There isn't any scientific explanation for "incarnation", let alone "reincarnation". There is still no explanation for how a chemical reaction controlled by persuasive spirals results in "experience", is there?
Anyways: I accept Kant's argument for the evaluation of philosophical maxims ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
... and it seems that one can adopt any maxim as guidance for one's behaviour, so I choose to take as a maxim:
There is only one "subject" of reality, and that subject seems to be experiencing itself via this particular meatsack known as "me". Anything "I" can do to improve that experience via another meatsack known as "somebody else" is worth doing, because it is the very same "subject" experiencing that act. "Karma" means "action", because any action taken is experienced through another be-ing.
The truth of this is irrelevant, in the "will that it should become a universal law" sense: if everyone acted in this way, seeing each and every being as another aspect of their self, then we surely would all have fewer problems. That's how the categorial imperative applies.
To resort to argument by authority, there's always this:
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." — Carl Sagan
I don't always (or even most of the time) follow this, because I'm not sure that the "universal law" makes sense when surrounded by self-centred automatons, so I resort to an even higher authority, Douglas Adams:
Slartibartfast: Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day.
Arthur Dent: And are you?
Slartibartfast: Ah, no. Well, that's where it all falls down, of course.
I am often inspired by eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Taoism, but I've not been able to grasp the whole reincarnation things.
It is certainly true that the atoms that make up your body have been transformed from the atoms around you (the food you eat, for example) into what you call "my body". And they will not remain as "your body" forever. Hell, I think the majority of cells in your body do not even carry your DNA.
Same with your habits, with many of the thoughts we think. Would you be exactly the same person if you were born in a completely different culture?
Perhaps the point in talking about reincarnation is not to figure out "how it works", but taking a holistic view beyond the perceived boundaries of "self". Much of eastern philosophy appears to be, at least to me.
I’m aware that it’s pretty whack, but my pet argument for reincarnation is this: you used not not exist. Then, at some point in time, you transitioned into existing. When you die, you’ll go back to not existing again (if that’s what you believe). If reincarnation is just a matter of coming into being from non-existence, then the fact that you exist is an evidence that it’s possible. Obviously there’s many holes in this argument (to start with, is every incarnation a probabilistically independent event?), but hey, what good’s freedom of religion if you can’t make up your own mind about things you can’t possibly know right?
I'd ask you to check your basic assumption about science as an authority.
Science is really good at transmitting information about deterministic processes, but is really bad at transmitting information about non-deterministic processes or even processes that are so complex that they appear non-deterministic e.g. human behavior.
I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be used as a moral tool that helps people think long term. It's not a bad idea to use tools like this, especially since all attempts so far to design a "science of morality" have been bloody, catastrophic failures.
> I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be used as a moral tool that helps people think long term.
At first glance things like this can sound good. However, religious ideologies like this are always double edged swords. In India, their caste system is heavily reinforced by the believe that people in a lower caste were "bad people" in a past life, and so there are no reservations about subjugating or otherwise discriminating against them.
This _always_ tends to happen to _every_ spiritual law scheme eventually, under different cultures. If a religion has enough followers, people have used its (seemingly good natured) ideology to kill and discriminate against those they don't like. This is the nature of humanity, I doubt there is any possible spiritual teachings that wouldn't eventually fall into this trap.
Your causation is backwards. People who feel like discriminating find a rationalization for their beliefs post hoc. Yes religious ideologies have been used to justify racism, but so to has there been "scientific racism" with with all its babbling on about skull sizes. If it weren't science or religion then it would be something else. The underlying issue is some people are bastards.
> I'd ask you to check your basic assumption about science as an authority.
Science is the only and ultimate final authority. It really is not a bad assumption. There literally can not be a higher authority than it by definition.
> but is really bad at transmitting information about non-deterministic processes or even processes that are so complex that they appear non-deterministic e.g. human behavior.
No it is not, science functions perfectly fine for complex processes. We can describe and draw actionable conclusions from the behaviours of fluids and gases even though they are made up of inconceivably complex interactions of billions of quantum effects.
We could easily model most of human behaviour if we really wanted to. It is just that it is unethical to do so, so we refrain from it. We make do with observing humans in the wild, and the observations we make sometimes have enough significance to make weak statements about human behaviours.
If the belief in reincarnation could be used as a moral tool to help people think long term, that should be scientifically demonstrable if it's true. It would be a hard ethical argument though, as you're basically trading a persons ability to make correct judgements of their own safety and well-being for a larger "long term" better functioning society. Not saying it's definitely wrong, but it better lead to a much better world for it to be worth it.
> Science is the only and ultimate final authority
Junk science led to the American eugenics movement that included forced sterilization of 64k Americans in the early 1900s.
I love science, but calling it the only and ultimate authoritity leaves a lot of room to create a world we don't want to live in. This happens because scientists disagree themselves on almost everything. Recognizing the difference in science as an ideal versus science put in practice makes me not want to agree with your statement.
Sure, it's a great method for understanding causal relationships in the world. It's also a method that humans invented, and it's not proven that some future invented method could not provide as much insight into the world as the scientific method. Calling it the ultimate authority and saying that "here literally can not be a higher authority than it by definition" is hard to defend IMO. Science gets its authority from consensus, right now we all agree that science should be granted authority! But it is clearly lacking as an all encompassing tool for understanding: How does the scientific method teach morality? It's not clear that it even can.
That it's the ultimate authority doesn't mean you should always believe it. It's just the best we've got. It's the best thing about science is that it's explicit about the bounds of what we know and don't know.
You don't ask a scientist what you should do, you ask a scientist what they think is true, and what the options are and what their estimated outcomes are. It's always you yourself who make the decision.
Regardless if there was junk science in the early 1900s (don't know much about it but wouldn't be surprised), it was people who decided to sterilize people. Just as it's people who decide to kill people for Jesus Christ or Allah or whatever excuse they come up with.
Even if the science were true, and some subset of Americans is less intelligent or more violent or whatever, it still wouldn't change the fact that now we've decided that eugenics is unethical. We embrace diversity because that's what aligns to our values. Maybe if we're in the middle of famine and war our values will shift again. The authority of science has nothing to do with it.
Perhaps we disagree on the definition of 'the authority of science'. Also FWIW I am not at all religious, in case you think I'm trying to restore scripture to it's rightful place of authority over science. I am just intrigued by this statement that science is the ultimate authority by definition, and that nothing could ever supplant it.
So science as I view/understand it, is the effort to extract knowledge from the observable universe through experiments, observations and logic. If I compare science to religion, this is where I see the difference: In the church you have the clergy, who preach their understanding of the religion, and you have the basis of the religion, usually a book. To the religious the book or some idea from the book is the foundation, and the clergy are the guides. Similarly in science you have the scientists who do the actual science, and the foundation is observations of the universe. The faith I have and my dogma, is in believing the scientists, that is the part where I can have doubt and where I might be corrected in my beliefs, and the foundation is the actual universe which as far as I have been able to tell is consistent with itself so far. It's a bit of a cop out, because any time someone says "oh but these scientists were wrong", then I will go "ok yeah but those were junk science" and move on with my merry life.
> We've got to repress those urges of curiosity to appease glorious science
No, it's to appease our desire to live in a society that aligns with our morality. If you'd read the religious books for what they are and respect them for their interpretation of what it means to be a kind and loving human being, instead of using them as tools to manipulate the minds of the unwashed masses into behaving as a cohesive unit, then maybe you'd understand.
I believe the parent understood more than you are giving them credit for. You don't think you're being too dogmatic when you replace one authority (scripture) for another (science) while retaining the exact same language?
The content of science, the body of knowledge, by definition, not supposed to be based on authority. Authority means that exactly the same counterfactual statement is considered either right or wrong based on whether the speaker of that statement has authority.
Science is currently not ultimate or final because is it is changing. For science to be ultimate and final, it would mean that tomorrow's science is the same as today's science. Nothing new or different can follow that which is ultimate.
However, we need to assert social authority in order to defend a discourse against the fallacies like "argument from authority" or other unproductive disruptions.
> I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be used as a moral tool that helps people think long term.
I find this highly offensive. The people must be lied to so they can do the thing that's best for them, because they can't come to this conclusion in a way that doesn't involve lieing.
I read it as taking a spiritual route to arrive at something like original position, which you can certainly get to by more secular means. (Rawls did, after all.)
For me, reincarnation means that there is always an observer. Regardless of our mental state, whether we're awake or asleep, intoxicated, locked in a sensory deprivation tank, etc, we're still observing our lives.
What happens when we die? I believe that our consciousness finds a way to continue somewhere else. There's no gap, because not being conscious is a non-sequitur. We just fade out and fade in seamlessly, across time, without our memories, like tuning into a new TV station.
I think that self-awareness stems from source consciousness, which is a universal force like gravity. At the most basic level, it's God experiencing itself through every possible contextual reality. Because what else is there to do? We explain it as emergent behavior arising from stochastic processes, but that's from an individual mindset. As a whole, our consciousnesses act more like waves interacting with one another and resonating at frequencies we feel subjectively as harmony and discord.
There are a number of basic operations that science could use to "prove" that reincarnation exists. We could merge and split minds, pause minds and unpause them, turn parts of them on and off, play minds at different speeds, put them in simulations, etc. Aliens probably have access to technology like this, and these ideas have been explored a ton in sci fi. But at the end of the day, would knowing the truth give us any more satisfaction than say, recreational drugs like psychedelics? I'm just not sure.
This wavy-stochastic-quantum aspect of reality may seem far-fetched, except it's looking like the wave equations that underpin quantum mechanics are nothing special, and in fact can be simulated classically on ordinary computers:
This lends a lot of credibility to the idea that reality is a simulation. And that we can (and probably are) interacting with our reality in macro ways that follow similar math to the micro. This New Age - quantum connection always seemed pretty out there to me, but now I'm having trouble finding a better model for reality.
One way to look at consciousness/life that I find interesting is as a quantum influencer. Life may direct probabilities around it to work in its favor. Reincarnation has a lot in common with multiverse theory. As in, if the observer always exists, then it exists no matter how improbable it is to exist. In other words, when an individual is born, a universe may get created for it. When it dies, it may go on living in its own reality in a separate universe, we just can't be with it anymore. ESP experiments suggest that life may influence "real" probability from quantum random number generators, choosing the reality most beneficial to life. So Schrödinger's cat may always be alive from its perspective, even if it dies from ours, although these experiments may be inherently impossible to replicate:
My favorite takeaway from all of this is that if we are all one, drawn from the same source consciousness, then each of our beliefs are no more or less valid than anyone else's. We can choose to see the miracle of life and the magic in each moment.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about, this is just the best working theory that I've found so far.
