what is buddhism evidence of reincarnation?

last SG · 2007-06-04T12:30:14+00:00

That's not a scientific method but a methodological method.

Phaze SG

Is it necessary to resort to ad hominem attacks?

I would refrain from questioning the intelligence of others unless you are willing to put your own under the same scrutiny.

I would argue that the ability to question is in itself evidence of intelligence.

In any case, it's besides the point. Whether or not January is able to prove that he is an intelligent being to your standards has no relation as to whether reincarnation actually occurs.

Phaze SG

Amazing. You accuse me of being stubborn headed and wanting to remain ignorant?

This is an argument from the kindergarten playground. "Nyah nyah I'm right and if you don't believe me you're stupid."

Faith healers, psychics and all kinds of kooks use this argument.

Sure. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. So what? That has nothing to do with consiousness. Are you saying that a human being is the same as an atom and energy? You believe that consiousness can exist without a physical host?

I skimmed through the 3 links earlier and while they were interesting, I did not find the arguments compelling. Research into past lives is interesting, though there have been criticisms as to possible flaws in the studies. I've already mentioned that I'm not dismissing the possibility of reincarnation offhand. I just felt that the probability was low and more research is needed. I refrained from commenting because I feel I do not have the necessary expertise. Having said that, I will attempt a rebuttal. I hope you will not be "stubborn head" and consider the points fairly.

An Eternal Now SG

Hmm... maybe you may want to take a look at this: A QUANTUM MECHANICAL MODEL OF THE BRAIN AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Though there (probably) isn't a verified testable hypothesis (I might be wrong because I myself haven't done much research on the scientific views of rebirth), modern understanding of the nature of consciousness does not have problems with rebirth.

An Eternal Now SG

In the past, the understanding that brain = consciousness would have been valid. In modern times, this understanding no longer stands.

Phaze SG

Thank you for the link. I will read it over lunch. Food for the mind as well as the body. Wink

Phaze SG

I take issue with this statement. I do not think this is the majority view in the scientific community. Not that the majority view is always right. The key feature of science is that it allows for major paradigm shifts in the face of evidence. I don't think this paradigm shift has occured.

Young Earth Creationists also claim there is overwhelming evidence that the Earth is 6000 years old. They claim that dinosaurs walked with man and that Noah actually did exist and he managed to squeeze all the animals on the earth into the Ark. They have all kinds of evidence and theories that 'prove' in. However their views fly in the face of an overwhelming majority.

january SG

spend about 15 mintues reading roughly on

1)A QUANTUM MECHANICAL MODEL OF THE BRAIN AND CONSCIOUSNESS
2)scientific acceptability of rebirth

past life therapy, recall of past experiences, child prodigy are evidences of rebirth

these are the things i recall

let me place my opinions....

to quote what a famous guy say, extraordinary claims must have extraordinary evidence....

let me give examples of few evidences which will be what i call convincing.

First, get a person on national television, this person has to claim that he is a actually reincarnated from a dead guy 20 years ago. Next, get the dead guy sons and daughter. The dead guy before his death was let say 70 yrs old. and his daughter and son was 15 years old when he was 40 years old. therefore, at age 15 years old, the daughter and sons have more clear memories of their interactions with their father for a period of 25 years.

This man who claim to have rebirth , then have to have many many examples of memories which these daughters and sons can recall as the same thing and infact hold a conversation recollecting the past events. their conversation would be able to last for hours and hours as they talked about it.

If there are a number of such cases, and is shown on television, joined in by relatives, out of the few billions people on earth now, there this is what i call a strong and convincing evidence. this kind of evidence is what will cause paradigm shift in the attitudes of scientist.

The weaker and not so convincing the evidence as mentioned by mouth and stories, the less motivation is there for science to veer its course of research.

as i said again, extraordinary claims require extradordinray evidences.

january SG

lets face it, if there are such a case that i mention, the media of television will not let go of the opportunity to broadcast such cases because it will definitely draw in many many viewers....

such example is so good to broadcast and can last so long that it is highly suitable for media broadcasting, with all the showing of passports, the live telecsat of reincarnated guy talking with dead man sons and relatives...

Herzog_Zwei SG

Agree with january.

Phaze SG

Slightly off topic:

David Chalmers is a philospher that has examined the nature of consiousness.

His papers can be found here.

Phaze SG

January,

I do agree with your two points:

1. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

2. Testimonial evidence is usually very weak.

However, I think the point of the paper is simply to suggest that quantum mechanical phenomena such as quantum entanglement and superposition may form a basis of an explanation of consciousness. It also uses the 'action at a distance' properties of quantum entanglement to try to explain phenomena like telepathy.

So before we examine the issue of reincarnation in this context, we should first ask, "is consiousness a quantum phenomena?"

Currently, I do not think there has been any peer-reviewed study of this - probably because the hypothesis is not currently falsifiable.

As David Chalmbers rightly points out, just because we don't understand quantum mechanics, and we also don't understand consiousness, it doesn't mean they have anything in common.

On the topic of consiousness, I have a few questions that I hope someone will be able to help answer:

1. When does the consiousness enter the body?

2. Why does reincarnation seem to occur more often in some cultures than others?

3. Is consiousness created? The population is growing at an extremely rapid rate. Since very few people attain enlightenment, I assume that most souls are reincarnated. So the growth in population is composed of new consiousness?

4. Is it possible to induce a near death experience or an out of body experience? There are a number of people who claim to be able to perform astral projection but I think it's safe to say that it doesn't work. I should think it is fairly simple to test if out of body experiences are real or if it's more similar to dreaming where the mind creates the experience based on previous knowledge. It strikes me that this is fairly easy to test in controlled conditions. It should be a double blind study. Put the subject in a room and induce an out of body experience. Put an object in a second room. Both the experimenter and the subject should not know what the object is. After the subject returns to his body, ask the subject to describe in specific detail what the object is.

I suspect this has never happened. If it did and it was repeatable, I'm sure we would have heard about it.

AndrewPKYap SG

1. Consciousness, does not "enters" a body if you look at it objectively. It would be more scientifically correct to say that consciousness "grows". As the "brain" evolved, it became more and more "conscious". In humans and great apes, we say that these creatures are not only conscious, they are "self-conscious".

When you are "self-conscious" you want to be "better" than others, for example.

At the present it is very easy to look at brain circuits (using MRI) to see how the brain is conscious of "heat" for example.

You monitor someone's brain using MRI and you can see how the brain knows that something is hot. You can see the same circuits in every human brain.

What is not known at the moment is how you know or experience "fear".

or how humans know that something is "red"

If you follow the brain circuits when light of certain wave length hits your eyes, you will notice that it does not matter which wave length of light is hitting your eyes.

It follows the same circuits in your brain.

Yet people can say... Red! Blue! Green!....

How in the world do people know it is Red or Blue or Green?

Phaze SG

Good point. I was just reading about that although I must confess I don't quite understand it it yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

It's related to what David Chalmbers described as the "hard problem of consiousness".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Setting aside the question of how we can have subjective qualitative experiences in the first place, I think we know something is red, blue or green because we basically agree that's what it is. Red, blue or green is just a descriptor. I often argue with my girlfriend about what constitutes 'pink'. I think the 'pink' ipod doesn't look 'pink' to me.

I think it's possible that all of us experience colour in different ways. Our perception of colour may be slightly different. However, it doesn't matter as long as each of us is able to recognize and agree the colour for what it is. We may experience colour differently, but as long as we experience it consistently, we are able to agree to call it 'red'.

Mentally ill people or people on psychotropic drugs may have inconsistent experiences. If you ask them what colour they are looking at, they may tell you it's red one minute, and blue the next.

If they recognize the fact that their perception is unreliable, they may choose to ask someone else what colour it is and trust the other person who tells them the colour is 'red'.

AndrewPKYap SG

You misunderstand the whole "hard problem of consciousness" problem.

The problem is not that people know that something is red. The problem is "how" . "How" do people know that something is red so that they can agree to it?

If the answer is: "Well we all agree that it is red" then it would not be a "hard problem of consciousness" would it?

Phaze SG

You make an interesting point that consciousness develops. So what you are saying is that consciousness develops from nothing?

I'll try to explain further what I'm trying to get at. I probably haven't thought this through enough so please forgive and correct my errors.

Consciousness is either an emergent property of the physical body (eg. the brain) or it is independant of the body.

If consciousness is independant of the physical body, then at some point, the spark of consciousness (I don't think it has to be fully developed consciousness) must enter the body. The problem I see here is that there must be a source of these sparks.

If consciousness is dependant on the physical form, and it is an emergent phenomena (like in the game of life), we must then conclude that the number of conscious beings is forever increasing especially if you believe that consciousness can survive beyond death.

On the topic of reincarnation, how would a being be reincarnated? Is it a competition like millions of sperm trying to hit an egg? So in some cases, a 'new' spark might endow a body with consciousness, and in other case, an 'old' spark manages to reincarnate?

Or perhaps the 'old' being takes over the physical body and prevents the original consiousness from developing?

Or the reincarnated consciousness merges with the newly formed consciousness to produce something different?

Phaze SG

Exactly. That's what I said. I said I don't yet understand the hard problem of consciousness.

That's why I said "setting aside the question on how we can have subjective qualitative experiences in the first place." I was simply addressing the statement about how we know something is red without addressing the issue of perception.

So you understand the "hard problem of consiousness"? And you believe you have the answer?

Omniknight SG

That's why buddhists say rebirth instead of reincarnation isn't it?

january SG

its good to bring him in. he is expert and this will link us to more technical and academic and chim stuff.

i have saved his website also, basically he is a philosophy and some psychology professor.

An Eternal Now SG

Originally posted by Phaze:
January,

I do agree with your two points:

1. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

2. Testimonial evidence is usually very weak.

Not necessarily.. I think the current evidence and testimonial evidence is not 'weak' but it is just not that well published nor easily acceptable within Western cultures yet (due to their judeo-christian beliefs and so on). There are media reports on them, there are interviews and stuff like that on news agency, but hour long interview I think is not feasible, maybe in future they will do one. I do look forward to something like that.

However, I think the point of the paper is simply to suggest that quantum mechanical phenomena such as quantum entanglement and superposition may form a basis of an explanation of consciousness. It also uses the 'action at a distance' properties of quantum entanglement to try to explain phenomena like telepathy.

So before we examine the issue of reincarnation in this context, we should first ask, "is consiousness a quantum phenomena?"

Currently, I do not think there has been any peer-reviewed study of this - probably because the hypothesis is not currently falsifiable.

As David Chalmbers rightly points out, just because we don't understand quantum mechanics, and we also don't understand consiousness, it doesn't mean they have anything in common.

Yes.. anyway this might be of interest, see my second last post in agnosticism, and the article The Universe as a Hologram - Holographic Reality

On the topic of consiousness, I have a few questions that I hope someone will be able to help answer:

1. When does the consiousness enter the body?

Upon conception. Of course actually speaking consciousness is not an entity that moves around from one place to another or 'enters' the body... only in relative conventionally we speak like that but it can be really misleading. Consciousness is a conditional-wave-like-process. As a matter fact the difference between the Buddhist understanding and Hindu's understanding of rebirth is here. Hindu's understanding is reincarnation of the soul, while in Buddhism, consciousness is not a soul or a self, but a conditional-wave-like-process and is everchanging - means ceases the moment it arises and conditions the next moment.

2. Why does reincarnation seem to occur more often in some cultures than others?

India had a stronger meditative tradition of yogis who had abilities to recall past lives. Other cultures probably had, in fact it's not very rare, but also probably some did not dare to speak up due to strong judeo-christian influence.

3. Is consiousness created? The population is growing at an extremely rapid rate. Since very few people attain enlightenment, I assume that most souls are reincarnated. So the growth in population is composed of new consiousness?

Consciousness is not created. In Buddhism, nothing is ever created and there is no agent that can produce anything. The concept of a Creator God is rejected by the Buddha (see Questions About buddhism, 25 February 2007 · 02:14 AM) But it is even deeper than that... there isn't even a truly existing agent or Self that is doing anything..! When your Buddhist insight practise deepens you will start to discover that there is no, cannot be any, Doer of an action. For example, there is no fixed permanent thinker behind thinking -- only thoughts arising and passing at lightning speed with the previous thought causing an subtle imprint wrongly misinterpreted to be the continuity of a 'Self'! This is all happening at lightning speed and requires very deep meditative clarity to see it. Everything is just spontaneous-arising out of conditions, an ever-changing process, not caused by some fixed agent or entity. See this article written by Longchen in my forum who is one of the highly enlightened practitioners who post there.. http://www.dreamdatum.com/doer-beingdone.html.

An Eternal Now SG

{double post}

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