The physical world we see is just an image.

As science grew alongside religion Descartes proposed in dualism that there was a realm of mind apart from the body, arguing for the former by saying: “I think, therefore I am”. 

Today, dualism seems increasingly an illogical fudge a marriage of convenience not truth, 

for how can two distinct realities co-exist? 

Mind and body realms that don't interact are irrelevant to each other, as what use is a mind that can’t affect the body? 

Or if they do interact, which one is primary? 

A mind emerging from the brain is superfluous and a mind-created brain is unreal. 

 If mind and body are two sides of the same coin, isn’t reality the coin not its sides? 

Faced with such challenges, dualism is currently in retreat before the monism that there is only one real world.

Yet as science and religion fight their ideological war, another monism still logically stands on the sidelines ignored by all, namely virtualism - the conjecture that we are living in a virtual reality, as ideological wars continue science v religion, the argument that we live in a virtual reality grows apace in the scientific world

the scientific arguement goes that - 

  the physical world is the output of a nonphysical quantum processing, i.e. a digital construct. 

If physical realism is that only the physical world exists,

 and dualism is that another reality also exists, 

then quantum realism is that only the other reality exists. 

in this monism, (there is only one basic substance) the ghostly world of quantum physics and it is real and the physical world we see is just an image thrown up on a screen

Dualism denies the  “prime axiom” of physics, that: There is nothing outside the physical universe (Smolin, 2001). 

And instead proposes the antithesis that: Nothing in the physical universe exists objectively, i.e. of or by itself. If the physical world is defined as the physical events we experience, two mutually exclusive hypotheses are formulated about it: 

1. The objective reality conjecture: The physical world is an objective reality that exists in and of itself, and being self-contained, it needs nothing other than itself to exist. 

2. The virtual reality conjecture: The physical world is a virtual reality, generated on demand by processing, without which it would not exist at all.