Why am I waiting for Carl Jung to come post about the “collective unconscious”?
how is children being able to pick up psychic vibrations from objects around them any less wierd than reincarnation?
all i can suggest is checking the book OLD SOULS. in that book children have memories of people who died so recently that people who knew the deceased can still be found. these people are usually many miles from the child so how does the kid happed to pick up those psychic vibrations. there are also birthmarks which sometimes relate to the method of death in the last life.
if you lived a thousand years ago and in your travels someone showed you a rock that always pointed in the same direction when hung from a string, you would not know the MECHANISM that caused it. you wouldn’t know about the magnetic field of the rock interacting with the magnetic field of the earth. you would just obsreve the strange behavior of the “rock.” the 1st step in science is collecting data not coming up with theories.
in the gospels there is a description of jesus casting spirits out of a man and into a heard of swine. these swine then run into a lake and drown themselves. what is that all about? another book i have: HOSTAGE TO THE DEVIL by Malachi Martin describes six cases of posession, a la THE EXORCIST. Martin is an ex-jesuit, so the book is written from a roman catholic perspective but i try to sort the data from opinion. suppose non-living human beings in SHEOL sometimes have the ability to contact and/or gain control of the living. if humans have FREE WILL regardless of whether carnate or not this could explain posessions and DEALS WITH THE DEVIL. the meta-physical paradigm must account for all the wierd phenomenon. we just need to find the right paradigm.
Dal TimgarIt’s not, really, although personally I find the concept that we may be able to percieve things through some sort of “radar” requires less explanation than an entire mechanism for souls to somehow store and retreive memories even though all the evidence shows that memories are stored in the physical brain. But the point is, you can look up at the evidence and come up with a lot of possible explanations. Perhaps there are imperceptable fairies that tell stories of other people’s life and describe apartments while we sleep, so we remember it subconciously. Maybe when someone dies some of the memories just float around and some happen to smack into a brain and leave an imprint. Maybe we can pick up psychic vibrations. Maybe we have things called souls that store our memories outside of a physical brain, and they get sucked into fetuses at a certain point. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Maybe people imagine things and remember the “memories” they got right, and forget the ones they don’t. Maybe children sneak around and stay up late and see a documentory about places they’ve never been, and describe it to their parents. Maybe, maybe, maybe. To use your magnetic rock example, we may have a rock that always points north (please also keep in mind that these “memories that people could not have known” are not as conclusively empirically evident as the fact that lodestones will point magnetic north); you are saying that the rock is pointing north because it fell from the North Star and it wants to go home. This may settle the issue for you, but it doesn’t offer an explanation as to how this works and it ignores about 50 other equally plausible-sounding and equally unproven explanations.
Why? If you found a lodestone before you knew about magnetism, do you think it would have been a good idea to classify it as a “weird phenomena” and assume it has a metaphysical explanation before fully establishing that there were no possible physical explanations? There have been many things that were once unexplainable, but we found physical explanations for them; if you admit that it was a good idea to scientifically investigate physical reasons for the phenomena of lodestones, why assume that things that seem strange to you now must be metaphysical?
So David B, is your point that the parapsycholgist’s detection of psychic vibrations disproves reincarnation? While reading your post, I was thinking “Where have I seen this before?” The use of a fact that is contradictory to a person’s previous position but would help in this case, or, in other posts, a series of possible explanations to refute an idea or an incident, those things seemed familiar. And then it came to me. The wackos on the old Art Bell show. Eg, UFO’s come from the future, they come from a distant star system, the are interdimensional, they are from the US govt; crop circles are energy vortices, they are UFO landing sites, they are temporal markers for time travellers.
They so believed that they would use anything to buttress their belief in the latest “sighting” even if it was different from what they used last time. You employ the mirror image. You so disbelieve that you will use anything that makes a point. I guess it just goes to show that fanatics are all pretty much the same.
Why undertake the logical fallacy of trying to disprove the existence of something. Why wouldn’t you be a nice LOGICAL agnostic and lay off the missionary work?
dal_tigmar said:
I didn’t say it was less weird. I said it was an altnernate possibility if we ever get any decent evidence. Gaudere has already explained what I meant (and did a better job than I did).
mipsman said:
< smacking head > Jeez, guys, I was pretty clear in that message. Why is this so difficult? At least Gaudere knew what I was saying.
In short, NO, that’s not even close to what I was saying!
And what’s your point? IF there really are unidentified ships flying around in the sky, they could be many things. They could be aliens. They could be time-travellers. They could be from another dimension. They could be super-secret government projects. (This ignores the more realistic possibilities like meteors, Venus, planes, etc. because I have started by saying “IF there really are unidentified ships…”) Just because people happen to like one particular “explanation” doesn’t make it right. Gaudere went over this very well in her post, above.
No, but it does show that you pretty much have no clue what you’re talking about. I don’t believe in either and I made that very clear (I’m sorry if you couldn’t comprehend that point). The evidence does not exist for either. But even if the evidence did become available, that does not automatically mean that one answer is correct. This is not a difficult concept here.
I’m not. I’ve been pointing out repeatedly that the evidence does not exist. Please try to pay attention.
From your past few messages, I don’t think you’d know logic if it came up and bit you on the ass…
First of all, there is no such thing as reincarnation. But I’m going to post a philosophical objection I have to it.
Can you imagine anything more cruel, more monstrous than to kidnap someone and erase their memories? Can you honestly claim that reincarnation is less cruel than some also nonexistant montheistic view of the afterlife?
You are separated from your friends and family. You will normally never be able to find them again, you are not even aware of what you have lost. You are stripped of all learning. You must relearn language, how to walk, how to cross the street.
It seems monstrous to me. It is the equivalent of sticking an icepick in someone’s brain and then saying you’ve done them a favor since they get to relearn and reexperience everything for the first time.
Now, Polycarp. The trouble is that there doesn’t seem to be any way for the soul to “hook into” the material brain. Our brain is made of ordinary matter. Now, suppose that we also have some sort of “soul” in addition. That would mean that our brains would have to influence the soul in some way, and the soul would have to influence our brains in some way. That is, there would have to be some physical effect of the soul-brain interaction, otherwise they cannot interact. I would interpret this as meaning that the soul is material, just of a different kind of material that we haven’t discovered yet.
If the soul does not interact physically with the brain in any way, then how exactly is that different from a soul that does not exist? You are free to imagine all sorts of things that do not affect the material world, but what reason is there to believe in them? I can imagine non-material, invisible, inaudible leprechauns. If there is no way for us to detect these leprechauns, then why would I go to the trouble of claiming they exist? I hold that non-detectable leprechauns are equivalent to non-existant leprechauns. But what if you say, “Look under ultraviolet light!” and we do, and we now can see the Leprechauns. Well, we have just discovered an effect leprechauns have…they reflect UV light. So these UV reflecting leprechauns are different from non-existant leprechauns.
So for the soul to exist, it must be material, albeit an undiscovered form of material. That means it is subject to scientific investigation. Now, we admit that we don’t understand yet how the brain works. But it seems premature to me to assume that there is some unknown physical principle at work here. In fact, it would be strange if there was some physical force whose only effect was on the brains of conscious beings. But there are, as yet, no anomalous phenomena going on in the brain that cannot be explained by ordinary physics. Perhaps we will discover them, but there is no need to invoke mysterious forces to account for mysterious phenomena that have not yet been shown to exist.
That’s my objection to Dal’s magnet analogy. He is proposing an expanation (reincarnation) for a phenomena (children knowing things) that has not yet been shown to happen. We are not yet at the point of hypothesising about why the magnet points north, we still must establish that the magnet really does point north. And as David pointed out, even if we do establish that the magnet does point north, that still does not mean that the proposed eplanation for why it points north is correct.
I’m going to do some broad-based definitions of terms here to facilitate our discussion, since it seems like we’re working at cross-purposes.
Try these: Materialism is the philosophic doctrine that nothing should be considered to exist but what is detectable by the senses (augmented by instrumentation) and is in theory explainable by theory generated and tested as appropriate to the discipline in question that “saves the appearances” of the extant data. Spiritism suggests that some additional phenomena may exist not directly apperceptible by the senses, even with the use of instruments, but inferrable from some other source of information. Neither term is necesarily cognate with the pejorative ideological terms which share their names, i.e., a materialist may be an ascetic with no interest in accumulating material goods and investing neither treasure nor heart in them; a spiritist may (and probably does) consider table-tipping, seances, and such as utter bunkum.
In a broader sense than what has so far been addressed, the basic question addressed here and in other threads that defy easy categorization is, “Does some aspect of personhood survive bodily death?” Spiritists in general subscribe to a Yes answer and materialists in general to a No answer, other than the obvious fact that the corpse remains a discrete dead body for some time after death. (That there may be exceptions to each category with particularly far-from-the-wall views should not concern us overly.)
As I suggested to Phil earlier, though, there is absolutely no requirement that something “real” in a materialist cosmos be explainable at a given point in time by the theory available then, simply that it be in some way detectable and not fall contrary to other known data. The hypothetical explanation follows the observation as often as not. Granted that theory should allow for predictability, phenomena not congruent with a theory are nonetheless often observed, and force the modification of theory to account for them.
By this same token, evidence of survival after death would not require a known mechanism under which it functioned to be valid evidence. It would require the sort of validity which would enable it to stand up under reasonable skepticism.
Personally, in contradistinction to Gaudere and I believe David, I would find the idea of “psychic emanations” inhering in material objects far less likely than the idea that an organized set of ideas, memories, and traits functioning to operate a person surviving after the medium through which that person interacts with the world, i.e., his/her body, ceases to be functional. This is because I think the pattern, the data array, can be preserved without the particular medium in which it has inhered, and may be imposed on other media.
The idea that skeptics are diehard materialists who would reject any spiritistic phenomenon simply because it is one is easily understood, based on their regular scoffing objections to any spiritist “evidence,” but totally false. I think nobody would be happier to see proof of postmortem survival than a materialist depressed about his own eventual total dissolution. However, his integrity does not permit him to grasp at straws that fail to stand up to skeptical analysis.
I am not a good skeptic; I remain too open to new concepts without sufficient proof to satisfy a skeptic. I see my “role” as one of advancing theory that would explain the new concepts to meet one of the skeptics’ objections. Working with skeptics of integrity, my efforts enable some advances in understanding of differing modes of worldview to be accomplished.
But I firmly reject “the supernatural” – though not God and not the possible effects of the things classed as supernatural. If the Gospel accounts are valid, to take an example, then natural law includes, along with what we know today, provisions whereby an incarnate deity may walk on water, restore sight with sputum, etc. Such phenomena are not “miraculous violations of natural law” but singularities within it where what “normally” occurs is varied for good and understandable reason. Just as f=mv is valid for Newtonian physics but requires the intrusion of factors based on c for Einsteinian physics, so the laws of surface tension permitting only water striders, Basilisk lizards, and their ilk to walk on water are varied to allow for a human form to do so under very specific conditions, i.e., those prevailing when Jesus and Peter did it on the Sea of Galilee.
David, you made the comment that “not one of these (kids with memories of past lives) stories has stood up to investigation” in such a way as to imply that all have been thoroughly investigated and found wanting. I suspect this is not quite the truth, that all which have been investigated have fallen short of reasonable skeptical criteria, and that there has been a tendency to discount any additional such stories on this basis. Is my suspicion correct or is there a body which does investigate any such story as it “surfaces” and has in fact found them all wanting? Not provoking an argument by this question, just inclined to wonder about how much of this is the quite human character, even in skeptics, to throw out all stories with an implausible basis when some similar stories have been investigated and found lacking.
And I do agree that reincarnation is not necessarily the mechanism operating in such recall cases even if any are valid. It is, however, the preferred choice under Occam’s Razor if you are required to get into spiritistic explanations at all.
Lancashire was something I chose more or less at random, and with a vague memory of accounts from there, as was Abu Dhabi (though without the second clause). I get a feeling I ought to get the “Blackburn” reference and find it very hilarious, but I’m drawing a blank.
Lorenz: A physicist of this name generated a set of equations under relativity (special IIRC but don’t hold me to that!) describing the effects on various characteristics of matter as it took on relativistic velocity. Mass, as you’ll recall, climbs with a “limit” of infinity at c so that no particle with mass can be accelerated all the way to the speed of light. Time as experienced by the particle slows – this one is demonstrable, in that particles at near-c velocities last for enormous multiples of their half-lives. However, these equations, though they show singularities at c, are not delimited to stopping there, and can be continued on beyond c to its multiples and towards a limit of infinite speed. The results are rather intriguing, especially if you have any theological training.
“Contained tachyons” are my own hypothesis, but the general idea would be something on the same idea that magnetic fields can contain particles that would otherwise move in straight lines within a defined area. It’s purely speculative, but the concept would suggest that the bioelectrical field of the human brain might contain tachyons (in the same way as a cyclotron’s magnetic field contains the charged particles orbiting within it) constituting the soul until the brain flatlines – which might account for the supposed OOBE near-death experiences reported by some survivors.
Phil asked:
Um, that is not the valid characteristic set of a tachyon. What is, I’m not equipped to state, but I recall some fascinating numbers coming out of those equations. RT, Cabbage, any of you want to give them a shot and post the figures as tachyons accelerate from c towards a limit of infinity?
Hm. I thought last time we has a discussion on this MB on tachyons, the QM guys thought their chances of them actually existing were extremely unlikely. You are correct that they are not massless; they are often said to have imaginary mass. Ow. Head hurts.
(Besides, everyone knows what a tachyon is; it’s a gluon that isn’t completely dry.)
Why are we required to assume spiritism? I mean, I am wondering whether you personally are saying you have to assume reincarnation to explain these recalls under Occam’s Razor. I, for one, would be more inclined to believe God communicated the information to the subjects. Or maybe Satan (not the poster), just to confuse everybody. At least for a Christian, both of these explanations are not introducing any new principle in addition to what he/she believes already, namely that God occasionally speaks to people, and that Satan occasionally is allowed to interfere with their lives.
Lemur, you are worried about getting separated from your loved ones in the next life? In your theological philosophy, do you envision an afterlife with a Lemur with wings and a harp or (more likely) horns and tails cavorting around for the rest of eternity, checking up on old buds, friends and family?
Why is there a search for a physical manifestation of the soul? We are probably in an 11 dimensional multiverse in which the entire Milky Way has less than an infinitesimal effect. The Lemur person with all of your relationships and your hard won ability to speak, to walk, and to cross the street, means nothing in the scheme of things (I place the mipsman person in the same boat). The only thing that counts is something that is on that 11 dimensional scale of existence, a Deity and our souls. Our bodies and personalities and experiences are but tools for some grand purpose for the soul at which we can only guess.
I thought the atheists were prepared for complete oblivion after death? With reincarnation you get partial oblivion. If the soul wants to recall and project a previous incarnation’s memories, skills, redevelop previous relationships, etc, I am guessing that the soul’s call.
Hmmm.
Gaudere, I am not equating tachyons with the “physical” mechanism for the soul, though I have a hunch that is the way to bet. I was merely presenting it as one hypothetical mode where something fitting (albeit loosely) into the present “materialism” cosmological model could accommodate the suggestions of one school of “spiritism.” You are welcome to come up with alternative models; I am not averse to intangible Cheez Doodles distributed by the Invisible Pink Unicorn provided that they make my point that a physical mechanism for the supposed supernatural need not be detectable by the means at our command to fit within the cosmology we can all agree on.
Having gotten to that point, would you be willing to examine the point I made with which lambda takes issue and suggest what explanation of a (hypothetical) past-life-recall case that stands up under skeptical analysis would require the fewest new assumptions under the truth set of a rationalist skeptic. I’d welcome David and slythe’s analysis of this as well, and any other “materialist” (my def.) of good will. To me Occam’s Razor calls for reincarnation as the semi-obvious conclusion in such a case. But I’m willing to admit I could be wrong.
Poly:
“I read the news today, oh boy/4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.” 
Never feed a Beatles freak a straight line.
I’m not entirely sure how you are using tachyons fit into past lives, though; since tachyons go backwards in time, wouldn’t we remember future lives? If you theorize that the soul is made of tachyons, remembering past lives seems like it would be evidence against your theory! Yes, I concede that we may simply be currently unable to detect the “soul”, but you don’t need to bring in FTL particles to make that argument.
Well, I personally prefer the psychic resonance bit, and not just to piss off the reincarnates. 
We know that things can be recorded in physical objects and retrieved later; we do that every time we listen to a CD. That events can leave traces on the physical world and the brain might have a “reader” of these things does not seem as unlikely to me as actual memories existing outside of the physical brain. The ability to pick up psychic resonances would actually be a useful evolution; we would know if a stream was good or poisoned by picking up the resonances regarding it. Of course, I see no particular reason to believe in this one either, but at least it doesn’t deny what we currently know about how memories work, although it speculates on a imprinting and retreiving mechanism we have no evidence of besides said “memories”. If you can find an equally solid objection to “psychic resonance”, I am willing to listen. As someone mentioned, if the soul keeps memories outside the brain, why is memory loss not impossible or quickly “fixed” by the soul when brain damage occurs? How do we know it is the soul being transmitted; why not simply assume it’s a memory-imprint being transmitted? That theory has less assumptions that reincarnation, even if one assumes that memories can exist outside of the physical brain; all it says is that the person has aquired memories from somewhere, it doesn’t make the leap to people being reborn again and again. If memories can just randomly float around and occasionally imprint themselves on a a brain, it would explain why everyone doesn’t remember past lives, although perhaps you think only some are reincarnated.
Of course, all this predicates the existence of a solid “memory they couldn’t have known and are highly unlikely to have guessed at or aquired from somewhere they don’t remember”, which we don’t currently have. Reminds me of what’s-his-face who asked us if we found Noah’s ark, if we would believe in the Christian God, and we all answered, well, number one, it hasn’t been found, and number two, all that establishes it that someone named Noah actually built a big boat, and we have to figure out how there could have been a worldwide flood when the scientific evidence does not support it, and all that proves is that one story is true, not the entire Bible. Now, it’s possible that there was a worldwide flood and all our previous research was incorrect, and it’s possible that memories really aren’t stored solely in the brain and it’s possible we can pick up psychic resonances despite all previous scientific investigation of the brain, but I don’t think the current evidence is strong enough to speculate much.
Reincarnation has a tidy recycling aspect to it–“They will come back, come back again, as long as the red earth rolls; He never wasted a leaf or a tree, why would He squander souls?”–but I don’t see enough evidence to make a leap to an undetectable method of transmission of stored memories and personalities and selves based on some cases of deja vu and “past life” stories that in my experience have always been debunked when scientifically investigated.
plain old Death is worse than reincarnation. HA!
1 of the 5 people who has told me of ghosly experiences said she talked to a woman sitting on the end of her bed who gave her name and disappeared. she talked to her parents later and found it must have been a grandmother she never knew. died b4 she was born.
being OPPOSED to an idea is just as lacking in objectivity as BELIEVING an idea. claiming scientific impartiality without having curiosity is amusing.
i checked amazon.com. it has 23 reviews of the book OLD SOULS. reading other peoples books and forming HARD OPINIONS is not scientific. books are second hand information at best. hearsay evidence is not admisable in court. but noone has the time to conduct all experiments himself. have to try to form tentative ideas of how the universe works somehow. and you have to fend off all these christians running around loose in this culture.
Dal TimgarPhil: In that case, they ought to retitle it “A Day in the Lives”!
Gaudere: thank you for the reasoned response. Naturally, I beg to differ. But I’m operating from a worldview where “spirit” is an understood ingredient, and given your postulates, I suppose your probability analysis is reasonable.
Dal: No argument. However, you may find you are “preaching to the choir,” so to speak. None of the regular skeptics on this board are closed to new ideas, just more demanding of proof of them than those of us with more credulity, you and me included.
By the way, your use of Christian in the last sentence implies that you don’t like dogmatic people telling you what you ought to believe…am I correct in my reading?
Just for the record, many of us who call ourselves Christian – because we believe in the God preached by Jesus of Nazareth (and the vast majority of us consider him an avatar (incarnation) of that God – are quite open to ideas and have no intention of imposing dogma on anybody, except on ourselves as we accept some dogmatic statement as valid. We might argue in defense of our views, respecting the viewpoint of the other person – something I find quite different from demanding that he accept our definitions and conclusions – which I find offensive in any sphere.
Cool with you?
OK, Polycarp
should i refer to them as Authoritarian Christians or ACs for short. hard to tell if they are the majority or not. they just seem to be the ones that demand my attention. 9 am saturday morning. how many centuries do you spend in hell for shooting a jehovah’s witness? can’t be more than 20.
Dal TimgarNow, wait a minute. The problem here is there’s no inherent morality in the system. How do you know what is right? What if you are Hitler? Do you get to keep coming back with an improved way to kill more and more Jews (oh, wait, don’t invade Russia. OK, I got it now – send me back!)?
But what if you don’t care? What if, each time you come back, you decide you are going to do things more and more wrong?
So, eventually, only evil people, those who had no interest in moving on to the next stage, would be left on earth.
So basically, you can not do what is right in this life, but that is OK, because you will get another chance. But how do you know you haven’t been saying this to yourself for an eternity already? What if you are the last evil guy who hasn’t quite gotten it yet?
Mipsman asked why I would think losing my memories would be worse than simply ceasing to exist. It’s not that. I accept the fact that I will cease to exist because I don’t think that anyone planned it that way. I don’t view the universe as moral or immoral, it just is.
Now, if the universe really is moral or immoral, if someone sat down and planned out the universe…then we’ve got a different story. If it’s all an accident, I can deal with it. But if there’s a deity, and it did this to us ON PURPOSE? That’s it, I’m gonna kick its ass if I can. Survival, escape, and evasion is the duty of all POWs.
If the universe has moral agency, then I claim god is an asshole. If the universe does not have moral agency, then there is no god to call an asshole, and I deal with that and accept it. It’s the difference between my mom getting hit by a car because the road was slippery and the car had a certain velocity and my mom was in a certain location, and god deciding that it would be cool if my mom was hit by a car.
Now, about the soul. Polycarp, I know that human consciousness is mysterious, and tachyons are mysterious. That doesn’t mean that one has anything to do with the other. My understanding of tachyons is that they are not ruled out by physics. The equations say that it would take infinite energy to accelerate a particle to c. The same equations show that it would take an infinite amount of energy to decelerate a particle to light speed. But my understanding is that tachyons cannot interact with normal particles, if they could then they could violate the law that information cannot propagate faster than c. So we have a particle that we can talk about, and speculate about, but would have no consequences in our universe.
And if our brains can interact with tachyons in some way, why doesn’t other kinds of matter? Our brains are simply carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etc, arranged in interesting ways. What makes our brains capable of interacting with tachyons when nothing else in the universe seems able to?
I think you are confused as to who is in charge of this world if there is a moral God, and thus who you should be trying to escape from. The Xtian God does not have some magical control over physics either beyond that which his followers might exert. I am always surprised by this immature image of God especially if it is by anyone who has taken a basic physics course.
Poly said:
I don’t know that this is in “contradistinction” (nice word 
). In fact, I don’t find psychic emanations more likely. I find both propositions equally likely, approximating zero.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. (And if I had, it would have sounded egotistical. )
I’m sorry if it appeared that way. Of course, I meant that none which has been studied has stood up to scrutiny. Certainly not every claim has been studied. But if there are any that are better than the last 8,405 (made up number!), I’d like to see them.
Well, there are certainly skeptics who go around investigating these things. Of course, they can’t hope to keep up with all the claims, but they tend to focus on the ones that are getting the most news and/or claim the most evidence.
Certainly at some point you get tired of seeing the same old same old. Some True Believers complain that UFO-skeptic #1 Phil Klass, for example, is not a skeptic but a grumpy old disbeliever. I don’t know, but even if he is, I can hardly blame him – he’s been investigating these claims for over 25 years now and keeps finding the same problems over and over again (not to mention all the True Believers attacking him!). I can’t begin to think what I’ll be like in 20 years.
Why?
Seriously, why do you say that it is the best one under the Razor? Reincarnation posits the existence of souls that somehow have the ability to (sometimes) keep hold on memories that are stored in the brain. This soul removes itself from one body as it’s dying and inserts itself into a new life that is beginning.
There are an awful lot of entities multiplying there!