A Logical Argument for Reincarnation
 

While I am a hardcore atheist, I grapple with the idea that this one life is all there is going to be. I can live to be 200 years old and what will I have learned about existence? Really nothing. This life we are living is just not long enough for us to really learn anything about that life.

If life was really whatever you wanted to make of it and it didn't matter what you did because when you're gone, you're gone, then why don't I just go and kill everybody I hate and just rape all the women I've always wanted to have sex with? Gee I have never burned down a house full of people or sexually molested a child so why don't I just go do these things for the hell of it? There's no payback so what does it matter?

And yet, it DOES matter, doesn't it? Many religious people think that if you don't believe in their god, their religion, that you WILL do those things. Of course, they must be brain-dead because most of the people that currently exist or have ever existed were not members of their religion and they did not go around killing and hurting people just because they wanted to. The truth is, they didn't want to. But the question is WHY? The answer doesn't really suffice: "Because it's wrong!" But why would someone with no religious convictions at all believe it is wrong? "Because society frowns on it!" But that's not the reason you don't do that stuff. You don't do it because YOU don't believe it's right--period. F-uck society. YOU don't believe in behaving that way. But the truth is, you really don't know why.

Serial killers, war criminals who murdered and tortured innocent people, rapists, thieves--they feel no remorse. They're not bothered by what they did. Why would you be bothered by doing the same thing if there is no real payback if you can get away with it?

We can talk about conscience, ethics, increasing the chances of survival by reinforcing certain beliefs and behaviors but all of these are empty if you really analyze them. To say I don't murder people because I have a conscience is saying what? What is a conscience? From Meriam-Webster:

Main Entry:con£science
Pronunciation:*k*n(t)-sh*n(t)s
Function:noun
Etymology:Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin conscientia, from conscient-, consciens, present participle of conscire to be conscious, be conscious of guilt, from com- + scire to know — more at SCIENCE
Date:13th century

1 a : the sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one's own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good b : a faculty, power, or principle enjoining good acts c : the part of the superego in psychoanalysis that transmits commands and admonitions to the ego
2 archaic : CONSCIOUSNESS
3 : conformity to the dictates of conscience : CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
4 : sensitive regard for fairness or justice : SCRUPLE
–con£science£less \-l*s\ adjective
–in all conscience or in conscience : in all fairness

(As an aside--ALWAYS keep a dictionary loaded into your computer, it's so very, very handy.)

Our definitions are tautologic--they go around in circles. To truly understand this definition, you'd have to define every word in it and then each of those definitions must also be defined until you finally end up back where you started none the wiser. The definition fails simply because it doesn't tell us WHY we have a conscience or why others don't.

I posit that the reason some of us have a conscience and some don't MAY be because those who do not have a conscience feel deep down that there is anything to regret after death. Those who do have a conscience, on the other hand, cannot escape the belief that SOMEHOW there WILL be a payback. Maybe it's not some bearded, wizened old man in a robe up in the clouds surrounded by angels that passes judgment. But somehow, some way, we must pay for what we do. Even if you're an atheist.

By examining the various philosophies and religions of the world, I found that the doctrines of karma and reincarnation to be the most palatable explanations. So began a long search for a philosophical argument to support it. After many years, I think I have one that is air-tight. It doesn't explain everything or even much of anything but it does lay out a case for reincarnation and that's enough for right now.

If you're interested, I'll lay it out for you (it's fairly complex).

there are no rewards, get over it. Don't be a pussy.

I don't agree with the statement that those who behave morally are doing so exclusively because of some sort of fear for retribution, in this life or the next.
I'm an atheist, and I truly don't believe there is any judgement in the "next life" or any karmic underpinning to our actions beyond cause and effect. However, I don't go around murdering and raping and being a monster out of fear of prison.
I don't know "why" I'm not a monster, but if we were to speculate, no matter what you take off the table, the simple fact of the matter is that we would not have survived as a species if we did not evolve some sort of base moral code. So in absence of any other evidence, you can say with certainty that there is a very high likelihood that it's just a part of us as a successful human race. Most of us just don't go around killing, raping and drowning kittens because we don't want to, not because we want to but don't want to end up in a prison cell or a fiery pit.
To have that sort of outlook is hugely cynical and flies in the face of all the evidence we see on a daily basis that the majority of us do actually care about others... and not because we think we'll get a medal at the end of the race.

Sounds like

"I'm an atheist because Evangelicals are ****ty, right? But also, I'm not"

Well I certainly believe in positive karma and having good moral scrutiny in ones life verses the opposite. But I believe and understand it having more viability during ones lifetime more so, than the so called, after life, reincarnation, or however you want to label it. When we die, its over with and doesn't matter.
I would actually like to hear your view concerning the subject of your post Larehip, it is quite interesting and I am not completely closed minded on the subject, please continue.

hardcore atheist....... air tight argument for reincarnation..... does not compute captain.

reading this i got the feelin you were stoned bull****tig wit ya bois about religion and just typed it up. id like to hear your explanation. i think a bulk of your passage is 'why dont we break laws and break social norms' and the bulk answer to that would be fear of getting caught and consequences

This. Your premise doesn't hold water, at all.

Yes, at least some of us do. I feel like I'm repeating myself from another thread now and probably many threads in the past, but morality has evolved. It is a behavioural strategy to maximize fitness. Other people are potential resources or potential competitors to us and so we have evolved emotions that motivate us to deal with others in a way that ultimately helps up our own fitness. Morality is part of human nature.

If you observe social animals like wolves or bonobo chimpanzees or dolphins, you'll see they too have rules that dictate how to behave. It may f.ex be that the alpha male is the first who gets to eat. Eating before the alpha is "rude", perhaps seen as a challenge, and provokes aggression. Our ancient ancestors would have social rules too; a more primitive version of todays human morality.

Many things flavour morality, like culture, upbringing, availability of resources and health, but what I wrote is the general jist of it. It's a huge subject and if you want to get further into it, I suggest you read up on some biology. I often recommend reading Dawkins The Selfish Gene because, even though it's not about morality, it will give you great insights into how and why such things inevitably evolve and a greater understanding of what stirs in the depths of not just human nature, but in all of life.

edit :

Sociopaths are, for some reason, underdeveloped emotionally. It might be environmental with a very strong genetic component. Either way, healthy humans are not sociopaths.

That's the fictional narrative that your conscious mind creates to explain the subconscious desires and inclinations that we all act on. You can test it by asking yourself if you've ever done anything for which you could be arrested and sent to prison. If the answer is yes, then you don't abstain from activities out of fear of going to prison.

We could have evolved any type of moral code or none at all and the results wouldn't be appreciably different in terms of survival. Psychopaths have survived quite admirably.

It's not fear of hell either. It's a subconscious feeling that once the deed is done it has a price attached to it. It cannot be unwritten. Nothing more than that.

Cynical it is. The scientific finding that we don't have any idea why we do what we do and believe what we believe and must make up narratives to explain is about as cynical as it gets. But it has been proven. Do we actually care about others and why?

Okay, the argument. Let's get to it.

First, we have to establish that we exist. How do we do that? Descartes put it best: "I can doubt everything, except one thing, and that is the very fact that I doubt." We know we exist because we have thoughts. Put another way: we have self-awareness.

There is the brain-in-the-vat argument that goes: You are nothing but a brain in a vat of solution in the laboratory of a mad scientist (the same guy who created the human centipede). He dumps various chemicals into the solution and shoots voltage through it and this causes you to have various sensations--sitting on a beach in Waikiki watching the sunset as the waves gently lap the shore, running down a dark alley for your life from a knife-wielding maniac with your adrenalin pumping and your heart in your throat, having hot belly-rubbing sex with the person of your wildest fantasies, sitting in a chair in front of your computer reading this post, etc. None of it is really happening. It's nothing but an electro-chemical reaction in your suspended brain being stimulated by a madman. How could you prove you are really where you believe you are, who you are, what experience tells you what and where you are and not simply a brain in a vat? You can't. You must doubt all your experiences, sensations, memories, beliefs. But you can't doubt that, in some way or other, you exist.

"And now, Igor, we put the lime in the coconut!"

And what is the agency responsible reaching this conclusion? In a word--consciousness. You are a conscious being. So let's define consciousness in an experiential way that we can all understand and relate to:

I. I experience.
II. I know I experience because I remember my experiences.
III. I can also remember remembering my experiences.
IV. I can remember some experiences as many times as I wish--an infinite number of times theoretically.
V. How many experiences must I remember to be conscious? All of them.

That's it. Simplistic but to the point. These are the bare minimum requirements in order to be conscious. You can add more but it makes no difference here. You can't take any of them away, however. But most importantly, they are a priori or self-evident. I don't want to get into long discourses on dualism and materialism. This clutters the landscape unnecessarily. Let's keep it simple and see where it takes us.

Okay, what is an experience? There are two kinds--inward and outward. Or those that happen within the mind of the experiencer and those that happen outside. For now, we are only interested in those that happen outside or what we call external events.

When you sense an event, you have an experience, right? Not quite. You must have a memory of the event that you sensed. Why? Because without it, can you know you had the experience? Or, more properly speaking, was it experience at all? Suppose, we are standing on opposite sides of the street and two cars collide in the street between us. I look at my watch and yell across to you that the accident occurred at 4 pm. An hour later, you say to me. "At 4 pm today, we witnessed a collision of two cars in the street."

But suppose I was drunk at the time and in a blackout mode and now say, "Sorry but I don't remember that at all."

Even though I witnessed the accident and even noted the time, without a memory of that event, did I experience it? Now you might say, "Yes, you were there." (The empirical view) But that doesn't matter to me--I don't have any recollection whatsoever of this event. I may as well have not been there. Without memory, I have no experiences.

Hence, my experiences are a chain of memories of events. I live in the same area I grew up in but I spent 6 years in the armed forces traveling much of the world. I was changed so much by those experiences that I am not the person I was before I left town/the state/the country. But if I could not remember anything of my travels would I be any different than before I left? No.

Moreover, if I lost the memory of all my travels and everything I encountered during those travels would I just have this 6-year gap of no memories? No, I couldn't or I would be remembering something--namely, a period of no memories. In other words, my consciousness is continuous. It has no gaps in it. If I lost the memories of my travels the day after I returned to town, it would seem to me as though I never left. Instantaneously, 6 years just went by. You can't remember having no memory. To be aware of nothing means you cannot even be ware of the passage of time or you would be aware of something. CONTRADICTION.

Ok, let's break here. I have things I have to do and I want to make you sure you understand what I have said here. If you have questions, ask away.

So, suppose you should wake up tomorrow morning and you have complete amnesia. I mean, COMPLETE amnesia--you have forgotten EVERYTHING. You are like a newborn infant and must relearn everything from scratch--how to walk, talk, learn your name, use the toilet, everything.

When do your memories start to accumulate?

To make answering that easier, let us assume that you were born at time T0. At time T1, you got amnesia. Now between T0 and T1 you lived a decently full life of, say, 30 years or 50 years, but let's make this interval long enough for you have reached well into your adulthood. During that time, you went to school, graduated, learned to drive, went to college, joined the service, got out and got married and had 3 kids. Suddenly, T1 arrives and you wake up with no memories of anything that happened in your life whatsoever--a total blank slate.

When do your memories start to accumulate? At T1 or later. Everything between T0 and T1 is lost. Your memories can only accumulate at T1 or later.

Were you ever conscious between T0 and T1? Well, if you meet the criteria I listed in my previous post--

I. I experience.
II. I know I experience because I remember my experiences.
III. I can also remember remembering my experiences.
IV. I can remember some experiences as many times as I wish--an infinite number of times theoretically.
V. How many experiences must I remember to be conscious? All of them.

--then you were conscious. But there is a problem now:

You lost your memories and can no longer recall them as many times as you wish or at all. They no longer meet the criteria of consciousness. Then could have you been conscious? No. And yet, you were conscious during that time. CONTRADICTION.

Will you get complete amnesia at some time in the future? No. How do you know? Because you are conscious right now and consciousness is continuous. If your T1 moment was to occur, say, 5 years from now--2018--your memories would not start to accumulate until then. All the memories/experiences that occurred before would be wiped out. Life began for you, as far as you know, in 2018. It would just BE 2018 for you. Since it is earlier than 2018 and you are conscious, you know you will not get complete amnesia in 2018 (or any other future date) or you simply wouldn't be conscious right now.

Now--if death extinguishes consciousness as many people assume, then death is a complete amnesia. So, now we can say that you WILL die at some time T1 in the future. Your entire life experiences and memories from T0 to T1 are wiped out. When do your memories start to accumulate? At T1 or later. But what about that whole life you lived from T0 to T1? It's gone. And yet you WERE conscious during that time (i.e. you met the criteria of consciousness). CONTRADICTION.

Conclusion: Death cannot extinguish consciousness. If it does, then you cannot be conscious now.

Once you are conscious, you are always and forever conscious. Consciousness, then, is eternal.

This is a big piece of philosophical meat to swallow but it is essential that you you understand it so I'll leave off here to give you time to digest it. Any questions--ask.

This is the most preposterous argument I've heard since I tried to debate a member of the Flat Earth Society when I was a young man. I discovered then the futility of attempting to reason with someone who was using fallacy and illogical impossibility as a weapon.

I think he's sending smoke signals

Try me.

The answer is yes. I've broken many laws, some reasonably serious. However, those actions were not at odds with my general sense of morality. They were at odds with legal expectation. Furthermore, I've done things that I consider immoral that have no legal ramifications, and I've felt bad about them enough to go to great measures to prevent such actions from reoccurring, based on the effect they had on the parties involved, who I care about. I don't understand how you're willing to speculate that all of humanity acts out of fear of reprisal, and simultaneously are unwilling to entertain the likelihood that most of us genuinely care about the well being of others because it's just part of who we are (most of us), which is far more evident than your sweeping assumption, which can be quantified as unlikely if you walk into a prison and see people occupying it without being able to classify them all as psychopaths.

I hope you're aware that the majority of the human race is not psychotic... The human race as a majority is what drives the whole. To use a statistical minority to make assumptions about the majority is fallacious. In fact, had the majority not been successful at co-existing with its own species, the deviant minority would not have survived either, since it's still part of the species. So in all actuality, that minority owes its survival to the co-existence of the species as a whole, which evolutionary morality supports in the first place.

Since you have unrequited access to the collective subconscious of our entire species, please tell me why people still feel remorse for things that are commonly forgiven.

Cynicism isn't in the detached analysis of behavior. It's part of behavior.

You clearly missed the central point of what I said, so I'll emphasize it. Then onto my ignore list you go

The problem with this is you're basing consciousness on memory, which is a biological function, which ceases to function when you die. Amnesia doesn't erase a person's physical existence, it simply erases a persons reference to it. The existence was still there, and the person was conscious of it at the time, but that doesn't throw physics and biology out the window simply because you don't remember anything after you die...

I think you're going too far into the philosophical when the simplest answers are right here on earth, and contradictory to your venture.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. You said earlier you wouldn't be murderer or what not because of the legal consequences. I said if you ever broke the law before then you don't abstain for that reason because you have no problem with breaking the law. Now you've switched gears and are saying murder, rape and such are at odds with your general sense of morality. Part of my point was you don't do certain things because YOU don't want to and now you seem to be confirming that. My point was further that you don't know why you don't want to you just don't. You can cover it up with saying it's at odds with your morality but that doesn't really explain anything. You're just saying you don't do that because you don't do that.

I'm not talking about those things. I'm talking about doing something that could land you in jail but it didn't stop you from doing it. Some things we will do and some things we will not do. Why? We don't know. Or we could say that we were raised that way but then that's doing things automatically without any real thought going into it which is doing it without really knowing why.

I'm not saying people behave a certain way out of fear of reprisal. It's cause and effect. We watch bad causes beget bad effects and that, in turn, affects what we do. I wouldn't call that reprisal. We know once things are set in motion--that's it. It will have to run its course and we can't change it. That has to nag like a b-itch at the root of our subconscious.

You mean psychopathic? Psychopaths are not psychotic necessarily. They are generally as sane as anyone perhaps even more so in some ways. They are simply devoid of a conscience.

That doesn't explain the presence of the psychopath or the proliferation of such. The truth is, no one is even sure how much of the human race is psychopathic. We only know they are found in every race, country, culture and both genders. Psychopaths are the premier solipsists. Solipsism is a philosophy that holds that you are the only real being and the others around you exist only for your benefit and can be used anyway you like. They don't really feel anything, they only appear to for your benefit. It's called a defunct philosophy but nothing could be further from the truth. EVERY ontological philosophy MUST have some degree of solipsism in it. This philosophy I am expounding relies on it a great deal.

And perhaps human beings are that way--we are all to some degree psychopathic. We have to be. If we were emotionally devastated by all the death and tragedy we read in the news everyday, we'd be complete wrecks in the space of a week, totally dysfunctional. Being able to detach ourselves emotionally from the tragedies of others and even joke about them also affords us some clarity, some sense, some way to learn from it without paying too high a price emotionally. And that's why, I believe, that psychopaths survive and in large numbers, because we share enough of their characteristics. But just as you can take solipsism too far, some people take psychopathic behavior too far.


You can figure that out on your own. You too have access. That's why it's called COLLECTIVE.



It's part of nature and nature is cynical. What do you call the food chain? No loving god would have come up with something so brutal and thoroughly absorbed in self-interest. It's a bloody outrage.

???
As you wish. Your loss.

I am advancing an argument that says that does not happen. You have to counter that argument with one of your own. We can assert anything we want to but that doesn't make it philosophically sound.

First, I am not talking about real amnesia. I am positing a hypothetical amnesia--one that completely wipes your memory clean. I don't know that any such form of amnesia exists and I doubt it. I'm using it as a metaphor for death. If death wipes out all the memories of this life you are living, then how can you be conscious right now? If death occurs in a future moment, T1, and everything before it is wiped out then your consciousness can only begin accumulating memories at that point T1 or later but since you are dead at T1 then that can't happen and it is as though you never lived at all. You must have been unconscious your entire life. But since you know you are conscious now, then your future death will not eradicate consciousness. Somehow, some way, it survives.

They are right in your own experience. That's what this argument is based on--your own experience. What's not part of anyone's experience is a big spook in the sky watching everything you do while sending down himself as his own son to deliver messages we don't give a s-hit about.

You could destroy the argument easily by proving there is no such thing as memory. But you're going to have a very difficult time of that. You're welcome to try.

I said I'm not a murderer/rapist because I don't want to go around murdering and raping people, not because I don't want to go to prison. Perhaps you misunderstood my post. It follows that I think murder and rape is immoral. I don't care where that morality comes from. It still isn't the kind of thing I refrain from doing simply because there's a prison sentence attached to it. I haven't changed my position on this.


So then your answer is unsupported speculation? I gave you a supported reason that it's to our evolutionary advantage to co-exist with our own species. We can speculate as to the intellectual mechanisms along those lines and probably be far closer to the mark than "reincarnation".

Sure. But at the same time, I don't think about driving to my parent's house and murdering them in their sleep simply because I won't be able to bring them back from the dead. I care about them, and I don't think I'd be able to go through with that even if I could bring them back.

It's true we are able to emotionally detach from far-removed tragedies. It was not required of our species to be emotionally attached to every living human or thing. Early man existed in tribes. It was to that tribe's advantage to invest in it, not necessarily the entirety of the species, at least emotionally or consciously. But even then, it was still necessary to co-exist with other tribes, because the gene pools needed the opportunity to become diverse.
I don't see this [being conditionally attached] as true psychopathy in our standard definition, as I don't believe such a thing to be a mental disorder. We ourselves characterize disorders based on a norm, not a standard outside of our own capacity to adhere to.
It's easier to see the relevance of this via the fact that we emotionally connect to people we spend time with, versus someone we've never met. It should be obvious why there are differences in emotional attachment there.


I'm not asserting a philosophical argument. I'm asserting facts and reasonable conclusions.

This makes absolutely no sense from a neurological standpoint.
Memories and consciousness is a function of our brains. When the brain ceases to function, that person's consciousness does as well. It doesn't mean that the brain was not functioning before it stopped. It just means it stopped.

Take a computer, for example. Pretend it is sentient. It does calculations with its processor, and stores information on its drives that it can access at any time. Let's say it prints out useful calculations, then someone pulls the plug and it stops functioning. It can no longer calculate, but it has calculated, and there is evidence of that. It does not go on calculating, as it is turned off. Its mechanisms functioned, now they don't. It was sentient during this time, and had consciousness... no longer having it does not change this. It doesn't matter from which perspective this is observed. It's verifiable. Even if it was not verifiable, the print out still exists as evidence, even though the collective consciousness is not there to see it. (tree falls in the woods...)

Subjective experience does not dictate the physical world, so we use a plurality of experience to make observations about it and arrive at a probable conclusion. Which is what I'm doing. I find that to be more valuable than a single person's philosophical meanderings that have no relevance to the world we live in.
Why would I try to do that? The problem here is you seem to be arguing that memory is something other than a neurological function, which you're still not any closer to proving.

Though not quite as admirably as human morality, which they have to feed off like parasites in order to survive.

Not at all. Psychopaths have wrought tremendous changes to human history and consciousness. The Holocaust, the Stalin purges, Mao's Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot, the Inquisition, etc. The world will long reverberate to the impact of the psychopaths among us. I'll go so far as to say that human morality and ethics seem incapable of progressing without them. Nothing will make you appreciate compassion and empathy like running into someone who doesn't have any.

My point was more that while psychopaths are perfectly adept at manipulating people in a society with moral values, that doesn't make a society full of psychopaths viable from an evolutionary p.o.v.

I've read your post, Dali, and I appreciate your thoughts on the matter and I'll get back to them sooner or later but I don't want to get bogged down in that right now or I'll never finish this. Let me finish posting my argument.

Okay, having presented a case for the survival of consciousness after death, how do we then make the leap to reincarnation? In a word--sensation.

We have sensations of two particular types: 1. Physical--which are sensations related to the sense-organs such as feeling hot, seeing an apple, smelling bacon frying, touching a rough surface, hearing the chirping of birds, etc. In other words, the sensations caused by and indicative of outside events. 2. Mental--which are sensations related to emotion and qualia. Qualia are sensations we have that are so personal that we cannot describe to others. If I twist my ankle, I can only describe the pain to you, you can't experience it directly. I cannot explain my perception of the color blue. The way I experience the taste of chocolate is known only to me. I cannot convey it to you. The sensation of falling is another quale.

What sets sensation apart from memory is that memory is not real-time but sensation is. I can remember an event long after it happened but the sensations I felt occurred only during that event and are now over. While we can remember an event strongly over the passage of years, sensations will always dwindle to zero eventually. That's why a serial killer must keep killing, for example. For a while, he satisfies himself by recalling his last kill and how good it felt, how sexually gratifying it was, but sooner or later that memory just won't cut it anymore and he will need a new one to replace it with.

Memory and sensation are alike in that both occur in a two-fold process. First I sense an event, then I recall it. That constitutes an experience. With sensation, first I have a certain sensation but MUST experience it again to complete the full sensation. If you get hit the chest with a foul ball, many sensations will go through you but they are so fleeting that you can't categorize them. If you are hit again some months or years later with a another foul ball foul ball or some other object hits you, you will remember the last time you felt that sensation. In fact, you'll remember every single time it's happened. If you hit a patch of black ice in the road and go into a spin, you will remember all the previous times these particular sensations were experienced--when you lost control in the snow driving down the freeway, when your bald tires on a rain-slicked caused you to lose total traction, etc. In other words, you must re-live sensations. You recall memories, you re-live sensations.

In life, you are building up a never-ending catalog of memories and sensations and you'll go on having them right up to the moment of death. Dying in itself produces sensations. But if death extinguishes consciousness, then you can't re-live those experiences. But you can't experience them disembodied either. So what must happen? You must be born again in a new body ready to reap what was sown in the last life. What is called karma.

Why isn't there a heaven or hell? Well, suppose heaven is a place of eternal bliss. How could you feel that? Your consciousness doesn't work that way. All sensations must dwindle to zero over time so this blissful feeling will simply fade. If heaven was a place of transcendent and eternal joy then any earthly memory you have is painful in comparison. CONTRADICTION. You can't have painful memories in a realm where there is only joy for all eternity.

Same with hell. If hell is a place of eternal pain and torment, you can't experience it that way because all sensations dwindle to zero over time. If you can never feel happiness again in this place of agony then any earthly memory will be pleasant in comparison. CONTRADICTION. You can't have pleasant memories in a realm where there is only sorrow for all eternity.

While I have skipped over a lot of stuff to make this as concise as I dare, that is my argument in a nutshell.

I'm still waiting for you to make a logical transition from dying to reincarnation, and explain why it must be true.

You simply said,
This is basically saying that you can't experience anything after you die, therefore reincarnation, because you must reap what you've sown.

That's quite a leap. And it ignores the fact that memory, consciousness and experience is still dependent on you being alive to do it, since it's a neuro-physiological process.

Why don't I remember any of my past lives? That makes reincarnation seem rather pointless.

Good point. And according to Lord Larehip, if the memories aren't there, then they didn't exist to begin with. So ultimately, nothing exists. Not even Solipsism.

Good job. Argument over. Whatever response he replies with won't have happened, therefore, good thread. Good fun. Bye bye.

Oh, but there is one last question, isn't there? What about god? Is there a god? Quite simply, I don't know but I had no reason to resort to one.

Then how does this mechanism of reincarnation work? I don't know but there is no reason to assume it is anything other than a natural and automatic process.

But what about the end of the universe? How do we deal with that if there must be reincarnation but no place to reincarnate into?

Now we enter the Twilight Zone.

If the universe come to a crashing end, it doesn't matter because consciousness is eternal. What is eternity? Time beyond measure. Indeed, eternity isn't really time because time by definition is finite, an interval--it is measurable whereas eternity cannot be measured. Our consciousness is eternal but its workings are not because we cannot experience eternity directly. Everything dwindles to zero eventually, everything decays, everything dies.

So how would we experience eternity in our finite state? Quite simply, we cannot reach the end. In the totality of our existence, even if we live billions of lifetimes, at the end of the universe we can only go back, Jack, and do it again. We would just live that same succession of lives over again with no idea that we are doing so. Each time feels like the first time, the only time. But, gee, couldn't that mean the universe has already ended and we are just re-living lives we've already been through a millions times? Yes, it could. Absolutely, it could.

But let's look at just this life you are living right now. What happens to it? You know you're going to die someday. And even though consciousness is eternal, the person you are now will cease to be. It will be as though this person never lived. Doesn't that contradict this whole argument? Yes, it might. One solution is that the total conscious entity that is going through all these births and deaths contains the "record" of this life and has access to it so that the conscious being you are now is not lost at death but is, in fact, retained. But even if that is so what happens to this you that you are right now, does it just go dormant? No.

Just as you must re-live all your various incarnations at the end of the universe, you must simply re-live this one life over and over again but each time will feel like the one and only time. And the same is true for all the other lives you have lived and will live. In fact, it isn't really proper to speak of them as a succession of lives. We are living them all right now--over and over and over again. Cogs in cogs.

For an eternal consciousness, a succession incarnations doesn't make sense. That implies time, a sequence, which eternity has no need for. An eternal consciousness just lives all its incarnations at once, over and over and over endlessly. So even if the universe ends, we wouldn't know it because it wouldn't matter.

Is there no way off this insane karmic merry-go-round, this samsara???

Perhaps. Ask yourself what then is reality if lives and worlds repeat regardless of whether there even is a universe left?? It is a dream of the total conscious entity that you really are. And you and everyone and everything are just bit players and props in that dream. You and everyone are all part of the dreamer just as everything and everyone is just some part of you in one of your dreams. That means we are really one consciousness--asleep. And perhaps someday, the dreamer will awaken and we will all be called home, just as all the characters in one of your dreams is called home when you awaken. Cogs in cogs.

We know that a dream can be real but whoever thought that reality could be a dream? We exist, of course, but how…in what way? As we believe, as flesh-and-blood human beings? Or are we just parts of someone’s feverish, complicated nightmare? Think about it and then ask yourself, do you live here in this country, in this world? Or do you live instead in the Twilight Zone? --Rod Serling from the Twilight Zone episode Shadow Play.

What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?--Friedrich Nietzsche

I think I read what you just posted, but I don't remember it, because I've reincarnated before I finished the last sentence.

And I thought you were a lost cause.

Just poking fun. :)

The idea is interesting, it just needs to have interesting things filling all the plot holes.

Lord Larehip,

I found this article today and I thought it was pretty interesting in regard to psychopathy.
You might find it interesting as well.

Brain research shows psychopathic criminals do not lack empathy, but fail to use it automatically

Using this logic, I could say that energy is created from the object when the object is created and when that object is destroyed, energy is also destroyed. Is that true? No. Energy is always conserved meaning it cannot be created or destroyed. There is no reason to assume the same would not be true of consciousness.

Science has a split personality that way. It holds a materialist view in that matter is the fundamental building block of the universe and that consciousness arises from it (i.e. consciousness is epiphenomenal). I disagree, I say that consciousness is the fundamental building block of the universe and that matter is epiphenomenal (the idealist view although there are a variety of idealist philosophies that do not agree). Yet quantum mechanics, the very basis of modern physics has already yielded a number of scientifically verified findings that disputes if not disproves the materialist view.

One of the most startling is the discovery that particles are really waves and that it is, in fact, consciousness that collapses this wave function to a localized area in space-time--what we perceive as a particle. Without consciousness, this reality would not exist but in potentia. Everything you see around you only exists because a consciousness observes it--yours. Moreover, the wave function of each and every object is in a constant state of expanding and collapsing. It is never just one or the other. We are simultaneously waves and particles at the same time even these are total opposites. How? We don't know. We can't even perceive both at once. It is a wave when we aren't looking and a a particle when we are.

In short, consciousness creates the universe and not just one time 15 billion years ago but every instant. Every instant--too short to be measured (reverse eternity, if you will)--your consciousness builds your universe around you completely from scratch, anihilates it in the same instant and then builds it again.

But each time is the first time. If you could put a counter on it to log how many times your consciousness rebuilds the universe, it would only register "1" every time you looked at it. It too is being rebuilt every instant.

Physicists have found this is true of atoms also. Why are atoms so identical, they wondered? They discovered that electron orbits are discontinuous. The electron orbit is recreated every instant. It has no past and no future. It has only the present, the very instant and then it's gone. The orbits are standing waves that cannot be affected by anything. Since we are made up of atoms, this is also our true nature but we don't realize it.

This life that you are living over and over again, it is doing the same thing. Each time it cycles is the first time. Which is why it's identical each time. If it was actually a different cycle, different things would happen.

It's a hard concept to grasp but basically when something is eternal then it cannot end and must either go on forever or repeat infinitely. Our existence goes on forever but our individual lives repeat infinitely and if the universe goes up like a nuclear bomb, then our existence will go into infinite repeat. And this may have already happened. We can never know. All we can say is that the effects of eternity are always acting upon us.

If psychopaths are to some degree like the rest of us, then we are to some degree psychopaths. The difference is one of degree, according to this study. I think that's probably true.

An acquaintance of mine argued over this some weeks ago. He's new agey kind of guy and has this violet light Christian love thing in his head. He was quite startled to find the following in a book called "The Source of Music--Music and Mantra for Self-Realisation" by Sri Chinmoy. So I went out and found a copy. From the chapter "God the Supreme Musician":

Music is God's Dream. God is dreaming at every moment through music. His Dream is called the cosmic Reality, the universal Reality. From the highest point of view, music is not mere words; it is not a concept, not an idea. Music is Reality in its highest form. God is playing the supreme Music in and through us, His chosen instruments.

So there it is again--We are just bit-players in in the dream of a transcendent consciousness or "god" if you will. We are just notes, each lifetime a repeating theme, the totality of lives a symphony of existence that is looking for a coda.

As I wrote earlier, science already has a brilliant answer to why most humans have a conscience. You should get into some evolutionary biology, behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology. These are related subjects that I'm sure would answer so many questions in your life.

Does this explain animal behaviour as well, then? F.ex are dogs only nice to people because they subconsciously worry about their karma? Is a vampire bat that shares blood with its starving neighbour doing so out of fear of what might happen in the next life?

Also, shouldn't it automatically follow that people who f.ex smoke are on average less moral? After all, they know that there are bad consequences for smoking, both consciously and unconsciously, yet they still do it. You'd think they would also be less moral, even if they subconsciously know they would pay for it in the next life.

So in other words, you went into this with complete bias and your air-tight explanation isn't air-tight.


This is a statement which is not true. Evolution behaves predictably and so does not produce "any kind of moral code". Generally speaking, for a moral code to evolve, it has to make sense as a strategy to maximize the fitness of the individual who holds that moral code. Humans, being a social species, have generally evolved moral codes that promote cooperation which is an important reason why we are such moral beings. You can maximize your own fitness by cooperating with others. But it also follows that we have evolved exploitative behaviour.

When you have a population where the general behaviour can be described as "I scratch your back, you scratch mine", that cooperation may raise everyone's fitness and so it may be in everyone's selfish interest to be in on it. Behaviours (and morals) evolve that help us cooperate because it is a good fitness strategy. But it can be an even better strategy to be a parasite in that system by getting your back scratched, but not scratching anyone else back. After all, you would get the positives of being in a cooperative environment, but not the negatives - the cost of having to help the others. So, ironically, a cooperative environment in itself may reward more selfish strategies that exploit that willingness to cooperate. The more cooperation there is, the more rewarding it would be to exploit that. But if everyone was selfish and didn't cooperate, everyone would have lower fitness for it. The few who then learned to cooperate would do better than the selfish ones and so, ironically, a completely selfish environment could also promote cooperation by making cooperation a comparatively more successful strategy.

So basically, both the exploitation strategy and the cooperation strategy are kept in the population and there is a ratio of exploiters/cooperators were being one is as good as being the other, ex. 90% cooperators and 10% exploiters. If you move away from this ratio in the direction of a higher percentage of cooperators, being an exploiter becomes more rewarding. If you move towards more exploiters, being a cooperator becomes relatively more rewarding. Natural selection helps keep the ratio somewhat stable over time and, generally speaking, this ratio is when the majority cooperate and a minority exploit. You might think exploitation would be so good a strategy that the suggested 10% seems too small - and indeed it can be. However, it is also in the interest of every cooperator to increase the ratio of cooperators by making it more rewarding to cooperate and less rewarding to exploit. (The reverse isn't quite true; someone who exploits generally won't benefit from there being more exploiters). Defense strategies against exploitation evolves. The ability to judge whether or not an individual would reciprocate kindness on your part is an excellent counter strategy. So are laws - moral/social codes or otherwise - that further promotes cooperation and demotes exploitation. This moves the ratio in favour of the cooperators.

So humans are great at cooperating and generally make it so that it is rewarding to cooperate and not so rewarding to exploit, but that doesn't mean that humanity doesn't possess exploitative strategies to take advantage of our knack for cooperation. After all, such strategies would have evolved and we are very complicated animals. A capacity for exploiting others may arise in someone by various means. For example, someone who generally cooperates may become an exploiter if that individual's environment changes. The capacity for being an exploiter, or when that capacity should trigger, may also be coded for genetically and perhaps a lack of the "right" stimulation could lead to a general lack in the capacity to cooperate, for example resulting from a reduced ability to read others emotions, again leading to quicker resort to exploitative behaviours.

So how moral you are comes from a mixed bag. A lot of it comes from genes (in a sense, all of it), some come from environment; both what you've learned and as a reaction to the environment you find yourself in and some of it may be explained by your general health. For example, your general ability like memory, happiness and so on will affect how moral you are. In the most extreme example, a person who is relatively moral may become less moral with the right (or wrong) damage to the brain.

Bottom line is, morality is part of human nature (we know why) and you don't need a fear of karma and the next life to explain it.

I realize I've written quite a bit now, even if it is a drop compared to the ocean about all that can be said or written on the subject. Perhaps some of it is difficult to understand depending on your knowledge of evolution. Feel free to ask if anything is unclear.

Science studies humans as well as other things. Of course there is a scientific explanation to this. You just have to look it up.

The scientific finding that we don't have any idea is a "scientific" finding you've made up.

Yes, there is, because all evidence points to consciousness as being the consequence of interactions taking place in a brain. Without an organ, or possibly something else, to facilitate such interactions, no consciousness can arise.

That is a pretty wild assumption to make, I think.

This is how far I got into your post before I met another statement and assumption. How do you know wave function collapses only happen as a result of consciousness?

I have heard that it is actually possible to know that they do take place in the absence of an observer, but exactly why I can't remember. I may look it up. Quantum physics are very difficult and I'm sure most quantum physicists will agree. As a result, one should be careful when using it as a basis to construct one's world view. This is difficult pioneer science. Are you sure you understand it all correctly? As Richard Feynman said, "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics".

From the general principle of occam's razor, one should accept that the universe is not generated from our consciousness alone. The alternative raises too many difficult questions. For instance, if everything is generated by our consciousness, why then this illusion of cause and consequence going way back to a time when seemingly there was no consciousness? Why do we dream up evolution? Why don't we know everything about the universe? How was the universe created? Why does the universe, or we as we create it, trick ourselves, for example by leaving dinosaur fossils for us to find?

Furthermore, following your line of thinking, it seems that pursuit of knowledge about material things seem futile. Yet for all we know, cause and consequence do seem to affect us in predictable ways. Dinosaurs seem to have lived, f.ex you can have a sensation of looking at a fossil or touching an old bone. And if the world does exist independently of consciousness, we will have improved our situation by learning more which is true.

What do you gain from believing it is all generated by your consciousness? Almost nothing. It seems a hopelessly futile and solipsist idea to me. What do you gain from believing the world would exist even if you were not in it? A universe you could possibly hope to understand.

Logically, it's air-tight. But it doesn't prove a thing. If it did, I would be the greatest thinker in the whole of human history.

Maybe you're thinking of quantum decoherence which gives the appearance of wave function collapse as an explanation of its observance. Wave collapse is not fundamental here and there may be equivalent processes to explain it. But it brings its own set of bizarre theories such as hidden variables and the multiverse (parallel universes). I can make use of those as well.

Almost nothing is pretty damn good! I'll take it! Idealism gives you free will, materialism can't even decide if there is free will or not but strongly leans towards not. Idealism gives a glimpse beyond death and before birth, materialism holds that there is nothing before birth or after death. Idealism explains morality as causation of consciousness (because we have free will), materialism holds that morality is nothing more than evolutionary programming linked to survival.

Doesn't prove that consciousness is epiphenomenal. Doesn't prove anything.

I don't know. I'm not an expert on what goes in an another animal's head. I know what goes on in mine and, to some extent, yours and THAT is what I work with. I don't know what a dog believes or if a dog has beliefs. I wouldn't waste my time philosophizing over it.

Occam's razor isn't going to be of much help in an area where every theory is as complex as the next.

Because there never was such a time. If I say consciousness is fundamental to the universe, it means you can't go back to when there was no consciousness. Your having a major misconception here and that makes me wonder if you understand at all what I am getting at.

We don't. Who said we did?

If the universe is fundamentally matter and you are also fundamentally matter then why don't you know? Pointless questions.

Watch the Science Channel. I think they present all the prevailing theories.

It doesn't work like that. Yes, you do not understand idealism at all. Do an internet search and educate yourself on this subject and we'll talk again. Right now it's useless. You can't argue against someone's position if you have no idea what their position is.

Nothing can be proven. Well, almost nothing. You yourself cited Descartes some posts back.

Because it is impossible to prove f.ex that the pencil you hold in your hand really is a pencil (and not f.ex just the illusion of a pencil), we don't actually build up a scientific understanding of the universe by going around and proving things. We may statistically prove something, but that's not the same thing.

Instead, our understanding of the universe is built up by collecting evidence. The pencil looks like a pencil. We can analyze the materials like wood and graphite or how you are able to write with it and the intent by which it was made. The answers to all this should provide evidence that what you are holding is a pencil, but at some point, you're just going to have to believe in that evidence - or not.

So we build our understanding of the universe piece by piece, by adding more evidence onto the evidence we've gathered so far. This is why principles like Occam's Razor is important. When furthering our knowledge of the universe, we have to make assumptions about it. But every time we make an assumption, there is a chance that assumption is wrong. So to reduce the risk of making wrong assumptions, we generally pick the explanations who build upon the amount of evidence we already have and which require us to make less new assumptions about the universe - because every new assumption runs the risk of being wrong.

That is what logical thinking is. What you have constructed is something entirely different. Instead of building on evidence, which f.ex points to the mechanics of the quantum world giving rise to a macro material world which behaves relatively predictably and which would exist even if there is no consciousness in it, you've made a hypothesis that flies in the face of evidence and which needs a wealth of new assumptions about the universe in order to be valid. You run a great risk of deceiving yourself by failing to take the pencil at face value. In other words, I don't think your argument is very logical at all because logic to me also implies critical thinking and I think you've failed to apply that. You already stated that your research has been done not to uncover truth, but specifically to support the idea of reincarnation. Seek and you shall find, whatever it is you find.

Your use of quantum theory is stereotypical. I'm not sure if you have any idea how many hogwash ideas people try to validate by applying "quantum" to it, even on this forum. Quantum theory's scientific history and its difficulty to understand which makes it both brainy and relatively incomprehensible to most and that makes it a favorite go-to explanation for almost anything conceivable. If you say that you understand quantum theory, then I will say you are bluffing. None of us really understand what happens when things are so small that an atom seems the size of a solar system just like noone truly knows what takes place in the center of a massive black hole. These are fringe sciences which are complicated and our understanding of them is still incomplete. To base your world view on assumptions you've made from your attempt to understand them .. Seems like folly to me. Especially when your interpretation counters evidence. But then again, you set out to find arguments to support reincarnation and not necessarily the truth.

In my time in academia, I've met quite a few physicists, but none of them have expressed your world view. They've seemed willing to accept that however mysterious things may seem at the quantum level, they give rise to a world with predictable rules that we can attempt to understand.

As touched upon earlier, if you strive to be at all scientific in this, you should follow the evidence.

What goes on in the head of a dog or a vampire bat is something great thinkers have studied for a long time and parts of the puzzle which makes up our understanding of the universe. The consistent validity of that knowledge adds credibility to the general scientific understanding of our universe, a credibility that your version of it does not have. There are many such sources of credibility that your version of the universe has no claim to. That you think of various facets of the universe as entirely dismissable (waste of time) is telling.

I don't think so. Now it seems you don't understand, but I can roughly explain why it makes sense to me.

If the universe contains matter and some of that matter orders, over time, into me, then you could say I am a consequence of the universe. My consciousness exists at the duration in time when my physical body makes it possible, but not before or after. Why should I know everything? I simply couldn't. Your own posts seem to say so.

But if my consciousness is what shapes the universe, then that makes me the creator of the universe. The universe only exists during the time that I do and is dependent on my very existance. So if I create the universe I exist in along with everything in it, then why is it stupid to ask why I created dinosaurs? Or if the universe is a consequence of a collective consciousness, why is it stupid to ask why we created dinosaurs?

You know, a good theory holds up in the light of scrutiny. Certainly if it's air-tight, right?