Reincarnation

[Enki]

A hypothesis.... a provisional conjecture for guiding investigation.  Check the dictionary. That is good enough.

For you, maybe, but certainly not for me.

For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis

So, Jeremy's question of how can your reincarnation hypothesis be falsified, is really important.

Remember, also, that ancedotes do not scientific evidence make.

The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition—thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-anecdotal-evidence-can-undermine-scientific-results/

[torridon]

There are today billions of people all over the world who are very comfortable with what science has discovered and also with spiritual/religious philosophies.  They may not understand how it all fits in but they don't see any conflict between the two.

Clearly there is conflict between the two ways of thinking, witness debates running on this board over years. We get two entirely different conflicting notions of what a person is, with your philosophy finding expression in your metaphor of a driver of a car being a separate thing to the car being driven, whereas science on the other hand gives us, to continue the metaphor, a virtual driver arising within the car itself, derived from its functioning low level software.  They cannot both be right, so why not come down on the side of evidence and reason as the better and more honourable guide to truth.  The scientific understanding has immense reams of multidisciplinary research and evidence underpinning it, reincarnation theory on the other hand has none, no logic, no detail and depends on a handful of curious claims as its only evidential justification.  You are just trying to hand wave away a mountain with your grain of sand.

[Sriram]

For you, maybe, but certainly not for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis

So, Jeremy's question of how can your reincarnation hypothesis be falsified, is really important.

Remember, also, that ancedotes do not scientific evidence make.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-anecdotal-evidence-can-undermine-scientific-results/

enki......

We have already discussed all this many times.  All phenomena cannot be investigated using the same methods or even the same principles.

Don't paint yourselves into a corner with all your... 'falsifiability', 'this fallacy', 'that fallacy'....and so on...and then stubbornly declare from your little corner that your's is the only correct view of reality!

Cheers.
   

[Sriram]

Clearly there is conflict between the two ways of thinking, witness debates running on this board over years. We get two entirely different conflicting notions of what a person is, with your philosophy finding expression in your metaphor of a driver of a car being a separate thing to the car being driven, whereas science on the other hand gives us, to continue the metaphor, a virtual driver arising within the car itself, derived from its functioning low level software.  They cannot both be right, so why not come down on the side of evidence and reason as the better and more honourable guide to truth.  The scientific understanding has immense reams of multidisciplinary research and evidence underpinning it, reincarnation theory on the other hand has none, no logic, no detail and depends on a handful of curious claims as its only evidential justification.  You are just trying to hand wave away a mountain with your grain of sand.

torridon......we have already discussed all this many times....haven't we?! 

A car will always require a driver. The driver may not be sitting in the car but may be a software written by some human.  I have already asked many times...if the driverless car crashes and kills someone who will you hold responsible?

In other words, there is no such thing as a driverless car. The system is different, that is all.

There is plenty of evidence for Consciousness being different from the body (like a driver and a car, like a user and his computer). The evidence cannot obviously be produced readily in the same manner that evidence cannot be produced for the solar system or the cosmos or the atom. It requires systematic study and understanding.

Cheers.

[Maeght]

torridon......we have already discussed all this many times....haven't we?! 

A car will always require a driver. The driver may not be sitting in the car but may be a software written by some human.  I have already asked many times...if the driverless car crashes and kills someone who will you hold responsible?

In other words, there is no such thing as a driverless car. The system is different, that is all.

There is plenty of evidence for Consciousness being different from the body (like a driver and a car, like a user and his computer). The evidence cannot obviously be produced readily in the same manner that evidence cannot be produced for the solar system or the cosmos or the atom. It requires systematic study and understanding.

Cheers.

We aren't as car are a computer.

[Enki]

enki......

We have already discussed all this many times.  All phenomena cannot be investigated using the same methods or even the same principles.

Don't paint yourselves into a corner with all your... 'falsifiability', 'this fallacy', 'that fallacy'....and so on...and then stubbornly declare from your little corner that your's is the only correct view of reality!

Cheers.
 

You do seem confused. Try looking up why falsifiability is important. And as for 'this fallacy, that fallacy', I think you must be thinking of someone else because I simply haven't used that line of logical argument at all to my knowledge.

I don't think that I have a 'correct' view of reality whatever that may mean. I simply go where the evidence leads, and I don't accept anecdotal evidence as particularly strong evidence. You obviously do, and, from my point of view, that is why when you find such evidence which fits your particular viewpoint, you fall for it hook, line and sinker, to the point of ignoring any other evidence or logic which threatens your position.  there are many more possibilities to account for NDEs for instance, than the one idea that something lives on after we die. There are many more explanations of so called past life regression than reincarnation. Open your mind, Sriram,

[Maeght]

enki......

We have already discussed all this many times.  All phenomena cannot be investigated using the same methods or even the same principles.

Don't paint yourselves into a corner with all your... 'falsifiability', 'this fallacy', 'that fallacy'....and so on...and then stubbornly declare from your little corner that your's is the only correct view of reality!

Cheers.
 

For it to be a scientific theory it has to be falsifiable by definition. For it to be a scientific hypothesis it has to be testable by definition. If it can't be falsified or tested it is not a scientific theory or hypothesis, it is something else. Definitions are important.

[torridon]

torridon......we have already discussed all this many times....haven't we?! 

A car will always require a driver. The driver may not be sitting in the car but may be a software written by some human.  I have already asked many times...if the driverless car crashes and kills someone who will you hold responsible?

Increasingly, with AI, there will be no immediate human accountability in the loop.  It's not like the old days where programmers hand coded software using their skill.  With an AI product, nobody knows how it works because the software has learned and coded itself.  Likewise, the software running a person has evolved over aeons of time and each new individual is born with a preconfigured learning machine in their head.  It doesn't make any sense to me to imagine that the 'person' running the show might have been a sailor in a previous life, even less so an octopus or a zebra or centipede. What science has revealed is that persons derive from a combination of nature and nurture in this body in this life, not some random previous entity somehow parachuted into my body by unknown mechanism pulling the levers of my power by some unknown mechanism.  The essence of me, derives totally from me, not from some previous inhabitant of this planet.

[ippy]

Sriram, you must be aware reincarnation's not a viable idea anyway as explained to you by various other posters, it's also very likely this reincarnation idea was introduced into your mind at an early age and is probably not that easy to shake the idea off as is often the case.

I notice you seem to be resistant to evidence based ideas when you're trying to promote your reincarnation as something of a viable option, why's that? This doesn't make sense to me when I don't see you as a head in the clouds type of person.

Regards ippy 

[Sriram]

Increasingly, with AI, there will be no immediate human accountability in the loop.  It's not like the old days where programmers hand coded software using their skill.  With an AI product, nobody knows how it works because the software has learned and coded itself.  Likewise, the software running a person has evolved over aeons of time and each new individual is born with a preconfigured learning machine in their head.  It doesn't make any sense to me to imagine that the 'person' running the show might have been a sailor in a previous life, even less so an octopus or a zebra or centipede. What science has revealed is that persons derive from a combination of nature and nurture in this body in this life, not some random previous entity somehow parachuted into my body by unknown mechanism pulling the levers of my power by some unknown mechanism.  The essence of me, derives totally from me, not from some previous inhabitant of this planet.

You don't seem to realize that all this AI is in fact, modelling out how Consciousness and Intelligence can function remotely. As discussed many times earlier, it also brings out how evolution can happen through Intelligent intervention giving rise to Intelligence again. 

Our creations show us how we have been created.

[Shaker]

You don't seem to realize that all this AI is in fact, modelling out how Consciousness and Intelligence can function remotely. As discussed many times earlier, it also brings out how evolution can happen through Intelligent intervention giving rise to Intelligence again. 

Our creations show us how we have been created.

No, they really don't.

A man called Darwin put that childlike 'reasoning' to bed a hundred and fifty-odd years ago.

[torridon]

You don't seem to realize that all this AI is in fact, modelling out how Consciousness and Intelligence can function remotely. As discussed many times earlier, it also brings out how evolution can happen through Intelligent intervention giving rise to Intelligence again. 

Our creations show us how we have been created.

Intelligent things can create other intelligent things, that much is trivial, but that observation doesn't explain a first cause intelligence. The harder challenge is to come to understand how intelligence arises from first principles as an emergent phenomenon of complex interacting systems.  Then we are on the road to understanding ourselves; our intelligence evolved.

[Maeght]

You don't seem to realize that all this AI is in fact, modelling out how Consciousness and Intelligence can function remotely. As discussed many times earlier, it also brings out how evolution can happen through Intelligent intervention giving rise to Intelligence again. 

Our creations show us how we have been created.

Not at all. We are trying to reproduce the same results but that doesn't mean that the origins and causes are the same.

[ekim]

Clearly there is conflict between the two ways of thinking, witness debates running on this board over years. We get two entirely different conflicting notions of what a person is, ......
.......  It doesn't make any sense to me to imagine that the 'person' running the show might have been a sailor in a previous life, even less so an octopus or a zebra or centipede. What science has revealed is that persons derive from a combination of nature and nurture in this body in this life, not some random previous entity somehow parachuted into my body by unknown mechanism pulling the levers of my power by some unknown mechanism.  The essence of me, derives totally from me, not from some previous inhabitant of this planet.

I have extracted some points from both of your last posts to comment on.  There is not only conflict between the two ways you mention, but both conflict with a third way which is about transcending all notions, I think the Sanskrit word is namarupa. thought forms.  The third way is not about defining what a person is and ending up with yet another concept.  It doesn't matter whether that concept is derived from religious scripture, scientific analysis or psychology as it just adds to the barrier which the 'spiritual' initiate has to negotiate.  There is another Sanskrit word, 'manas' which is basically memory in its variety of forms e.g. evolutionary, genetic, cellular, personal life.  Whether 'personal life memory' results partially from a former life or not is irrelevant, it still has to be transcended by the initiate who is more concerned to discover experientially his true identity rather than a notion of it, even if that notion is called 'essence' and forms a part of scientific theory.

[Sriram]

Intelligent things can create other intelligent things, that much is trivial, but that observation doesn't explain a first cause intelligence. The harder challenge is to come to understand how intelligence arises from first principles as an emergent phenomenon of complex interacting systems.  Then we are on the road to understanding ourselves; our intelligence evolved.

"intelligence arises from first principles as an emergent phenomenon of complex interacting systems."

Oooh...you like to coin grand sounding sentences that don't really mean much.

We don't have to explain any first cause intelligence. We just need to explain our own intelligence.

If we put together the theory of evolution, complexity, emergence.... and mix it with NDE's, reincarnation, personal mystical experiences...and add in the phenomenon of civilization and human development that we actually observe. We get a nice wholesome hypothesis of spiritual development.

[Shaker]

If we put together the theory of evolution, complexity, emergence.... and mix it with NDE's, reincarnation, personal mystical experiences...and add in the phenomenon of civilization and human development that we actually observe. We get a nice wholesome hypothesis of spiritual development.

... known to those of us in the reality-based community as a right steaming pile of horseshit.

[torridon]

"intelligence arises from first principles as an emergent phenomenon of complex interacting systems."

Oooh...you like to coin grand sounding sentences that don't really mean much.

We don't have to explain any first cause intelligence. We just need to explain our own intelligence.

If we put together the theory of evolution, complexity, emergence.... and mix it with NDE's, reincarnation, personal mystical experiences...and add in the phenomenon of civilization and human development that we actually observe. We get a nice wholesome hypothesis of spiritual development.

"If we put together the theory of evolution, complexity, emergence.... and mix it with NDE's, reincarnation, personal mystical experiences...and add in the phenomenon of civilization and human development that we actually observe. We get a nice wholesome hypothesis of spiritual development."

Oooh you do like your pick'n'mix confections that don't really explain much, offering a pleasant pastiche in place of unbiased detailed conclusion from evidence.  Evolutionary biology reveals that cognitive intelligence has evolved at least twice entirely separately on this planet - in the line of vertebrates and also in cephalopods.  This tells us that intelligence is a natural consequence, ie it is a logical inevitability of sufficiently complex systems, and it is an emergent phenomenon, not a causal one.  A queen bee does not control her colony because she is endowed with an intelligent brain, but rather intelligence arises out of the interactions of individual members of the colony. For a queen bee to have the intelligence to guide her colony would require her to have a bee colony in her brain, which colony would contain a queen bee that had a bee colony in her brain, which colony would contain a queen bee that had a ....... ad infinitum.  The idea of first cause intelligence as an underlying axiom to an understanding of all things fails because intelligence by its nature cannot be a first cause, it emerges from simpler underlying systems of sufficient complexity.

[Sriram]

"...intelligence by its nature cannot be a first cause, it emerges from simpler underlying systems of sufficient complexity."

You keep stating this as though it is some sort of a fundamental law of nature.  It isn't.

If we take robotic intelligence or AI, as having emerged due to the complexity of robots, we can see that human intelligence is responsible for it. So, the idea that Intelligence can arise without a higher level Intelligence has no basis. 

Intelligence arises from complexity which itself arises from some form of higher Intelligence. We are actually seeing this happening in AI. 

There is no basis to say that Intelligence and complexity can arise in the absence of a higher intelligence.

[torridon]

"...intelligence by its nature cannot be a first cause, it emerges from simpler underlying systems of sufficient complexity."

You keep stating this as though it is some sort of a fundamental law of nature.  It isn't.

If we take robotic intelligence or AI, as having emerged due to the complexity of robots, we can see that human intelligence is responsible for it. So, the idea that Intelligence can arise without a higher level Intelligence has no basis. 

Intelligence arises from complexity which itself arises from some form of higher Intelligence. We are actually seeing this happening in AI. 

There is no basis to say that Intelligence and complexity can arise in the absence of a higher intelligence.

There is basis, and I just explained it with real world examples in the previous post.   OK, smart things can themselves create smart things, so much is trivially true, but that observation cannot amount to an explanation of the fundamental nature of intelligence as that leads to an infinite regress.  That intelligence arises naturally is the more profound truth of the matter.  Complexity derives from simplicity, not the other way round.  We find that large houses are made of small bricks; but we never find small bricks that are made of large houses as you would have us believe.

[ekim]

"Intelligence arises from complexity which itself arises from some form of higher Intelligence."

"That intelligence arises naturally is the more profound truth of the matter.  Complexity derives from simplicity, not the other way round."

I think you should both agree on a definition of intelligence.  There is at least one Hindu school of thought that sees it as simple in nature but is present in life forms in different proportions.  It is life forms which vary in complexity.

[ippy]

"...intelligence by its nature cannot be a first cause, it emerges from simpler underlying systems of sufficient complexity."

You keep stating this as though it is some sort of a fundamental law of nature.  It isn't.

If we take robotic intelligence or AI, as having emerged due to the complexity of robots, we can see that human intelligence is responsible for it. So, the idea that Intelligence can arise without a higher level Intelligence has no basis. 

Intelligence arises from complexity which itself arises from some form of higher Intelligence. We are actually seeing this happening in AI. 

There is no basis to say that Intelligence and complexity can arise in the absence of a higher intelligence.

I note your idea was also the basic form of Arthur C Clark's book 2001, where did the entity that placed the monoliths obtain their, or it's intelligence from?

It looks to me like you're up another blind alley Sriram.

Regards ippy.

 

[Sriram]

There is basis, and I just explained it with real world examples in the previous post.   OK, smart things can themselves create smart things, so much is trivially true, but that observation cannot amount to an explanation of the fundamental nature of intelligence as that leads to an infinite regress.  That intelligence arises naturally is the more profound truth of the matter.  Complexity derives from simplicity, not the other way round.  We find that large houses are made of small bricks; but we never find small bricks that are made of large houses as you would have us believe.

Infinite regress cannot be avoided, as I have explained many times. Even the Big Bang and the Singularity lead to questions about how they arose...and then further to how that something arose and so on.  Science does not eliminate infinite regress. There is no 'Ultimate' answer.

So, let us stop complaining about infinite regress, please....and move further.

Since we can observe that human intelligence leads to evolutionary development in man made products leading to complexity and even intelligence, that is a perfectly valid reason to assume that biological evolution and complexity also have some kind of intelligent cause.  That is the most logical assumption to make.

Ok...to begin with, you people may have problems with religious baggage  because of which such thinking may seem ill advised.

Secondly, we may not be able to observe or understand the source of such Intelligence from our normal observations.

I agree these are problems, but these are issues we have to overcome rather than looking the other way and coming up with convoluted chance based explanations.   

[torridon]

Infinite regress cannot be avoided, as I have explained many times. Even the Big Bang and the Singularity lead to questions about how they arose...and then further to how that something arose and so on.  Science does not eliminate infinite regress. There is no 'Ultimate' answer.

So, let us stop complaining about infinite regress, please....and move further.

Since we can observe that human intelligence leads to evolutionary development in man made products leading to complexity and even intelligence, that is a perfectly valid reason to assume that biological evolution and complexity also have some kind of intelligent cause.  That is the most logical assumption to make.

Ok...to begin with, you people may have problems with religious baggage  because of which such thinking may seem ill advised.

Secondly, we may not be able to observe or understand the source of such Intelligence from our normal observations.

I agree these are problems, but these are issues we have to overcome rather than looking the other way and coming up with convoluted chance based explanations.

None of that justifies an assumption that our present reality is a creation of some prior or higher intelligence.  The best we can say is that it might be a possibility that we cannot eliminate and if it turns out to be the case then it will not be a complete picture as it leaves undefined the provenance of the higher reality.  So it doesn't really get us anywhere and given there is zero evidence to support it and given there is plenty of evidence from the natural world that intelligence arises naturally wherever conditions are favourable I don't see much point in taking it seriously.  It is fantasy thinking when we could apply ourselves to real thinking. 

[Sriram]

None of that justifies an assumption that our present reality is a creation of some prior or higher intelligence.  The best we can say is that it might be a possibility that we cannot eliminate and if it turns out to be the case then it will not be a complete picture as it leaves undefined the provenance of the higher reality.  So it doesn't really get us anywhere and given there is zero evidence to support it and given there is plenty of evidence from the natural world that intelligence arises naturally wherever conditions are favourable I don't see much point in taking it seriously.  It is fantasy thinking when we could apply ourselves to real thinking.

You are agreeing that its a possibility...and then retracting to call it a fantasy. 

Religious mythology may be fantasy...but some form of Intelligence giving rise to evolution, complexity and Intelligence is a real possibility.  What we observe from our own lives and our creations, points to that very clearly.

We have to work on understanding it of course, but that is a subsequent matter. Not easy and not as straight forward as merely demanding evidence or designing some instruments.

[torridon]

You are agreeing that its a possibility...and then retracting to call it a fantasy. 

Religious mythology may be fantasy...but some form of Intelligence giving rise to evolution, complexity and Intelligence is a real possibility.  What we observe from our own lives and our creations, points to that very clearly.

We have to work on understanding it of course, but that is a subsequent matter. Not easy and not as straight forward as merely demanding evidence or designing some instruments.

I don't see much point in trying to understand something unknowable, particularly if it consumes out energies, then that is energy that could have been spent on trying to understand things that we know to be real. Alan Burns will solemnly tell us that intelligence is a gift from God, but merely 'accepting' that is a lazy man's way out of trying to understand what intelligence actually is; we don't then have to think about it.  Given there are seven billion of us on the planet now, we need more than ever to face up to understanding our nature, we need to learn to be realistic.