• TheMadFool
    13.8k
    The idea of having lived past lives features quite prominently in some religions - one of them being Mahayana Buddhism (reincarnation)

    Many well-respected researchers have investigated the possibility of reincarnation and the favorite method of proof is memories of past lives lived as a different person. This methodology makes sense; after all, if reincarnation is true it's necessary that there should be incidences of recalling a past life.

    However, there seems to be a critical flaw in this proof technique.

    A well-known fact about memory is that it's not perfect - heck, we even forget what we did just an hour ago so recalling a past life is going to be even more difficult. That being the case, not recalling a past life is consistent with reincarnation - it's just the imperfect nature of memory.

    That means a theory of reincarnation is consistent with two statements that contradict each other:

    1. There are verifiable memories of past lives

    and

    2. There are no verifiable memories of past lives

    This state of affairs reminds me of the following statement made by the philosopher of science, Karl Popper:

    A theory that explains everything explains nothing — Karl Popper

    I think Popper was talking about his famous falsifiability criterion for judging whether a given theory is scientific/empirical or not. If a given theory T explains everything then, nothing contradicts it and so it's unfalsifiable.

    Take the theory of reincarnation, call it theory T. Let M = 1. There are verifiable memories of past lives and ~M = 2. There are no verifiable memories of past lives.

    3. T -> M = IF the theory of reincarnation is true THEN there are verifiable memories of past lives.

    The theory T is falsifiable if ~M because

    4. ~M -> ~T by contraposition

    However, because memory is imperfect, ~M doesn't entail ~T which means

    5. ~(~M -> ~T)

    If 5 is true then the value of ~M as evidence of the falsehood of reincarnation theories based on verifiable memories of past lives is lost.

    It seems that a theory of reincarnation that's based on the existence of verifiable memories of past lives is unfalsifiable, ergo isn't a scientific theory.

    There is nothing that's outright wrong in the the steps that lead up to the formulation of a theory of reincarnation based on verifiable memories of past lives; after all, memories (of past lives) serve as evidence for reincarnation. Yet, such a theory seems to be unscientific in the sense that it can't be falsified.

    Comments...
  • Pantagruel
    3.2k
    I think Popper was talking about his famous falsifiability criterion for judging whether a given theory is scientific/empirical or not. If a given theory T explains everything then, nothing contradicts it and so it's unfalsifiable.TheMadFool

    Correct.

    In sociological analysis it can be a given that there are "non-logical" theories which nevertheless factor significantly in the actual operations of the human world. So relegating the theory of reincarnation to the realm of non-logical theories doesn't undermine it.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    So relegating the theory of reincarnation to the realm of non-logical theories doesn't undermine it.Pantagruel

    But being unfalsifiable relegates any theory of reincarnation based solely on memories of past lives to pseudoscience. Can we do anything to repair such theories to make them scientific?
  • Pantagruel
    3.2k
    But being unfalsifiable relegates any theory of reincarnation based solely on memories of past lives to pseudoscience. Can we do anything to repair such theories to make them scientific?TheMadFool

    But as I was pointing out, not all theories in the "human" realm are - or must be - scientific. To think that all theories must be scientific in nature is what leads down the slippery slope of reductionism.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    But as I was pointing out, not all theories in the "human" realm are - or must be - scientific. To think that all theories must be scientific in nature is what leads down the slippery slope of reductionism.Pantagruel

    As far as I can tell, the scientific worldview seems to dominate the intellectual landscape and the view that science is about the truth and all else is just a matter of opinion appears to have rubbed off on the general populace - it's reached a point that, unless one wants to come off as an ignoramus, people think twice before questioning science. I take this positive impression people have of science as evidence that it (science) has, more often than not, managed to come up with the goods so to speak and is rarely caught with its foot in its mouth. Science has built a very good reputation as the current best certified dealer in the truth business and this provides ample reason to be highly skeptical when people make claims that are unscientific, especially when they're impossible to disprove/are unfalsifiable. This is why I was looking for ways to fix the theory of reincarnation predicated on verifiable memories of past lives. Making such a theory scientific will push up its credibility rating to 100%, a desirable state of affairs, don't you think?
  • Philosophim
    2.2k
    I think it will be difficult to place reincarnation as something scientific due to our understanding of memory. We know that memories are stored in the brain. We know that damage can remove these memories. We even have drugs like propranolol which we use on people with post traumatic stress disorder to erase and minimize memories.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug-induced_amnesia

    Here's a layperson's breakdown on memory. https://lesley.edu/article/stages-of-memory
    Here's a more advanced study of the history of memory from philosophy to modern day science. Cool read. https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/where-do-memories-form-and-how-do-we-know/

    Since we know that memories are formed within the brain, and since we know (from the second article) how to create and identify a false memory, then we can conclude that memory is something which comes from the physical and chemical interactions of the brain.

    What is reincarnation in this scenario then? Since we know a person's dead brain tissue has not been placed into a new person, we know for a fact that the memories one has cannot be the memories of the former dead brain.

    I am not saying it is impossible to make reincarnation a viable option to look into. But can you define reincarnation in such a way that does not contradict the well confirmed knowledge we already have on hand?
  • Gnomon
    3.5k
    But as I was pointing out, not all theories in the "human" realm are - or must be - scientific. To think that all theories must be scientific in nature is what leads down the slippery slope of reductionism.Pantagruel
    Yes. The typical criteria for belief, for most folks, is not objective or empirical or logical or falsifiable evidence, but whether "it works for me". :smile:
  • Pantagruel
    3.2k
    Making such a theory scientific will push up its credibility rating to 100%, a desirable state of affairs, don't you think?TheMadFool

    It would if the subject matter was within the realm of science. Or perhaps I should say "current science."
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    "current science."Pantagruel

    :up:
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    false memoryPhilosophim

    I made it clear: verifiable memories of past lives.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    @Philosophim
    1. There are verifiable memories of past livesTheMadFool
  • Philosophim
    2.2k
    1. There are verifiable memories of past livesTheMadFool

    Ok, then we can make reincarnation falsifiable.

    If it is true that memories have been found to be located within the brain, then we know that a dead person's memories resided in their brain.

    In theory, if the same physical and chemical properties were repeated within a brain, then the memory of a previous brain would be identical.

    Thus, "Reincarnation" would have to be defined as an instance in which a new brain has the identical physical and chemical properties of an older dead brain. Of course, there's nothing to stop this from happening between two living brains either.

    Further, reincarnation implies that one can remember an event that has never happened to itself directly. So we would have to have two people recollecting the same event, even though one person was never in the location of the other. (This also does not rule out two people having the same memory of something neither have experienced, but I don't want to go there).

    Since it would be more difficult to measure between a dead and a living brain, a starting point would be to see if identical memories, as specified above, could happen in two living people. The simplest place to start would likely be between identical twins.

    First, you might attempt to see if it is possible for a pair of twins to have an identical memory of something they have both experienced. We will need to take and record both of their brain states over a set period of time while they are trying to remember something. A success would be if both could remember the same memory state that the other had never encountered before.

    You could go on from there I think. Perhaps if you could prove that people can have the same memory of something, when one did not have the experience, then we could look at the idea of brains that aren't as similar being able to experience the same thing. Finally, if that was possible, we could probably set up records of a few generational decades in which a person recounted a memory in detail while their brain state was recorded, and someone else happened to do the same after that initial person was dead.

    Does this sound like something viable?
  • Banno
    23.1k
    So relegating the theory of reincarnation to the realm of non-logical theories doesn't undermine it.Pantagruel
    So your claim is that if we permit illogical theories then reincarnation is permissible?

    A contradiction implies anything: p & ~p implies q.

    Hence, if we permit illogical theories, we permit anything.

    That's closer to Popper's meaning in "A theory that explains everything explains nothing".

    Illogical theories ought not be permitted, even outside of science.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    A greater problem with reincarnation is the nature of the self. That is, what is it that is being reincarnated?

    Suppose, @TheMadFool, that you found yourself remembering, as if they were your own, things that did not happen to you, but happened to someone else. Suppose you remember being Chancellor of Germany in 2019.

    Would you then conclude that you are Angela Merkel?

    And if not, then if you had the memories of Julius Caesar, why would you conclude that you were Julius Caesar?

    That is, there seems to be more to being you than just having your memories.

    IF reincarnation is to make sense then one needs to be clear as to what it is that is being reincarnated.
  • Pantagruel
    3.2k
    So your claim is that if we permit illogical theories then reincarnation is permissible?Banno

    Life is not reducible to logic. Most of what transpires in the human realm fits into what Pareto call non-logical action, in case you didn't notice. All I pointed out is that failing to fit with a known scientific theory does not in itself invalidate an hypothesis. If it did, there would be no scientific breakthroughs or paradigm shifts.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    ParetoPantagruel

    :lol:
  • Janus
    15.4k
    There was a study carried out by someone called Stevenson (if memory serves) which purported to show that there are many cases of children remembering details about deceased persons lives and deaths that they purportedly could not possibly have known from being told by anyone. Accepting for the sake of argument that these reports are true and verified, would this prove that the children in question were, in a past life, the people whose lives they can remember?

    I say not, because reincarnation is just one theory to explain this phenomenon. Others are that there are "Akashic Records" or a "collective unconscious" or "universal mind" where every detail of everyone's lives are stored, and that the children were inexplicably able to "tap into" those details.
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    Discussion of reincarnation is a taboo topic on this forum in Western culture.

    If you really want to know what research has found, google Ian Stevenson and read some of the facts. This is as good a place to start as any.

    The point to note is that in the many cases he documented, the children who recalled their last lives knew facts for which there was no external explanation - buried coin boxes, hidden doors, locations of buildings and trees no longer there, and numerous other such details. Of course, it is widely accepted now that Stevenson was a dupe and a fraud who was sucked in by wishful thinking. In this matter, people will believe what they will, I know a few western Buddhist converts who refuse to believe anything Stevenson published.

    A more recent and quite scholarly study by a Buddhist monk can be found here.
  • Janus
    15.4k
    the children who recalled their last livesWayfarer

    You're simply assuming the truth of one of a number of possible explanatory theories. The theory would not be proven even if all the children's reports were true and not explainable by the children being told what they said they remembered. So with you in this matter, as with the proofs of God's existence, it is a prior faith finding confirmation wherever it can.
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    The theory would not be proven even if all the children's reports were true and not explainable by the children being told what they said they remembered.Janus

    Yeah, I do think Stevenson does actually consider that possibility. But in many cases, prior commitments are unlikely to be swayed by such considerations.

    Stevenson’s magnum opus, published in 1997, was a 2,268-page, two-volume work called Reincarnation and Biology. Many of his subjects had unusual birthmarks and birth defects, such as finger deformities, underdeveloped ears, or being born without a lower leg. There were scar-like, hypopigmented birthmarks and port-wine stains, and some awfully strange-looking moles in areas where you almost never find moles, like on the soles of the feet. Reincarnation and Biology contained 225 case reports of children who remembered previous lives and who also had physical anomalies that matched those previous lives, details that could in some cases be confirmed by the dead person’s autopsy record and photos.

    A Turkish boy whose face was congenitally underdeveloped on the right side said he remembered the life of a man who died from a shotgun blast at point-blank range. A Burmese girl born without her lower right leg had talked about the life of a girl run over by a train. On the back of the head of a little boy in Thailand was a small, round puckered birthmark, and at the front was a larger, irregular birthmark, resembling the entry and exit wounds of a bullet; Stevenson had already confirmed the details of the boy’s statements about the life of a man who’d been shot in the head from behind with a rifle, so that seemed to fit. And a child in India who said he remembered the life of boy who’d lost the fingers of his right hand in a fodder-chopping machine mishap was born with boneless stubs for fingers on his right hand only. This type of “unilateral brachydactyly” is so rare, Stevenson pointed out, that he couldn’t find a single medical publication of another case.

    If he was talking about plain old medical epidemiology or pathology, it would be regarded as quite unexceptionable. But as I said, discussion of rebirth is a cultural taboo in the West. It often sends people right off. I really shouldn't say anything about it. :worry:
  • Janus
    15.4k
    But in many cases, prior commitments are unlikely to be swayed by such considerations.Wayfarer

    That's true and as I said it amounts to confirmation bias, not free inquiry. Which is fine as long as that is admitted.
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    Most people will say that Stevenson naturally suffered confirmation bias - damn the evidence!
  • Janus
    15.4k


    You're not getting what I've been saying; I'm saying even accepting that what is presented is true evidence that cannot be explained empirically, the confirmation bias consists in believing it supports reincarnation over say, collective memory, universal mind, akashic records and so on.
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    Actually Stevenson was careful not to say that his research proved reincarnation occurs. He said it suggests it, but was willing to consider all kinds of theories about it.

    But the point is that generally the bias against it is very strong in Western culture. Stevenson once remarked that in the West, people would often say 'why bother with these studies? Everyone knows that it's just folk stories.' In the East, people would say 'why bother with these stories? Everyone knows it happens all the time.'

    In the Wikipedia entry (which is generally dismissive of Stevenson), there's a passage that says

    The philosopher Paul Edwards, editor-in-chief of Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, became Stevenson's chief critic. From 1986 onwards, he devoted several articles to Stevenson's work, and discussed Stevenson in his Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (1996). He argued that Stevenson's views were "absurd nonsense" and that when examined in detail his case studies had "big holes" and "do not even begin to add up to a significant counterweight to the initial presumption against reincarnation." Stevenson, Edwards wrote, "evidently lives in a cloud-cuckoo-land."

    which I'm sure would be the majority view.

    However what is interesting is that one Robert Almeder, who was apparently a reputable philosopher of science, took issue with Edwards' criticism in this article.

    I notice that Almeder's wikipedia entry says:

    Almeder was strongly influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce, Ian Stevenson, and W.O. Quine, and subscribes to Cartesian dualism, broadly rejecting scientism and materialism. Stevenson's reincarnation research work on children who claimed to remember past lives convinced Almeder that minds are irreducible to brain states. He has argued in several papers and in his Beyond Death: The Evidence for Life After Death (1992) that Stevenson's critics, most notably the philosopher Paul Edwards, have misunderstood the nature of Stevenson's work.[5]
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    The possibility that a person can experience a memory of another person by fluke doesn't seem to impact reincarnation theories based on memory because recall of past lives while entailed is not, by itself, sufficient to clinch the argument of reincarnation.

    I say not, because reincarnation is just one theory to explain this phenomenon. Others are that there are "Akashic Records" or a "collective unconscious" or "universal mind" where every detail of everyone's lives are stored, and that the children were inexplicably able to "tap into" those details.Janus

    Interesting thought and coincidentally I happened to read about it a few days ago. :up:
    Discussion of reincarnation is a taboo topic on this forum in Western culture.

    If you really want to know what research has found, google Ian Stevenson and read some of the facts. This is as good a place to start as any.

    The point to note is that in the many cases he documented, the children who recalled their last lives knew facts for which there was no external explanation - buried coin boxes, hidden doors, locations of buildings and trees no longer there, and numerous other such details. Of course, it is widely accepted now that Stevenson was a dupe and a fraud who was sucked in by wishful thinking. In this matter, people will believe what they will, I know a few western Buddhist converts who refuse to believe anything Stevenson published.

    A more recent and quite scholarly study by a Buddhist monk can be found here.
    Wayfarer

    Helpful as always :up:
  • Philosophim
    2.2k
    If the ability of a person to remember another dead person's memory is not reincarnation, what is your definition of reincarnation?
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    It's an interesting point in Buddhism in particular. Buddhism emphatically rejects the idea of an individual person or same consciuosness which migrates from one life to the next. This is the subject of this discourse. The gist of it is that 'consciousness arises according to conditions' but that there is not 'one who is conscious'. So long as the conditions for consciousness continue to arise, then consciousness will continue to arise because of conditions. In this discourse, this is re-told in forceful terms to the figure of Sāti, the Fisherman's Son, who holds the 'pernicious view' of 'a consciousness that migrates from life to life'.

    It modern terminology, it is as if a person propogates a wave, which in turn gives rise to an instance of consciousness. Is that instance the same or different? Well, it's not really an individual thing, so it doesn't make sense to say either. Are you the same person you were when you were seven? The answer is both yes and no.

    What the Buddha differentiated his teaching from, was the Hindu notion of an unchangeable ātman or Self 'which persists unchanged while all else changes'. But he also doesn't say anywhere 'there is no self', as that is the view of nihilism. Understanding the Buddhist principle of anātman/anatta is quite a subtle matter, and often prone to misunderstanding.

    In practice there is a sense of continuity from one moment to the next, and one life to the next. This is developed in later Buddhist philosophy in terms of the 'citta-santāna', sometimes translated as 'mind-stream'. But the point is, there is no underlying entity, self or thing, the self, such as it is, is a dynamic process which unfolds over lifetimes. It is that sense of 'this is me, this is I, this is mine' which is one of the fundamental 'roots of suffering' in Buddhist philosophy.

    Some refs

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstream

    https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/selvesnotself.html

    https://tricycle.org/magazine/no-self-or-true-self/
  • Philosophim
    2.2k

    Much appreciated Wayfarer! This was very informative, thank you.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    If the ability of a person to remember another dead person's memory is not reincarnation, what is your definition of reincarnation?Philosophim

    Well, I was contemplating the possibility of a person recalling having memories of another person by fluke. It's not impossible, is it? For instance, a person after my death could have my memories not because s/he's me but just as a matter of chance. After all, memories are basically thoughts and two different people can have the same thoughts, no?
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    A greater problem with reincarnation is the nature of the self. That is, what is it that is being reincarnated?

    Suppose, TheMadFool, that you found yourself remembering, as if they were your own, things that did not happen to you, but happened to someone else. Suppose you remember being Chancellor of Germany in 2019.

    Would you then conclude that you are Angela Merkel?

    And if not, then if you had the memories of Julius Caesar, why would you conclude that you were Julius Caesar?

    That is, there seems to be more to being you than just having your memories.

    IF reincarnation is to make sense then one needs to be clear as to what it is that is being reincarnated.
    Banno

    As I mentioned in my reply to another member, having memories, even well-verified ones, is not sufficient to establish the truth of reincarnation because of the possibility that a person could have memories of another person by fluke; after all memories are thoughts in essence and it's not impossible that two people have the same thoughts.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    IF reincarnation is to make sense then one needs to be clear as to what it is that is being reincarnated.Banno

    The soul seems like a good candidate for reincarnation - that immaterial substance that, like a rolling drop of water gathers sawdust, collects memories of existence as a particular person/being; these memories giving it identity, defining it as to who it is.
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