One typically eats with a utensil
(2) One typically cooks or otherwise burns their food before eating
(3) One typically makes copies of themselves if they are able
(4) One typically uses a doorway to exit a room
(5) One typically calls to others when they need help
(6) One typically seeks shelter from a storm or heavy rain
(7) One typically....etc
....
....
Regarding the "patsies" comment -- I don't care either way as it gives me a change to pull together and arrange my thoughts into a form that will survive my eventual forgetting of the same. I think there's value in being amused as well as being the object of amusement if the purpose is to organize the disparate matters of this subject into something coherent which will be easier digested later.
I think it's fair to say that Fortean phenomena are one class of phenomena while non-Fortean are another, and that one is generally separated from the other by a set of conditions, on one side indicative of the uncommon and mysterious, and on the other the mundane and explained.
The problem is that the class is entire dependent on time and the knowledge state of our world and ourselves--it can only remain as a formal category dividing the world into things we know and do not know. I think you are saying this, and I find myself "weirded out" by the fact that I am echoing it and yet somehow am in a state of mistrust regarding the "class" distinction. These set of conditions are heavily contingent on our state and seem to have no basis in the reality of the event in question. Now of course I say this and fall into the same trap which I warned against earlier.
The above proclamation seems to have a couple of large holes, the first of which is that it requires us to reject dualism without a substantial reason, merely proclaiming it to be insufficient and declaring any counterpoint to be equally meaningless because it's based on language. I don't buy this. I've already revealed the importance of language in revealing ideas. I'm afraid you'll have to provide something more substantial. The alternative seems to be dangerously close to requiring some kind of faith.
I wish I could do better--I think we've hashed out this discussion a great deal in the "Red Ferrari" discussion and I do not wish to revisit it again. Again if you go back to my "holes in the fishnet of language" analogy you will see why I brought this up. It seems to me that "dualism" is something we create in ourselves--a kind of biological tool to work and cope with the world and to perhaps
Fischer-Price our interaction in the same way as to make it intelligible to our heavily binary way of thinking. Perhaps it is too much to ask that a person using the hammer to hammer nails into a building isn't necessarily imparting some kind of metaphysical
hammeristic quality into the artifacts built. The same may go for our "cartesian engine" (think of it as a virtual machine running inside a real hardware based machine--that it
sees everything in a certain way does not make the hardware a virtual environment too...) which processes the world-body-brain interactions into something that
resembles a space of intelligibility for the purposes of survival expedience, but in the words of George Soros, nevertheless be a fertile fallacy.
Back to the term “Fertile Fallacy”, it is a type of knowledge that creates first a self-reinforcing cycle, and then subsequently a self-defeating cycle. For example, look at the most recent set of mortgage problems: Lenders noticed that real estate prices tend to only go up. Once you make this assumption, it allows you to start offering increasingly risky loans to home buyers, because even if they default, the home will be worth the same or more. Once you decide this as a lender, your knowledge creates a self reinforcing cycle, more home loans equals higher home prices, but eventually the falacy is reached, the end of the ponzie scheme is attained, and the number of buyers in foreclosure starts snowballing – thereby creating a self defeating cycle. Banks don’t want to or can’t lend money to buyers who are willing to pay the current prices, which only causes the prices to slip further, causing the banks not to be able to lend money, etc. Think about this for a second, when banks were coming to the understanding of the real estate market, they DID NOT understand how they affected that market
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Fertile Fallacies | The Brink of Chaos
If we can learn anything "mystical" or "profound" from the world of quantum mechanics it is this: we are the very participants and actors changing and altering the landscape of the world we are trying to
get a grip on aside from our meddling notwithstanding. This is not to mean anything like "mere consciousness affecting reality" but of an acting
body making changes to its environment and trying to cognitively grasp it's essence at the same time. This is also where (a point to Jeff) the
standard social science model breaks on the rocks of positive and negative feedback loops between actors, participants and the world with its other actors and participants. 
. I like it because I took Fine Arts at university, and there is often a quality imparted to art that reflects the tools from which it has been made. However, somewhat ironically, the failure of the "Cartesian engine" metaphor seems due to its context within some version or another of subjective idealism. It's sort of like your example of a model referencing itself in order to reaffirm its own truth. In contrast, Cartesian dualism appears to be supported by evidence of a world beyond ourselves, not simply a metaphor. Grant it, it may still be true in the end that all such evidence is no more than the product of our mind fooling us into believing there is an objective universe when in fact there's not.