Hi @swamidass,
The more I learn about this, and I hate to admit this @dga471, the more hylemorphism seems to have some real legitimacy.
I’ll be brief here, as I’m a little busy right now. There seems to be a kind of confusion as to what hylemorphism is - especially when applied to human beings.
First, regarding the notion of a form (morphe): a general definition would be that for any natural kind F, an F’s form is simply the truthmaker for the proposition that it’s an F. (In other words, a form is that by virtue of which an F is an F, and not something else.) For chemical substances (such as sodium chloride), form will be roughly equivalent to structure. For living things, form cannot be cashed out purely in terms of structure; it’s the flow of control between the different parts of an organism that makes it alive. Without integration of the parts, there’s no organism. For animals with minds, reference would also need to be made to the organism’s power to orient itself towards its built-in goals, under the guidance of its beliefs (or internal map of the world) and its desires - an ability that is tied to the organism’s brain and central nervous system, which regulate the body. Humans possess the higher-level power to critique their own beliefs and those of others - an ability that requires language - and change the direction of their lives in the light of these critiques.
Now here is where it gets interesting, for this is where we can distinguish between different kinds of dualism.
Cartesian dualism, or substance dualism, holds that the soul and body are two distinct entities, and that the former acts on the latter (and vice versa).
Hylemorphic dualism, or what I’ll call action dualism, holds that a human being is a single entity, capable of performing both bodily and non-bodily actions, and that thoughts (as opposed to sensations and images) are non-bodily acts, as are volitions driven by thoughts.
Property dualism holds that humans have two fundamentally distinct kinds of properties - mental and physical - but is willing to allow (as substance dualists and action dualists do not) that the former supervene upon the latter.
So what happens when you die? A property dualist would say that’s the end of you: there’s no mind without a living body. A substance dualist would say that your soul is the real you, and that it floats away free at death. What about a hylemorphic (action) dualist? The problem here is how actions such as thoughts and volitions can continue in the absence of sensations, images and memories. Also, if the form of a living thing is simply the living-ness of a living body, then how can we speak of a dead (human) organism still having a form, when there is no longer a body?
Aquinas famously held that our souls do indeed continue to think and engage in acts of will, after our death. As far as I can tell, the only way he could have defended such a view was by supposing that the separated soul is infused with knowledge by God - making it totally dependent on God for all of the information it needs to marshal, in order to think, as its body is no longer working. Additionally, I think Aquinas would probably reject the definition of the soul as being simply the living-ness of a living body, in the case of human beings, as he insists that there are some human acts (i.e. intellectual acts) that are non-bodily acts.
The Thomist picture of the afterlife is a bizarre one: the separated soul is in a pitifully dependent state until it is reunited with its body again.
After all that, I’m not sure which dualist picture (if any) you find appealing, or whether you prefer Christian materialism. Anyway, I hope the foregoing information helps.