Doesnt the fact that we consistently find previously unkown details about, animals, life, space, the universe etc suggest that there is far more to know than we think we know at any given time?
Serious question
We usually find those things when we’re looking for them. It’s not as if people are constantly declaring they know everything there is to know about the universe and then they stumble across new particles or dinosaur skeletons. Sometimes we have to revise our understanding of the universe based on our discoveries, but other times the new discoveries fit right into existing theories.
We know what we know, including the fact we don’t know everything.
So what if some people act like know-it-alls? Their self-assessments are irrelevant to the actual situation.
Again, winning the lottery 100 times is a possibility. Treating the occurrence as a virtual fact is pointless.
There’s no evidence for your viewpoint. Your argument boils down to “you can’t disprove it, therefore it’s an equally valid viewpoint”. That doesn’t hold water.
You can’t disprove the existence of the fairies who dance nightly upon my lawn and explain cosmic principles to me, either. The mere possibility of their existence means nothing.
“Keeping an open mind” doesn’t mean assigning equal weight to the idea, either.
Every time there is a non sequitur thrown into the works which causes us to question the way in which we do things or to re-evaluate the truths we previous held about the world, it shows that we really don’t know as much as we would like to believe we do about the working of the world, can you agree?
But the “non sequitur” needs to be more than just a feeling or a semantic trick. A replicatable observation that falls outside of the established parameters is required to expand those parameters.
It shows that something we thought was incorrect, not “we didn’t know as much as we thought” (even if that’s technically true). The problem is that we expect this to happen from time to time. In science our understanding of the universe is always provisional and is open to correction and revision as we learn more.
Come now. you are not going through life as if anything might be possible.
You yourself said there is a lot of nonsense out there.
There are things you dismiss as unlikely, implausible and wacko.
Astrology, homeopathy, crystals?
Now what is it, for you, that keeps the idea of an afterlife a possibility?
Is it conditioning? You are just so used to the idea?
Or some personal experience or all the anecdotes out there?
That’s why we say, bring forth the evidence that does exist and let’s examine it.
Just like we can’t see any mechanism how Jupiters gravity could somehow influence someones character, we don’t see how thoughts, produced by a brain, could somehow live on without that brain.
For us to entertain that notion we would first have to have some indication that this happens at all.
Only then would we say that apparently it is possible, although we don’t know how.
In the progression of posts above it is conspicuous that nobody has responded to the post by “Donnie Barko”, post #74. Seems to me that this post would be the opening salvo for “evidence” for reincarnation.
Similarly, nobody has responded to my request that they specify what they would require as evidence for the hypothesis, one way or the other.
What we have so far is a lot of uninformed opinion. Uninformed opinion is entertaining, but not very informative.
I did. That’s why you asked me what I would consider evidence for reincarnation. I felt a little bit badly making such a short response to a long and detailed post from someone who has obviously put a lot of time into this subject, but I think what I said was true. He says Stevenson collected a lot of histories and sometimes the results were remarkable, but he doesn’t offer any specifics. On further analysis, unsurprisingly, the evidence is much weaker than Stevenson says and nothing close to what DonnieBarko might like to believe. (PDF warning)
In this study Thomason reviews three cases of xenoglossy that Stevenson found more or less inexplicable without reincarnation. What she found was this:
The first two subjects spoke very few words in the language they were “channeling” and mostly conversed with their interviewers by repeating the questions they were asked. Opinions about their accents and pronunciation varied. They had some some exposure to the languages being spoken, which contradicts the whole concept of speaking a language they did not know, and they made some mistakes that you would’ve expected from people who spoke English and had tried to learn another language. The third case involves a woman who spoke the “xenoglossy” language with some proficiency, but she’d grown up in a city with a reasonable number of speakers of the language, had taken lessons in that language, spoke a related language herself, and read books about the place where her alternate personality was supposed to have lived. And even with all of that, experts disagreed about her pronunciation and how fluent she was.
Calling this “unscientific” is being extremely generous. As research goes it’s biased and laughably bad. I’ve read about similar things in the past with regard to spiritualism, although not “xenoglossy” in particular. The problems are pretty much always the same: the investigators always very badly want to believe in the phenomena they are studying, so intentionally or not, they shade things in a favorable light, ignore more plausible explanations for what they are seeing, overlook mistakes by the subject, and don’t work very hard at checking what they are seeing. Maybe they can’t help it because they want very much for this stuff to be true. But it isn’t, and either through enthusiasm or genuine ignorance (of the languages being channeled, for example) or of course through fraud, the stuff they come up with is not convincing.
I think Czarcasm did. I’m not responding to it because I think it’s ultimately a catch-22: it’s hard to come up with a way in which someone could have concrete and verifiable information about a past life that they could not have obtained any other way. If it’s verifiable, they could have read about it or watch a documentary or asked someone. If it’s not verifiable, we can’t know if they are discussing something that really happened. We can know if it’s generally consistent with the historical period being discussed and I’m sure plenty of claimants fail badly at that, but advocates for reincarnation would probably try hard to find loopholes. So I’m asking about the mechanism through which this knowledge is transmitted, and of course you don’t have an answer because there isn’t one.
No, that’s not true. We have a well informed opinion on one side based on what we know about human consciousness and the brain, and on the other we have some people trying to hold the door open to say maybe something is possible - without any means through which is would happen and without any clear evidence. Saying both sides are uninformed is a false equivalence.
Marley23: I re-read the string of posts above, and stand corrected on both counts. Whoops!
So it would seem that the best way to get a definitive answer to this is to interview subjects, and verify their stories?
This has a large degree of subjectivity involved; is there some objective measure that can be applied?
I see a problem with these kinds of phenomena that both sides of the argument will interpret any data in a way that supports their respective positions.
So what evidence would be definitive and be able to withstand subjective interpretation?
No. That’s the best way to waste a ton of time reviewing sloppy “research” by people who, however innocently intended, are trying to prove that something impossible is true and who are prone to making extravagant claims about their findings because they’re desperate to believe them. The best way to get a definitive answer would be to research the brain and come up with some way for this to be possible. If it’s not possible, that rules out all these accounts by themselves. (Spoiler alert: it’s not possible.)
What I want to say about the subject is this: while the topic of reincarnation may simply be nothing but woo, the way it is presented in this thread is a tower of woo. Allow me to explain.
The ‘original’ concept of reincarnation was a consequence of failing to escape the wheel of samsara. I’d include a wiki link, but it sucks so bad I am not even going to bother. The key point is that your individual self is not what it seems, and transcending this is vital if one is ever to achieve nirvana or what-have-you.
So. You will be able to find cites to the contrary, but at a more serious level in these traditions the concept of the self is not the same as in Western traditions. So. To impose the Western concept of the self first, and then from there to say that this self is what is re-incarnated, is why I say this whole thread is a ‘tower of woo’. The foundation is woo, and then woo is build upon that. The Western concept of the self should not be involved. You are all asking the wrong question. What is re-incarnated? What is hoped to be escaped? You can’t talk about re-incarnation without answering these questions.
If you want to know what kind of evidence would prove the Western idea of reincarnation, watch the Coppola movie, “Youth Without Youth”. It is pretty good by itself; especially so if you are interested in this stuff. But still totally misguided. This whole discussion is, I think, a Westernization of something you all don’t understand.
I’m sorry, but the first question is still “Is reincarnation even possible?”, followed by “Does reincarnation happen?”. Until those questions are answered, no other question can logically be on the table.
There is only one soul in the entire universe, which travels back and forth in time to become every living sentient being at one time or another. So be nice to other people, because sooner or later you will be them. (an idea posted on this board many years ago by another poster, btw)
This idea reminds me of John Wheeler’s idea that there is only one electron in the universe going back and forth in time.
Do I believe in reincarnation? Not in the slightest. But it doesn’t hurt if other people do.
It does if it leads to the widespread belief that the poor deserve to be poor because of something they did in a past life.
Could’ve been me. I’ve mentioned the idea once before, maybe a year or so ago. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna search for it though. 
I also mentioned a paraphrased version of it in this thread (post #98)
Not sure how original this idea is, however. Wheeler’s single electron idea is what inspired this thought in me as well.
Dang, I found that older post (March 2012). The last post from the thread, “Nobody really knows what happens after death.” Is that just pc BS?"
I appreciate the link. After reading it, I agree that the examples of xenoglossy that were examined there are rather weak and that the author handily discredited them. Whether these are the best examples that Stevenson had to offer, I do not know, but if they were, I would have to agree with you that the evidence is not too impressive on that point. Also, Stevenson’s ad hoc hypotheses demonstrate his willingness to go out on a limb to save his pet theory. Not sure that bodes well for his many other case studies, whether on xenoglossy or other phenomena.
I submit to this board, however, that there are a number of incredible, well-researched, and well-documented examples of children who have inexplicable recall of a previous incarnation, the accuracy of which has been subsequently confirmed. These made up the vast majority of Stevenson’s 3000+ cases, but there have also been other widely publicized examples.
I do not have the time, at the moment, to bring any of these to the board’s attention, but I will make an effort to do so in the next few days.
But for those who have suggested that there is no evidence supporting reincarnation, I contend that these case studies are precisely that. Generally speaking, can they be conclusive proof? No – in the instances when the child’s recall is proven accurate, it is impossible to completely rule out the possibility that the child came upon the information in some other manner. But the accounts that I have learned about over the years are so striking, so internally consistent, and so thorough, that I have been persuaded.
For what it’s worth, I have not attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information I extracted from friends whom I’ve put through past life regressions, as I previously described. However, I do think that it would be worth a shot.
Just give us the one you think is the best example.