So obviously, for reincarnation to be plausible, you must hypothesize some form of non-physical memory that does get transfered. You must hypothesize a soul that is non-physical, but that does contain some form of memory that does get transfered to the next being it inhabits despite the fact that it isn’t physical. Naturally, the mechanism for this has not been discovered or adequately explained, but it is far from impossible. There are lots of low-level events that we have no ability to predict, and no full explanation for, and many of those occur in the brain, where extremely small-scale chemical reactions and chaotic energy flows result in large-scale human behavior.
…except that despite this (entirely hypothetical) non-physical memory; nothing is actually remembered; we start afresh as a new person and develop a new personality; nothing (at least nothing that anybody in this thread has yet properly described) has been carried forward, if punishment is exacted, it is because of something done by someone else - someone the new person is not, and cannot remember being,
So basically, if some things ( souls ) hypothetically exist, made of a hypothetical substance ( soul-stuff ), maintain identity in a hypothetical way ( subconscious memories ), our souls will be affected by a hypothetical force ( karma ) which hypothetically gives us what we deserve due to our hypothetical former lives.
This is supposed to be plausible ? It’s just a little speculative, methinks.
Yep. Stick with Shit Happens
As and when evidence for additional entities arises. this explanation can be modified to become more elaborate as necessary.
“Mind” as something seperate and distinct from the brain or neurological activity within it - Descartes’ “thinking thing”. Any metaphysical view from epiphenomenalism down to eliminative materialism makes the claim that there’s nothing to “mind” apart from brain activity.
Absolutely, it’s entirely speculative since there is no irrefutable evidence. There are many well documented cases where people have claimed to remember details of their past lives, but we can only speculate about whether those are true claims or not.
Reincarnation is just an idea about what might account for some peoples’ experience of a higher purpose and extra knowledge. Why is it that some people are just more important to you than others? Why is it that life often presents you with the same problems dressed in different situations? Why is it that people have an intuition of destiny? Why is it that some otherwise pedestrian events acquire special significance, and are much more memorable than major events? Why is it that people sometimes have a feeling that they have met someone or seen something before, when they have not? Reincarnation is speculation as to why this is the nature of consciousness. It is a story that seems to tie together a lot of loose ends. If you see those loose ends, and you see the connection between them, then reincarnation is plausible. If you don’t, how could it be?
The point though is that people were dying from lack of food and medicine, now they aren’t. It really isn’t karmic that in the old days about 75-90% of conceptions led to death but nowadays only about 35% do.
Plus I have heard that about a fourth of all conceptions lead to abortion. There are about 40 million abortions a year and about 133 million births.
http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Pop/2004.htm
There just isn’t much karma to work out that way. People are living longer and surviving childhood due to nutrition and vaccinations. It has nothing to do with karma.
It is my personal view that as science goes up people’s lives get easier and they are more likely to be empathetic to their neighbors as a result. If your life is harsh and brutal you are less likely to care about the welfare of other people, you’ll just be angry and isolated. If your life is reasonably easy you’ll be happier and more willing to help. Its a sociological fact that happy people are more altrutistic.
That is conjecture. We are born into our socities and luckily society piles the human rights and scientific research for the next generation to pick up where they left off. My generation is in favor of civil rights because my parents generation fought for them. They were in favor of women’s rights because their parents fought for them. They were against slavery because their parents fought to end it. Each generation does not have to start from scratch. The teenagers of Chile do not have to reoverthrow the Pinochet dictatorship of the 1980s, their parents did it already. Since people prefer freedom over serfdom, freedoms just pile on. True, in a catastrophe people will revert (world war 1 as an example led to severe oppression over the next 30-40 years), but at the same time rights and freedoms compound themselves.
9/11 is pretty minor on a global scale. 19 guys flying planes into 3 buildings it not the end of the world. In world war two Britian underwent heavier bombings every night.
I am not certain where the future will lead. I think freedoms and knowledge compound on themselves. People generally don’t form grassroots organizations to fight against freedom and human rights (but it does happen, like gay rights for example, just not as much as fighting for them), but if people are traumatized, threatened or weary they will revert to dictatorship. If global warming leads to massive problems worldwide I’d predict a resurgence in dictatorships. But even those won’t be permanent. The dictatorships that arose as a result of the trauma of WW1 and the great depression are all gone now. The dictatorships in the USSR, Germany, Italy, Spain, the resurgence of the KKK in the US, they are all gone now. The more scientific knowledge we have the easier we can make life. The easier we make life the less people will want and be willing to live under dictatorships.
I fail to see how the stats you’ve presented discredit karma in any way. More people have longer life spans to make their choices in. Great. All part of the cycle.
Would this be conjecture? Would you say America supports this theory, contradicts it, or is somewhere in between? We have the incredibly rich. We have a middle class that is incredibly rich by some standards. Lots of resources. Programs to help people, but still abject poverty in regions and large groups of well off people who don’t seem to care beside those who do. Thinking of Karma and America I think of the passage. “To him whom more is given, more is required”
It is conjecture. Sometimes refered to as a personal view. I agree with your statements here. IMO it only supports Karma as it reflects it. That’s how the cycle of KArma and reincarnation works. It is moral and spiritual growth that brings about these changes. Slavery has been around for thousands of years. Why did it take so long for humanity to begin to abolish it? There had to be a moral and spiritual shift in society. Society had to grow over generations as individuals grow through successive lives. Enough individuals had grown to a point where the slavery could be successfully challenged.
Okay. My point was that it was IMHO the cumulative choices of a too comfortable and complacent society who ignored what their government was doing until the response to those actions came right to their door. The same might be said in Europe during WWII. It was the cumulative choices of individuals that allowed those things to happen. Hitler did not gain power in a void.
Certainly science changes the parameters of our choices and I agree that if people have more and are not threatened they are more likely to share and help others. To me that reflects a lack of moral advancement. There are some pretty egregious discrepancies within our own borders. Our problem doesn’t seem to be a threat of dictatorship but a corrupt system of government that is owned by big money that we as a people {as in of the people and by the people} can’t seem to muster the courage and energy to change. It isn’t easy to see the long range consequences of our choices.
The desire for life to be easier seems to make things worse as much as it does better. Why walk take a bus or ride a bike when driving is easier. Screw the hydrocarbons. Why recycle? The grocery store has lots of plastic bags. {that last for thousands of years}
I also don’t know where it will lead us and future generations. Sometimes I think people can only advance so much on this earth and eventually if the balance of scientific advancement and moral and spiritual growth get to skewed that generation will really be in trouble. Think of all the science fiction “after the nuclear holocaust” novels. Imagine the incredible panic now if a nuclear weapon went off. I shudder to think of it.
Reincarnation doesn’t fly because it is based on the concept that there is a soul.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that there is a “soul” and it is distinct and unique. This leads to a whole different question. Just within the last 50 years or so, the population of the world went from about 2.5 billion to just over 6 billion, and it is estimated to reach over 9 billion in 2050 cite . Where are the extra souls coming from?
God has one of these
and calls it soul aid.
You could probably compute the number of bits needed to store your memories and personality. It would be quite large. You could compute the amount of energy needed to transmit this information from one place to another using information theory. It would be quite large also. Where does this energy come from? Why can’t we detect it?
Given that there is no evidence for this (all the reincarnation cases studied adequately show an information leak from the supposed past life or that the memories don’t quite play out - look at Bridey Murphy, for example.) Thus there is no reason to try to hypothesize any weird memory/unknown energy.
Saying our components have souls is as silly as saying that because a computer runs a program, so do its constituent transistors.
Like I said, you have to hypothesize something non-physical. Energy is physical.
Not everyone agrees with this though. There is lots of evidence on both sides. Granted, scientific evidence for reincarnation is suspect, but many religions take reincarnation as a given. Tibetan Buddhists base the selection of their leaders on the memories of past lives that ordinary children have.
The functioning of computer programs and transistors is fully understood and by design predictable. What does that have to do with barely understood, chaotic, unpredictable systems that self-assemble into meaning-driven systems?
Memories are physical. The structures of our brains that give us personalities are physical. If this soul was to rewire our brains, it would require pure vanilla energy to do it. If it had no physical component, and no energy with which to interact with physical things, we’d never be aware of it.
It’s not surprising reincarnation comes up - if you think personality survives death, the two possibilities for the soul’s destination: someplace like heaven or Valhalla, and some other body. I’m sure from the earliest days people observed that little Ook had a personality just like his dead grandfather.
Never worked with nanometer design, have you? 
How about if a soul determines quantum states that according to QED should be random? That wouldn’t involve any energy, but in the brain it could lead to large-scale effects. We have no way of verifying QED probabilities in complex systems. Perhaps if we did, we would see the soul at work.
Exactly how do we get from the quantum level to the chemical and electrical properties of the brain? And exactly what probabilities are you talking about? Decay? Electron clouds?
Your letting your desire for reincarnation (which I can understand) drive your reading of the data, instead of letting the data suggest interpretations. The first question to ask is whether there is good evidence that anything odd is happening. If we all get reincarnated, why do only a handful remember. And, if we’re animals, why doesn’t anyone remember being a hamster or something?
That’s a good question. My point is that I don’t think you or I can answer it.
Look, I don’t have any data; let me be the first to say that. The reason I’m arguing that reincarnation is possible is that I think it is a good idea, with a positive effect on ones outlook, and I can’t see any reason to reject it out of hand. In my opinion, one should entertain any number of outlandish beliefs. Maybe the best question is, could a person ever be harmed by a belief in reincarnation?
I think there is evidence that something odd is happening. Consciousness is very odd. How is it that you can be conscious of your fingers and toes just because there are electrical pathways between them and your brain? Which neuron is the consciousness located in? The answer is pretty clear: it’s not located in one, it’s located in all of them. But by what mechanism does a collection of atoms conspire to create an integrated consciousness? Reductionist theories have trouble handling that question, and western science is predicated on deconstruction and reduction. Truly, western science just isn’t equipped to approach the question of whether reincarnation is plausible. It went a different direction far too early in its development.
And it doesn’t stop there. You aren’t just conscious of your atoms, you’re conscious of your environment – just because photons are hitting the light receptors in your eyes. Somehow we are able to be conscious of events near the beginning of time, at sub-atomic levels, and through mediums of air, water, radio waves, and telephone cables. All of these atoms distributed through space and time are conspiring to produce your consciousness, and your consciousness therefore extends through all of these mediums. Your consciousness even entertwines with other peoples’ consciousness when they tell you stories and have conversations with you. None of this can be explained by reductionism. Something odd is going on, and it’s amazing to me how vehemently people will argue that it is all just physics and information theory. Those subjects don’t touch on it. They’re way too low-level. The theory of reincarnation may be wrong and ill-supported, but at least it is on the right scale.
So it is similar to the view that religion is good because it can make people do good things? And, you have a stronger case, because I don’t see how a tyrant can use a belief in reincarnation to start a Crusade. I think we can argue about the benefit of being upfront about the evidence for something, but I can’t see any real harm in a belief in reincarnation.
You should start to read about the latest discoveries. Check out mirror neurons , which activate when you watch someone doing something that you’ve done. From an article in the Times, it seems to me to be a biological explanation of empathy, among other things - you can neurologically feel someone else’s pain. Yesterday in the Times there was an article about how people’s pleasure centers were activated when they heard a refutation of a political view they did not share. Then there is the study showing that if you decide to move your hand, your hand gets the signal to move before you are consciously aware of making the decision.
None of this is proof of anything of course, but it seems to strongly support the reductionist view. The brain, though, is a lot more complicated than we give it credit for.
How about :
“Kill the unbelievers, and you will be granted a better next life!”
“Your victories over the heathen are proof that they sinned in their past incarnations !”
“There is no true death, only the cycle of rebirth. Therefore, do not fear to die, or hesitate to kill anyone, no matter their age or sex. All shall be reborn in their proper places.”
“Suffering earns one a better place in the next life. By raping and torturing the prisoners, you aid their future.”
Yes, I’ve heard about these discoveries, and I think they are very exciting too. They still beg the question: why consciousness at all? What is it about an information network that produces an “awareness.” I remember hearing about research into operation of machinery – how after sufficient time operating a gigantic mechanical arm, people begin to experience the arm as if it was their own. I think there is no doubt that the very same thing is happening with the human body – but the question is, what is the root of the awareness? And the answer seems to be that there is no physical root of the awareness; the awareness changes as the whole system changes. Another way to look at that is that the root of the awareness is extra-physical. Reincarnation is just the theory that the root of awareness doesn’t disappear when the system disappears – the extra-physical root retains something without the physical connection, and is recycled. And again, there is no reliable data to support this – just a persistant intuition among the complex physical systems that something odd is going on: a ghost in the machine.
Point to the master of cynicism 
. All I can say in rebuttal is, if you can believe this stuff, you probably would have gone for it whether you believe in reincarnation or not!