Reincarnation: Reality or Myth?

[Borachio]

That's the Lovecraft story.

Iirc, it was written as a series of stories, each beginning at the same point and continuing further along in the narrative.

edit: no, that's not quite right. It was originally serialized for a magazine. So, each "episode" could stand alone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_West–Reanimator

As for everything being material, yes indeed, you could characterize me as a hard materialist. Alternatively, you can think of everything as being Mind, I believe.

I don't think it makes any difference - matter or mind. It is a fundamental premise of mine that there's only one "thing" making up the world, though. Dualism just doesn't work for me at all.

I favour matter at the moment, because that's the most acceptable paradigm for the western mind, it seems.

 

[peter grimes]

To further Gatsby's wonderful post, I am nothing more than a pattern.

A pattern of atoms that have come together in this particular arrangement for a while. But the atoms constituting ME right mind are not the same atoms as will be my body tomorrow, nor even in the next minute!

I am a constantly frothing assemblages a transient matter, perpetually swapping out some atoms for others. The only continuous property of that ME-ness I call "I" is my sense of self - and I'm confident that it's nothing more than an emergent pattern of neuronal states.

 

[illram]

Right, but if you intentionally deconstructed yourself and reassembled your atoms elsewhere, even in exactly the same configuration would your sense of "I" remain? If it is an emergent pattern of neuronal states it should I suppose. Maybe I is an illusion and our sense of self is transient? I left last night and the new I just thinks I am a continuous existing consciousness?

duuuuude.....

 

[Ayatollah So]

what we call the soul is actually an activity which occurs when matter moves and behaves in certain complex ways. In other words, the "soul" is a systems process.

Gatsby really is great.

Right, but if you intentionally deconstructed yourself and reassembled your atoms elsewhere, even in exactly the same configuration would your sense of "I" remain? If it is an emergent pattern of neuronal states it should I suppose. Maybe I is an illusion and our sense of self is transient? I left last night and the new I just thinks I am a continuous existing consciousness?

"I" is an illusion if you try to pack more into it than it will bear; otherwise not. For example, consider a series of Star Trek thought experiments. In experiment 0, you deconstruct / reassemble as in Star Trek. In experiment 1, you deconstruct, and all but 1 atom from you are reassembled, with the 1 replaced by the nearest corresponding atom of Gatsby. In experiment 2, 2 adjacent atoms come from Gatsby. As more atoms come into play, veins and arteries and such are moved the minimum distance required so that tissues can remain healthy. And so on.

Clearly, in experiment 0 the "transported" person will claim to be illram. And in experiment 7 * 10^27, he will claim to be Gatsby. In the middle, he will be confused and distraught.

If you think of "I" such that there has to be* a straightforward answer in this continuum of thought experiments (* which is different from saying you'd have to be able to know it), as to where the survivor would suddenly no longer be "me" -- then your "I" is illusory. On the other hand, if "I" is just a convenient handle with which to label a particular human organism, then no problem.

 

[timtofly]

What people typically call the soul is an emergent property of matter: rather than being due to a particular component of matter itself (e.g. a certain subatomic particle), what we call the soul is actually an activity which occurs when matter moves and behaves in certain complex ways. In other words, the "soul" is a systems process.

You see no evidence why humans would invent something that does not exist? Really??
So how do you account for the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, the Bogeyman and Santa Claus? Humans invent such fictions because they make life variously more interesting, manageable, and bearable.

When you say that the soul is a 'phenomenon which can't be explained or explained away', isn't this effectively an admission that there is no coherent intelligible definition of the soul?

Then why is this process not occurring in every other being with similar physical properties?

Santa clause is an embellished concept of a real human, or so I am told. The others are also human acts that have been relegated to the unknown.

Are you saying that the soul does not exist, but yet attempting to explain it through material means? If it does not exist, then the material that allows it will never be found. Yes it is a phenomenon, unless you want to deny that as well. I am trying to see if people even accept it as existing. If it does not exist as a phenomenon, then it would be useless trying to define it.

I would question the reasoning that a fetus inside the womb is just a part of the incubator. There is a definite point in the process where there is awareness of what is going on around oneself even in the womb. Also there are some bodies that function just normally, but the person is not really there. There are some bodies that are paralyzed yet the person has full capacity of awareness. So the soul is more than just a phenomenon that is the end of what the body itself produces. There is more than just a capacity to learn and gain knowledge. There is the ability to reason and push that knowledge in a forward progression.

 

[Borachio]

To further Gatsby's wonderful post, I am nothing more than a pattern.

A pattern of atoms that have come together in this particular arrangement for a while. But the atoms constituting ME right mind are not the same atoms as will be my body tomorrow, nor even in the next minute!

I am a constantly frothing assemblages a transient matter, perpetually swapping out some atoms for others. The only continuous property of that ME-ness I call "I" is my sense of self - and I'm confident that it's nothing more than an emergent pattern of neuronal states.

Ah. But you're assuming that these material atoms are actually real things, aren't you?

There's no reason to think that the atoms themselves have materiality in this sort of sense.

Atoms are really only a convenient sort of short-hand for thinking of various phenomena which we don't have any kind of handle on.

The atoms themselves are just as much nothing more than an emergent pattern of neuronal states as your sense of your "self", I suggest.

You might, of course, replace atoms with "constituent parts" - of whatever configuration you choose. But I don't think this is going to help.

Still, I'm fairly confident I don't know what I'm talking about.

 

[Gatsby]

Then why is this process not occurring in every other being with similar physical properties?

What makes you think that it isn't? (I assume you're talking about animals here). It probably is happening in other animals, but not to the same degree of complexity and refinement as it does in humans.

Santa clause is an embellished concept of a real human, or so I am told. The others are also human acts that have been relegated to the unknown.

So perhaps the soul is likewise an embellished concept of personal consciousness and survival beyond the great unknown that we call death?

Are you saying that the soul does not exist, but yet attempting to explain it through material means? If it does not exist, then the material that allows it will never be found. Yes it is a phenomenon, unless you want to deny that as well. I am trying to see if people even accept it as existing. If it does not exist as a phenomenon, then it would be useless trying to define it.

I am saying that what we call "the soul" is a mental construct, an emergent property of matter which only persists so long as suitable material conditions/dynamics persist. In other words I am saying that the soul is an illusion; I am not saying that it doesn't exist per se.

I would question the reasoning that a fetus inside the womb is just a part of the incubator. There is a definite point in the process where there is awareness of what is going on around oneself even in the womb.

Why would you question it? Certainly the foetus is sustained by and through the womb, and emerges in the womb. Many of the materials and processes within the foetus can also be found within the womb / the body of the womb's owner. Any yet we can definitively distinguish a foetus from its womb because the foetus is a complex of self-sustaining and self-building materials and processes which eventually reaches the point where it can function independently of the womb. It really does depend on how you look at the issue, but ultimately both the womb and the foetus are devoid of any kind of fundamental unique essence.

There might be response to stimuli in a foetus, but that does not necessarily mean that a foetus has anything like what we would consider to be self-awareness.

Also there are some bodies that function just normally, but the person is not really there. There are some bodies that are paralyzed yet the person has full capacity of awareness. So the soul is more than just a phenomenon that is the end of what the body itself produces. There is more than just a capacity to learn and gain knowledge. There is the ability to reason and push that knowledge in a forward progression.

In the former case (the person not being there) the necessary conditions which support a sense of self or "soul" are not all met. In the latter case (paralysis) the necessary conditions which support these are all met, and the malfunction is in a part of the body which does not play an integral role in creating a sense of self or "soul".

One still has to learn how to reason, and one still has to learn how to use existing knowledge to create new knowledge.

 

[timtofly]

If the soul is just an illusion, would it not be plausible that illusion can manifest itself over different lifetimes to different individuals?

 

[Tahuti]

It may not be necessary, but it seems the whole point is to get to a final state. That state would relate to a "soul" as seeing as how the physical type of body does not matter. What word or concept would we use as the final state? And what part of the individual can exist from the first state to the last one?

Well, our brains are probably a complex set of "urges" that can move humans to seemingly contradictory directions. There probably isn't a "soul" as in a unitary agency mechanism that can override all others.

It may, but in this case we have no reason to believe that it might.

What you say is true in only the case of you having worked out a testable theory of the phenomenon - and the technology to test your theory not existing. In that case there is definitely a potential possibility there, something to be worked out in the future to figure out whether it is actually true or not.

But you have nothing to be tested in mind, so we can't consider it as a potential possibility. You need a rough sketch of the phenomenon, what it is, how it works, how it affects our reality, and so on, for it to be considered as "potentially possible"... or at the very least just how it affects our reality.

Without that, you don't really have anything to be potentially considered as a potential truth.

Well, it is a tricky one at that. There are probably certain gradations of certainty, though we can't really use them seriously in a logical sense because of the inherent arbitrariness when making such "rankings", even though these might work as heuristic.

I hear what you're saying - absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But in this case I think you're wrong. As I said the post you quoted, at this point in time we have a very nearly complete picture of the forces at work in our everyday lives. There's not only a lack of evidence for a "soul*", there's also a lack of space for a force or particle that could interact with matter such that it might give rise to a phenomenon like a soul.

All the observations from astronomy and particle accelerators have imposed ever smaller constraints on the enigmas still left to describe. The stuff we still don't know simply isn't interacting with "normal" matter - if it were, we would have seen it by now. It's simply not there. Note that I'm not talking about subtle quantum arcana or large scale cosmological stuff - I'm dealing directly with how our bodies and brains work. We understand the forces and interactions at this scale very well. There's no soul to be seen.

So any potential reincarnation effect would have to - by definition - interact with the matter in our brains. So how would that happen? We're talking about electromagentism and chemistry here. We understand that stuff extremely well. At this point it is not absence of evidence - it's crossed over to evidence of absence.

The problem of this, is that we still haven't looked into "death" itself, since that isn't possible - not if you do not believe in ESP babble that is. Science of full of U-turns and discoveries that were considered impossible before they were made. It isn't really in a scientific spirit to say that "we understand that stuff extremely well", because the point of science is arguably that we understand very little and always will. It is a never-ending game.

 

[Gatsby]

Right, but if you intentionally deconstructed yourself and reassembled your atoms elsewhere, even in exactly the same configuration would your sense of "I" remain? If it is an emergent pattern of neuronal states it should I suppose. Maybe I is an illusion and our sense of self is transient? I left last night and the new I just thinks I am a continuous existing consciousness?

duuuuude.....

That's a good question and one which could only be answered by actually carrying out such an experiment. Though I imagine that it would not just be the configuration of atoms which mattered, but also their directions of movement (especially in relation to each other). Not sure how the Uncertainty Principle would fit in with this though...

The new "I" is a direct effect of the previous "I" from a moment ago. I suppose you could liken the "I" to a sequence of falling dominos or a Mexican wave: the individual components condition each other from one moment to the next, and the illusion of a continuously moving thing (or an "I") is thus generated.

 

[Gatsby]

If the soul is just an illusion, would it not be plausible that illusion can manifest itself over different lifetimes to different individuals?

How would it do so? If the conditions which generate a particular "soul" begin and end with a corresponding particular human organism, then how would such an illusory phenomenon move onto another organism once the current one expired?

As I noted before, it is possible that people who are born after "I" die may have a lot in common with me. This could be due to having a genetic relationship to me (e.g. because they're my descendents), being exposed to similar ideas and environmental conditions (e.g. being raised in the same part of the same country), or simply due to coincidence. None of these possibilities requires any sort of movement of a "soul" from one being to another, even if one could propose a mechanism for how such a movement might occur.

 

[Ayatollah So]

In other words I am saying that the soul is an illusion; I am not saying that it doesn't exist per se.

Hmm, I always worry about accusations of illusion. For example, someone told me that the "moon illusion" makes the moon look really big when it's low on the horizon, and framed by trees or something. I once had the privilege to experience this full force: looking down a tree lined residential street, the moon looked as big as a continent.

Guess what? The moon IS as big as a continent!

To get an illusion, there have to be two sides that disagree: the representation, and the reality. In the "moon illusion fallacy" the problem was an implicit misdescription of reality by those who explained the "illusion". In philosophy, the tricky part is usually describing the representation. What exactly does experience*, or common sense*, or what have you, say about "souls"? Only if we know this - and I don't feel I do - can we go on to assess illusion or accuracy.

*I know what tradition says about souls, but that ain't necessarily the same.