Can you summarize the evidence that non-mechanistic factors must be affecting us? I’ve never heard of it. Note: saying that physics doesn’t explain [some phenomenon] is irrelevant; in that case, it could just as easily be an undiscovered law of physics. If there’s a non-mechanical non-physics effect, it has to be positively identified what it is, not an unexplained gap.
We are more than the sum of our memories. Your brain is a neural network that has now incorporated your experiences. Your memories may be what constitute your sense of self, but your brain reacts in lots of ways that are unique to you but which are not associated with any specific memories.
For example, I’m irrationally afraid of spiders. I have a friend who loves them, and lets them crawl all over him without problem. So I know the fear of spiders is something I learned, and not something universal to everyone. But there’s no specific memory associated with it. I suspect that if all my memories were suddenly gone, I’d still have an irrational fear of spiders, because that’s baked into my subconscious brain now.
The brain is a whole lot more complex than just being a collection of memories with some logic circuits to make sense of it. Even your low-level pattern matching circuitry that happens at a subconscious level are trained by things you see, but once trained, they don’t necessarily need a memory to recognize a pattern.
Here’s a simple example: People with amnesia still seem to recognize what a TV is when they see one. They certainly learned about TV at some point, and once had memories of learning it. But even with the memories gone, the wiring persists. So if you took a person from Africa who had never seen a TV and could swap his memories with yours, the chances are you wouldn’t be able to recognize a TV, even if you have memories of them. This may sound crazy, but experiments with split-brained people show this is exactly the case. You can learn to recognize something with your right eye, then if you look at it with your left have no idea what you’re looking at, even though your brain ‘knows’ because it’s already seen it. The problem is that the low level circuitry that does the pattern matching isn’t available to that side.
I think if you and I changed memories, I might think that I am now in your body, but I would have a whole lot of inexplicable ideas, emotions, and sensations I can’t interpret or at least don’t know where they come from. And you might be sort of ‘you’ in my body, but you’d have this new weird fear of spiders and you’d be recognizing a lot of people you don’t know and can’t place, because you’re using my pattern recognition circuitry with your memories. At the very least, it would be hella confusing.
Your friend could have learned to welcome spiders, and fear of spiders could be everyone’s initial state. I don’t think that has any effect on the validity of what you’re saying.
What about the phenomenon of shared hallucinations? Put a scientist with his or her choice of measuring devices in a room with two test subjects unable to communicate with each other verbally. They injest some hallucinogenic drug (the scientist does not). They both see a bugblatter beast and hide under the furniture. Only later, when the effect of the drug wears off do they reveal, in separate isolated interviews, that they both saw the same bugblatter beast. The scientist recorded no evidence of one. There are plenty of accounts on the internet where people claim something like this happened to them (minus the scientist). Have experiments like this been done?
There are different possible explanations for that bugblatter beast. One is that there’s a group of people (maybe everyone, maybe not) who have a built-in bugblatter beast hallucination, and the drug merely reveals that fact. Another is that there really is a bugblatter beast (sometimes or all the time) but we usually can’t see it. Or that there’s only one consciousness and we all share it. Or that there’s more than one kind of consciousness and we share some kinds but not others. Or that bugblatter beasts are just really weird. 
There are also other, more normal explanations possible.
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It’s a load of bull; a scam where there was deliberate collusion.
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The subjects colluded inadvertently - they due to coincidence, expectation, situation, or culture expected to see roughly the same thing, and then in discussions about the ‘astonishing event’ where they ‘saw the same thing’ differing details get underplayed or forgotten.
The absence of the scientist is kind of relevant here.
Sure. This arises out of complexity theory. To start: Complex systems share certain characteristics, among which are nonlinear responses and extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Also, they are stochastic, meaning that randomness plays a part. That means they are unpredictable.
An example of the first kind would be turbulent fluid flow. It is just there, and it’s chaotic, but it’s always chaotic in the same way. But note that even if you understood all physics down to the quantum level, you would still be utterly unable to predict the exact motions of the molecules in the turbulent flow.
Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) are things like your brain, ecosystems, or human societies, or your immune system. They constantly change and adapt to changing conditions. Those changes are actually computed by the system, but in ways we don’t really understsand. And because of sensitivity to initial conditions and stochastic elements inherent in the system, they can not be replicated.
Complex systems are also defined by the inter-connectedness of the things in them. That’s where the complexity comes from. The number of connections between agents is more important than the agents themselves in determining system behavior.
A really good simple example is an anthill. If an alien species came here, you would not blame them for thinking that anthills are sentient creatures. They exhibit all kinds of intelligence. If you flood an anthill, the ants will swarm out and form rafts with their bodies and the colony will climb aboard and float to safety. Anthills have nurseries with precisely controlled temperatures kept constant by ants bringing in rotting vegetation to give off heat, and they do it in the precise amounts to maintain a common temperature. If you examine the region around an anthill, you will find complex lines of ants moving between the hill and food sources in a very efficient, almost mathematical way. If ants from one anthill come across ants from another one, a war may break out, complete with fronts, enveloping actions, etc. Ants captured in war are sometimes made to be slaves in the victor’s colony. But if enough of them get captured they may form a schism and attack the colony from within.
And so it goes. When ants come across a chasm, they will form a structurally sound bridge over it with their bodies, so other ants can get across. The list of highly sophisticated, seemingly intelligent behaviors in social insect colonies is very long.
And yet… Where is all this coming from? There’s no brain. There are no rules of physics that establish or control this behavior. Ant queens do not direct the colony - they’re just there for the breeding. And individual ants are incredibly simple and almost certainly have no awareness. They are state machines. Pheromones or other signals trigger states that have very simple behaviors.
For example, here’s what happens when a colony runs low on food: Ants switch to ‘forager’ state because of hunger. In forager state they follow several simple rules:
– Mill around randomly
– Try to stay equidistant from other ants when foraging.
– If you come across food, grab it and head for the anthill, while dropping a trail of pheromones behind you.
– If you are foraging and come across another ant’s pheromone trail, follow it.
– If you get to the end of the trail and it’s not the anthill or food, start foraging randomly from there.
– If you find food, take it back to the hill and add your pheromones to the rest.
That’s about it. For an individual ant, it’s pretty much just random behavior. Put 100 ants together, and they’ll generally just wander around randomly until they die. Ants are dumb. But put a million of them together, and suddenly all these emergent properties start happening. They form food delivery lines, they create anthills, etc. The size of the ant roads will be proportional to the size of the food at the end.
It’s all very optimized, seemingly intelligent behavior, with no intelligent actor in the mix at all. Yet all of that complexity came from somewhere, and it’s not physics. There are no physical rules you can put together to predict an anthill. And even when you can model ant behavior perfectly and build simulated anthills in a computer that mimic real ones, you can’t use that model to predict what a real anthill will do in the future, because its behavior is too complex and depends on too many random things.
For example, imagine an anthill starting up. Two ants come out to look for food. You’ve placed two food sources exactly equidistant from the anthill. Can you predict the shape of the anthill a week from now? Or how long the food sources will last respectively? Nope. Because randomness and nonlinearity abound. Imagine our two ants dutifully marching to each food source, but one of them has to climb over a twig and therefore takes just a little longer to find the food source than the other ant. Now the other ant ‘wins’ the race, and builds the first pheromone trail. Other ants latch onto it, and suddenly the first food source is being exploited, and the other one is playing catch-up because there are fewer ants available to follow that trail. So now the first food supply is finished faster than the second, and the ant colony starts to expand in that direction.
This is the world we live in. We are agents in a complex system that is infinitely more complex than an anthill because we are much smarter than ants. And this has been going on for billions of years. In the meantime, we ourselves are complex systems, and we are made up of other complex systems. It’s complexity all the way down. And if you started the universe again with exactly the same configuration, you would not get the same result. In fact, you would get a different result every time you started again, because quantum fluctuations would effect the initial state of matter enough that each universe might come out completely different. Physics does not determine what will evolve from a complex system, so long as it stays within the constraints of what’s physically possible.
This is fairly new science. Information theory has been around since Claude Shannon in the first half of the 20th century, but the study of complex systems is newer because much of it just wasn’t clear until the computer age. A lot of the science we use today to understand such systems is simply wrong, but old ideas take a long time to die. I’d say biologists have fully embraced it (the Precautionary principle is essentially a statement about the unknowability of complex systems and what our interventions will do to them). I’m still waiting for economists, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists and others to realize they are dealing with the same kind of thing.
The fact that a team of scientists couldn’t have planned an anthill doesn’t have any bearing on their ability to explain it after the fact. Explaining after the fact is all that’s required.
A law of physics that accurately predicts randomness or chaos is still a law of physics.
Yes. There can be no “big” changes, but there can be small, incidental changes. And the accumulation of many incidental little changes could create diverging realities.
Call me picky, but I’d say that any change at all would require a divergence in realities. When it comes to altering a timeline there’s no such thing as a little change.
Also, would the souls remember their experiences from prior times through the loop?
Reincarnation is false because it sticks with the ordinary view of life as linear, and supposes that we can “jump around” space-time becoming other beings- fish, frogs, giraffes, salamanders, another person. No such thing is possible because if it were, we could become other beings while still alive. No, ‘you’ will always be ‘you.’
They can explain it in general, but they can’t predict what it will do outside of broad strokes. And anthills are neither a necessary outcome of physics, or explainable using physics alone.
Actually reincarnation doesn’t jump around at all; it just presumes that once you die, your soul just shrugs off the old skinsuit, steps a little to the left, and pulls on a new one. Putting aside the dubiousness of souls existing at all, it breaks no more rules than a person being able to change their pants does.
Yes, I agree
At death, the soul is “eaten.” Consumed by another entity.
Wait, what? I thought the idea was that the soul travels back in time and reinstalls itself in a (probably) alternate timeline of the same person it just was. Since when are souls being eaten now?
Yeah… but you say that like it isn’t the saddest thing in the whole damn world. 
(On the other hand, the fact that certain other people don’t get to decide what is or isn’t true is a tremendous relief. :))
It is awareness, not the soul. Too often the word ‘soul’ is thrown out as another term for mind/psyche/awareness, when in reality it was historically defined differently.
It’s trivial for something to not be explained by science; it’s called not knowing yet. 
Unless you have positive proof of the predictive power of the other method(s) you’re proposing to replace physics.
I think none of what you said really means anything from a practical standpoint. I mean it all sounds very nice and poetic as a metaphor, but what does that even mean “your awareness goes back to your conception”?
Well yes and no. Are you the same “you” as the you from 20 years ago? Sure there is a continuity in that you share the same physical body and your consciousness retains memories of being you from back then. But in many ways, you are very different people. If an amnesia wakes up and has no recollection of his wife of 10 years, is it better to just call it quits or try and develop a loving relationship with what is effectively a total stranger (financial and familial obligations not withstanding)?
This raises a whole bunch of questions on the definition of what it means to be “you” (of which “amnesia” is the probably easiest).
Let’s say we have the technology to make an exact copy of you, memories and all. And we have the technology to copy, move and delete memories as easily as we might edit video.
Now lets say I make an exact duplicate of you, the copy goes and murders someone, I copy those memories into your brain and delete it from the brain of the murderer version of you.
Which one should be charged with a crime?
Does it change things if the person you “murdered” is another copy of you?
Of course, in this particular scenario, we can probably just spool up a copy of the person you murdered and maybe fine you for the inconvenience. But I digress.
I think your first paragraph nailed it exactly. There is no evidence whatsoever of “circular life”.