Philosophical justification for reincarnation
I think there was a discussion on reincarnation some time ago. However, supposing we accept reincarnation either as fact or as theoretical possibility, how would we convincingly justify it in philosophical terms?
Edit: Some useful arguments include the following ones suggested by @Bartricks.
There are at least three distinct mutually compatible cases. First, a case from indivisibility.
Our minds are strongly indivisible. Half a mind makes no sense. As our minds are strongly indivisible, they have no parts. An object that has no parts does not come into being - for there is nothing from which it can be formed - and thus if it exists, it has always existed. Thus our minds have always existed. As our lives here had a beginning, we - the minds undergoing them - must have existed previously, for we have always existed.
Second, a case from free will or retributive moral responsibility. To be retributively morally responsible for one's behaviour one needs to be its ultimate originator. One will not be its ultimate originator if one has come into being, for then the causal chain extends outside of oneself to external antecedent causes. Thus, to be retributively responsible requires existing but not having been caused to exist. We are retributively responsible, thus we have not been caused to exist and must always have existed.
Third, a case from God. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being - God - exists. Life here is dangerous and we who are living such lives are ignorant of most things. God, being all powerful, let that be the case. But God, being omnibenevolent, would not have subjected innocent persons to such a life. Thus we are not innocent. But when we are born we have performed no actions in this life. Thus the moral crimes for which this life is a punishment must be ones we performed in a past life. Thus we must have lived previously.
Edit: Some useful arguments include the following ones suggested by @Bartricks.
There are at least three distinct mutually compatible cases. First, a case from indivisibility.
Our minds are strongly indivisible. Half a mind makes no sense. As our minds are strongly indivisible, they have no parts. An object that has no parts does not come into being - for there is nothing from which it can be formed - and thus if it exists, it has always existed. Thus our minds have always existed. As our lives here had a beginning, we - the minds undergoing them - must have existed previously, for we have always existed.
Second, a case from free will or retributive moral responsibility. To be retributively morally responsible for one's behaviour one needs to be its ultimate originator. One will not be its ultimate originator if one has come into being, for then the causal chain extends outside of oneself to external antecedent causes. Thus, to be retributively responsible requires existing but not having been caused to exist. We are retributively responsible, thus we have not been caused to exist and must always have existed.
Third, a case from God. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being - God - exists. Life here is dangerous and we who are living such lives are ignorant of most things. God, being all powerful, let that be the case. But God, being omnibenevolent, would not have subjected innocent persons to such a life. Thus we are not innocent. But when we are born we have performed no actions in this life. Thus the moral crimes for which this life is a punishment must be ones we performed in a past life. Thus we must have lived previously.
Comments (625)
Hi Apollodorus
I don't understand your question.
What is there to philosophise about?
It either exists or it doesn't. The only thing that can determine that question is evidence, not philosophy.
You asked us to suppose that it exists as a fact or possibility - so what's left?
It doesn't matter, though. There is a strong prejudice against such claims, so that no matter what the evidence, it can always be denied. And it's not really a subject for philosophy, at least since about the 4th century AD, when belief in 'metempsychosis' was anathematised by the early Church.
Those interested can google Dr Ian Stevenson and read about him. I wouldn't regard the wikipedia entry as a credible source, however. But it's really not worth discussing on this forum it will only result in acrimony.
Hi Wayfarer
I totally agree that Stevenson's work was brilliant, even if it couldn't be held as conclusive.
I also agree that the Wikipedia article is grossly misleading and should be withdrawn.
Academia, through the University of Virginia and onwards to wider peer reviews, has accepted Stevenson's methods of data gathering as matching high scientific standards. The only things under dispute are the causes of the phenomenon he uncovered.
Anyone who reads the research and sees the tv programmes about this will see that the evidence from 'out of body experiences' to reincarnation are genuine cases with honest victims of this effect.
Whether this is down to reincarnation and the spirt, or something more mundane, is where the real debate should be happening.
Once again, the so-called scientific community has tended to try and smear the evidence rather than debate its nature.... and why? Dogma.
Hi there. It wasn't "philosophizing" I was talking about. I meant more something like "justification" in the sense of what would amount to "proof" from a philosophical or reason-based perspective as opposed to a religious or faith-based one.
"Reincarnation" represents merely waking up again each day – but religiously(?) generalized into a metaphor about 'birth-awareness-death' – the arc of daily living from sleep to sleep again (Sisyphus-like "wheel") with each yesterday (like) a different "past life" ... especially due to vagueries of memory (thus, why Alzheimer's syndrome is such a horror vacui). Experientially, each day, and each year, and each decade, one was not quite the same person as one is today.... All the same, and yet, tomorrow never knows, does one? :victory:? So taking this metaphorical "reincarnation" literally just misses the existential plot, at least as I grok it, and substitutes other-worldly woo (à la religious neurosis) for this-worldly today, living attentively in the moment.
Personally, I do tend to accept reincarnation as many Platonists and even non-Platonists do. Obviously, I can't say it's a "fact" as I don't remember experiencing it. However, I believe that it's a very strong theoretical possibility and, as you say, there may be scientific evidence to support this.
Here's one (my) way of looking at it.
If someone asks you (or you're asking yourself) about reincarnation, you might answer "I don't know". But that answer doesn't take you anywhere as ignorance isn't really a basis for knowledge.
In contrast, if you were to answer "I don't remember", this might take us a small step forward.
For example, we could take "I don't remember" to really mean "I remember not existing before" which tends to change the situation. We now have a subject/agent who remembers and "not existing before" may refer to the current incarnation, which actually makes sense: you can't remember not existing at all as there would be no "you" to remember, but you can remember existing as something or somebody other than what you are now however vague that memory may be.
This would be comparable to waking up from deep sleep and saying "I don't remember a thing". But what you are actually saying is that you remember being in a state of deep sleep where your consciousness was not aware of the normal experiences of everyday life - not that your consciousness was nonexistent.
It's up there with astrology, ghosts and UFO research, all generally categorised under the heading woo-woo.
I accept the possibility, but I don't think too much about it.
Well one route to go would be many worlds. Perhaps in some other world there are copies of us. We wouldn't be able to interact in any manner.
Perhaps as energy, we might be lucky enough to interact with other persons in some obscure manner. It's not necessarily woo, nor is life after death in some wonderful realm, but the evidence is not terribly convincing.
Some people say they remember previous lives, but what about those who don't. Is it that they have not reincarnated or is it a matter of lack of memory? Or maybe some people are able to, and others not.
I may be repeating myself of this point but, as far as I can tell when I apply any possible word or concept to the state prior to my birth such as "joy", "grief", "length (of time)", "good", "bad", etc., I find that none apply at all. That's as much evidence, if it can be called that, that I can get for the transcendent. Why would after death be any different: before birth nothing applies, after death nothing applies: the state is the same.
We come back to testimonies. But is it this world in which such memories apply or what? Even putting science aside, the reasons why such a thing could occur doesn't make much sense to me. Then again, at bottom, nothing does.
In Western cultures where the metaphysical norms are derived from Abrahamic religions.
In contrast, go far East, and it would be woo not to believe in reincarnation/rebirth.
First answer why it would be necessary to "convincingly justify it in philosophical terms".
Quoting Manuel
The point about testimonies is that they can be tested against evidence.
With a one lifetime conception, those who have hard lives now are doomed to hopelessness and resignation.
The kind of evidence they provide is less solid than evidence found in other branches of science. Personal accounts are quite less reliable that direct observation.
Doesn't mean it's not evidence, it can be. It's just more problematic.
Corroborated.
Neither do I, don't get me wrong. I was just saying that philosophy ought to be able to come up with something a bit better that just quasi-religious belief.
At the end of the day, either reincarnation is real or it isn’t. If it is, then it necessarily involves memory, remembrance and recollection.
The reason we don’t normally remember past lives is probably because it would interfere with our normal, everyday life. People having different intellectual capacities, it seems reasonable to assume that those at the lower end of the spectrum might be overwhelmed by memories from past lives whereas those with a more developed intellect would handle it without major difficulties.
In the Indian (Buddhist and Hindu) traditions there are numerous references to precisely this ability to remember past lives among those with a more evolved intelligence and this seems to be an ability that can be acquired, or reawakened, through specific forms of mental training.
For example, the Abhidharmakosa of Vasubandhu (4th-5th century CE) says that those wishing to develop their power of recollection of past lives should start by taking hold of the thought that has just passed and then of that immediately before it, and so gradually proceed back through the successive states of their present existence to the very moment of their conception and beyond (VII 123).
Obviously, this requires training and it would happen in the context of meditation or contemplation, when the body is completely motionless and there is a maximum of mental clarity and focus. But the texts mention many who can actually remember their past lives as a result of the above technique (or of spiritual development in general) and there is no reason to assume that this is just empty talk in all cases.
See also Visuddhimagga
Normally, when we’ve misplaced something, we often find it useful to mentally trace back our actions until we remember where we last placed it. What is different (and interesting) in the above-mentioned technique is that not actions but thoughts are used to stimulate and awaken memory.
Memory is equally important in Greek philosophy even though for slightly different reasons. Platonists believe that learning is a process of remembrance and we find a similar stance in Platonic-influenced Christian thinkers like Augustine of Hippo.
So, it would seem that attention to “the present moment”, useful though it may be in itself, may also be the gate to the past and, possibly, to the future. Instances of people with “paranormal abilities” aren’t entirely unheard-of.
There may be other ways to “justify” belief in reincarnation. For example, if God is just as is generally admitted, then it stands to reason that he might give us a second chance and not judge us after just one life. In discussions with Christians and Muslims I’ve found that they are often prepared to accept reincarnation on these grounds.
As @baker said, there are also ethical considerations.
I'm not well read on the topic of Reincarnation, but I do have a general hypothesis for why the theory of body-hopping souls arose among philosophers & sages concerned with Ethics. Almost all cultures on Earth have devised some explanation for the inequalities and injustices of the world : The Problem of Evil. For example, ancient Greek cultures were feudal societies. "As above, so below" : they typically assumed that humans were like slaves or servants to their feudal Lords in heaven. In that case, humans were subject to the mercurial whims of their whip-wielding slave-owners, and free-will was a pathetic illusion of the downtrodden. So, the Greeks, both slaves & lords, tended to be fatalistic, and/or pessimistic, about their long-term future prospects, and held no hope for any afterlife beyond the grave. Thus, they saw no reason to expect personal justice in this life or any other. Those "typical" Greeks also tended to be materialistic & deterministic about the mechanics of the world, in which humans were mere grinding cogs.
However, atypical idealistic philosophers -- most of whom were independent-minded upper-class slave-owners themselves --could hold a more optimistic worldview, in which personal freewill could alter the course of Fate to some degree. Also, their god-models were more abstract -- more like general principles than specific persons. As leaders of society themselves, this allowed them to have more individual influence on the course of events. Plus, they believed that humans had individual personalized Souls, instead of the generic animating force of ancient Animism. Therefore, it made sense that, since even these leaders of men were subject to fatal forces beyond their control, their world was still characterized by injustice. Which contradicts the Platonic notion of God as the eternal epitome of Goodness. Yet, even if the gods were not powerful enough to fight Fate, they could conceivably give their human subjects a second chance in an afterlife.
So, my theory is that Plato's principle of Reincarnation was an attempt to justify the goodness and justice of the gods, despite all the evidence against it in the real world. If at first you don't have a life of peace & justice, just try-try again in a series of after-lives. Originally, the Hebrews also seemed to believe in arbitrary Fatalism, and the finality of the grave. But that didn't fit their image of Yahweh as a loving father. Consequently, like the Greek philosophers, Jewish thinkers gradually came to believe that the cruelties of reality were not the intention of God for his beloved creation. But his best intentions were countered by his old nemesis : Satan. So, as a compromise, God made arrangements for postmortem Justice, not in a series of reincarnations, but in one triumphant victory over the evil god of fickle Fate.
Unfortunately, both of these solutions to the Problem of Evil depend on Faith in future Justice, instead of the blessed experience of Justice in the Here & Now. For those of little faith though, "justice delayed is justice denied". :sad:
Gods subject to Fate :
Whereas the Hebrews blamed humanity for bringing disorder to God's harmoniously ordered universe, the Greeks conceived their gods as an expression of the disorder of the world and its uncontrollable forces. To the Greeks, morality is a human invention; and though Zeus is the most powerful of their gods, even he can be resisted by his fellow Olympians and must bow to the mysterious power of fate.
https://www.auburn.wednet.edu/cms/lib03/WA01001938/Centricity/Domain/2205/Fate%20reading.pdf
In the opening of Paradise Lost, Milton invokes his Muse, the Holy Spirit, to grant him “Eternal Providence” that he may achieve his goal for the epic: to “justify the ways of God to men”
"Job also had an unquenchable thirst for God in the midst of his sufferings. His friends were troublesome enemies and his tears were his food day and night. He longed for God's justice in his suffering. He realized he needed more than a therapeutic God and gospel. He longed for deliverance from his pain, as well as assurance of his reconciliation with God. This is what sets the stage for Job's lamentations, a yearning for God's mercy and justice."
https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/smith_don/job/whirlwind08.cfm
Justice delayed is justice denied. ___William E. Gladstone
There are at least three distinct mutually compatible cases. First, a case from indivisibility.
Our minds are strongly indivisible. Half a mind makes no sense. As our minds are strongly indivisible, they have no parts. An object that has no parts does not come into being - for there is nothing from which it can be formed - and thus if it exists, it has always existed. Thus our minds have always existed. As our lives here had a beginning, we - the minds undergoing them - must have existed previously, for we have always existed.
Second, a case from free will or retributive moral responsibility. To be retributively morally responsible for one's behaviour one needs to be its ultimate originator. One will not be its ultimate originator if one has come into being, for then the causal chain extends outside of oneself to external antecedent causes. Thus, to be retributively responsible requires existing but not having been caused to exist. We are retributively responsible, thus we have not been caused to exist and must always have existed.
Third, a case from God. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being - God - exists. Life here is dangerous and we who are living such lives are ignorant of most things. God, being all powerful, let that be the case. But God, being omnibenevolent, would not have subjected innocent persons to such a life. Thus we are not innocent. But when we are born we have performed no actions in this life. Thus the moral crimes for which this life is a punishment must be ones we performed in a past life. Thus we must have lived previously.
I believe all of these arguments are sound, though only one needs to be.
They definitely seem worthwhile looking into. Obviously, we'll need to see how we define things like "mind" etc. But I must say your arguments come very close to what I meant by "philosophical justification". So, maybe we are getting somewhere.
I think this is the most persuasive of your three. It contains the fewest assumptions perhaps, or at least the assumptions are intuitively self evident on reflection.
Apart from memory, intent, sensation, ratiocination...
I tend to agree with that. They are not "parts" stricto sensu, they're functions of the same one thing.
But how can we formulate the mind argument to render it more acceptable to official Christianity?
The original question said "supposing we accept reincarnation either as fact or as theoretical possibility"
Any chance of expanding on that a bit?
SO a further objection would be that it is not obvious that a mind is an object.
Then there's the treating of being as if it were a predicate.
All this to say, the road is not as clear as has been presumed.
Well, I did say we need to look into how we define "mind". But my feeling is that we're on the right track.
Actually you do; frozen water will always consist in a discrete chunk. For that matter even bodies of water, parts of which might freeze are generally discrete.And water vapour may form separate clouds.
What is it that is reincarnated?
Suppose mind to be memory, intent, sensation, ratiocination and so on; what remains from one life to another? Intent, sensation, ratiocination are context-dependent; your sensations now are not the sensations you had in a previous life.
So just memory? Then reincarnation consists merely in disembodied memories moving from one mind to another.
Both sensations and memory are functions of consciousness. It is consciousness that reincarnates.
Of course, there are some problems, hence the original question. But that's not a reason to give up before even trying.
Ice, water and steam/vapour are often used to illustrate how consciousness can assume various forms. However, it needs to be borne in mind that, unlike water, etc., consciousness does not break into discrete parts. It remains a unity.
You don't have his memories.
Nor his sensations.
Perhaps you share his intentions, at least to some degree. But that is hardly sufficient for one to conclude that you are the reincarnation of Napoleon.
And i submit that these are not small issues. If one cannot explain what it is that is reincarnated, one has no grounds for claiming that reincarnation occurs. But in attempting such an explanation, one falls into all the issues of self, identity, mind...
Hence there are very good philosophical reasons to think reincarnation problematic.
I'm not saying it isn't problematic but I don't think these are problems that can't be resolved.
Essentially, the soul that reincarnates consists of consciousness which is intelligence, awareness and has powers such as will, knowledge and action.
If you have the memory (real, not imagined) of Napoleon, then you're Napoleon reincarnated as this present person. Otherwise you aren't.
Memories remain embedded in consciousness in latent form. Aspects of memory may become active in the form of basic instincts, etc. but the rest remain dormant until such time as there is cause for them to be (re-)activated.
Perhaps one way of looking at it is that God created our bodies after which he infused us with his breath or spirit which would suggest that the spirit part of us is divine and therefore immortal and not strictly speaking "created".
SO we have a new entity, the soul, and that is what is reincarnated... and what makes this soul the same as that soul is that they have the same memories?
Hence it is not the will, knowledge and action of the individual that is reincarnated...
Indeed, one's will, knowledge and action do not remain constant over a lifetime, let alone between lifetimes.
So again, what we have at best is memories becoming disembodied and moving into other minds.
That aspect of consciousness that is pure intelligence and is aware of itself as consciousness is always the same. What changes is that memories of a particular existence are withdrawn back into consciousness at death and new ones are created in a new incarnation.
I was just about to say the same. I think we can agree on that.
The mind is the object that is conscious. That is, it 'has' consciousness as one of its properties. But it is not itself consciousness - that's a category error of the sort Banno and others who don't know their stuff are wont to make.
Memories, desires, thoughts, hopes and so forth are all states of mind, not constituents of the mind. That's why if you think less you are not less of a mind than if you thought more, etc.
What could that mean? It's not at all clear what intelligence is - see the discussion of IQ. SO invoking it here does not serve to clarify the issue.
"Is aware of itself" - some sort of qualia? As if what it is like to be Apollodorus is the same as what it is like to be Napoleon... But that looks just wrong.
I knew the instant I mentioned ice that someone would say 'er, but a block of ice can be divided'.
The point - which you missed - was that simply changing water from a state of being liquid to a state of being solid does not, in and of itself, constitute dividing it.
I await you telling me more about the properties of ice.
If that's true then it follows that Tarbrick's analogy was a bad one; which is all I was pointing out.
It's a bit like an actor on stage. The costume changes, the character changes, the stage etc. may change even during the same performance and the audience changes too. Yet the actor himself or herself remains the same.
The powers of will, knowledge, action, etc, remain the same. What changes is their content, object and ways in which they operate in accordance with the new circumstances.
But it does, ice is divided from liquid water as is water vapour.
Quoting Bartricks
:rofl:
Whether yours or not, it's simply a bad analogy; despite which I do agree that minds and their mental states are logically distinct.
Hmm. Did well at school did we?
That's why I said from the start that we need to define things like "mind". The way I see it consciousness is the entity or principle that reincarnates. In its pure state it it is just intelligence and self-awareness and it has powers like will, knowledge and action in latent form.
When consciousness descends into the material world by assuming a physical body, then its self-awareness focuses more and more on its new existence and on the objects of the world, and its other powers of will, knowledge and action assume the form of the "mind", i.e. intellect, emotions and sensory faculties or what Platonists may refer to (with some modifications) as ?????????? logistikon or intellectual aspect ????? thymos or emotional aspect and ???????????? epithymetikon or sensual aspect. Consciousness in itself is the nous.
I suppose it's just a matter of terminology but other than that there seems to be general agreement between what you and I are saying. Or so I think.
It would probably help if your audience was thoroughly stoned.
It doesn't. It just changes its state. That's obvious.
Now baby steps: changing a mind's state, does not divide it.
You can't divide a mind
When someone who doesn't have any philosophical training or aptitude responds that you can divide a mind because you can change its states, they are being as confused as someone who thinks that freezing water divides it. You.
I see what you mean. We can get back to that once we've sorted out one or two other points.
Consciousness is a state, not an object. If you go unconscious you do not cease to exist.
It is the mind, not our consciousness, that is the object of reincarnation. There has to be something that lives a life and that has lived other lives. Two lives can be radically different, yet lived by the same mind. It's the mind that is that thing. That's why two lives that have no conscious states in common can still be lived by one and the same mind.
Would they be divisible if they had parts?
Yes.
Therefore they lack parts.
If they lack parts they're uncreatable.
If they exist and are uncreatable, then they exist and have not been created.
If they have not been created but exist, then they have always existed.
Our bodies have not always existed, thus we have existed prior to our bodies existing.
That's just one argument - what's wrong with it?
I mean, it is the product of thought, but surely that is not a fault? Thought - reasoned reflection anyway - is our source of insight, is it not?
So where is the error in my reasoning above?
Sure - except we know what an actor is. What is it that remains the same from one life to another?
And I haven't seen a good account of that. It's not the things we usually associate with the parts of the self.
Quoting Apollodorus
But Apollodorus is not the power to will, knowledge, action - we each have those; Apollodorus is the content that you say changes. So it's not Apollodorus who is reincarnated.
On that argument, since you and I both have the power to will, knowledge, action, we are the same person.
SO if your account is right, it's not Apollodorus who is reincarnated.
Water can be divided; whether by freezing or not. Take a glass of water; I can divide that into two or ten just by pouring it into two or ten other glasses. Can you do that with a mind? No, of course not, and I've not said or suggested that you can. So water is simply not a good analogy for mind.
One of Stevenson’s cases:
He documented nearly 3,000 such cases over the course of decades (and rejected many more suspecting ulterior motives or lying). Also found many cases where birthmarks and deformities appeared to correspond with reported cause of death in previous life (for example at the reported site of a bullet wound).
Of course it could all be coincidence. Indeed the case above was explained away by a prominent Western Buddhist I know on just those grounds. ‘The desire not to believe’, said Stevenson, ‘ is just as powerful as the desire to believe’. That said, Stevenson never claimed to have proven that reincarnation occurs; only that these cases suggested that it might.
What I have said stands; the philosophical issue that remains is: what is reincarnated?
Indeed, and that is one objection to consciousness being a process. We seem to agree that consciousness being a process and consciousness being indivisible are incompatible. We have to ditch one option before settling on a view.
EDIT: do you have a view on the binding problem in relation to consciousness? (I haven't defined the binding problem tightly here, there are a number of slightly different ones I think, but I'm interested in any/all of them)
Children.
I don't recal ever hearing in Theravada Buddhist doctrine about the spontaneous recollection of past lives. I searched ATI for it, no finds. Recollection of past lives is one of the supernormal faculties and it is an attainment, not something that would randomly happen. The Buddha had a recollection of past lives on the night of his awakening.
I also don't recal ever hearing in Hinduism that the recollection of past lives could be spontaneous.
My point is that there exist doctrines about the recollection of past lives, and that if someone presumably collects evidence of the recollection of past lives, but this evidence is not aligned with the doctrines of the recollection of past lives, then something is amiss.
So those children who are reported to be able to remember their past lives:
1. didn't actually recall their past lives,
or
2. they were highly spiritually attained (for which there should be further evidence),
or
3. the doctrines about the recollection of past lives are wrong.
If 3, then the whole project of looking for evidence of recollection of past lives is moot to begin with.
Without a theoretical framework based on the doctrines, what are you going to look for, in terms of evidence?
https://www.amazon.com.au/Rebirth-Early-Buddhism-Current-Research/dp/1614294461
It's futile to talk about a topic like reincarnation/rebirth or recollection of past lives without first defining the terms, or by categorically ignoring the contexts in which those terms originate from.
As to your question, an Early Buddhist would probably answer like this: Because there is kamma, there is rebirth. It's not that "you make kamma"; it's that kamma makes you. What is (!)born is kamma. (In this sense, Early Buddhist concepts are somewhat comparable to scientific materialism, because there is no notion of a "soul" that would be reborn.)
This is in contrast with a mainstream Hindu version of reincarnation, where it is said that a person is actually a soul that gets embodied over and over again in many bodies; the same soul can be one time around born in a human body, another time in an animal body. The way the same hand can put on different gloves.
Does Analayo's book provide doctrinal evidence of the spontaneous recollection of past lives?
Interesting as far as theories go. However, I've got my own.
Pythagoras or some other Greek philosopher went to Egypt in search of higher knowledge. The Egyptians believed that the Sun god was reborn every day anew. The human soul was similar to the Sun god. In popular belief it was reborn into the afterlife after death. But esoteric tradition held that it was reborn many times unless it was initiated into higher mysteries. Pythagoras or other Greeks took this secret knowledge to Greece and the Greek colonies on the Italic Peninsula.
This possibly also ties in with @180 Proof's metaphor.
From here.
Not at all. We all have arms, legs, heads, etc. without this making us the same person.
We all have the power of will, knowledge and action, but those powers differ from one individual to another.
The soul (psyche) has a higher aspect that remains in contact with the Universal Intelligence (Nous) at all times and a lower aspect that reincarnates, assuming a subtle body (ochema) and a physical body.
At the higher level all souls are essentially identical to one another and to the Universal Intelligence from which they emanate, like drops of water from the same ocean or rays of light from the same sun.
Water drops and sun rays are essentially identical to one another but not in the sense that they are one single drop or one single ray. Additionally, each drop or ray may be different from others in that they may contain, for example, bits of algae or particles of dust or other materials.
Likewise, even though souls are essentially identical, their psychic content such as latent memories, instincts, inclinations and other psychological features differ from soul to soul in the same way they differ in terms of physical bodies.
Stevenson's cases make very interesting reading and raise many theoretical possibilities.
For example, some children are said to intellectually and emotionally identify with the opposite sex even though biologically they are different.
This may be explicable as being due to upbringing if a child was brought up with others of the opposite sex, but where this is not the case, the phenomenon may be explicable by means of the reincarnation theory - unless science has a more plausible idea.
I agree. But there is no harm trying to harmonize reason and tradition as far as logically possible, along the lines of a Wesleyan Quadrilateral.
Another possibility would be to see reincarnation as an esoteric or higher teaching.
"There are six kinds of people who recollect these past lives. They are: other sectarians, ordinary disciples ..." - Visuddhimagga XIII 15
Recollection of past lives may not be "spontaneous" in the strict sense of the word, it can be the result of spiritual practice performed in a past life or due to some other reason or cause, e.g. magic, certain drugs, etc. I wouldn't accord the term "spontaneous" too much importance.
You are probably correct that the historical origin of the Reincarnation hypothesis arose in some of the older civilizations. The Egyptians, and later the Babylonians, were considered the world-class experts on Magic & Mysticism -- the subjective "science" of their day. So, the mythical worldview that incorporated Reincarnation followed a chain of authority from "higher" cultures to "lower" societies. That may explain the "how" of cultural transmission of memes.
However, my psychological theory was focused on "why" such ideas emerged. Most likely, the theory of Reincarnation was not based on objective-empirical evidence, but on hypothetical reasoning from general theories -- gods & spirits & souls -- to more specific mechanisms for how those imaginary systems might work in their mystical realms, and how such otherworldly functions might impact humans in the real world.
Since Reincarnation is just one of many ancient spiritual-mystical theories of how the invisible world works, and the details of the soul-hopping process differ from one culture to another -- Egyptian, Hinduism, Buddhism -- those conjectures about the unseen realms seem to reflect the traditional meme-plexes (belief systems) of each culture, rather than any "higher knowledge" drawn from esoteric experiences in the spirit world. In other words, these stories (cultural myths) are fictional, not verifiable. But, of course, that's just my opinion, based on my lack of experience with spirits, or knowledge of arcane "secrets". :smile:
So it really doesn't matter what the bible says or some Buddhist thinks. What matters is what Reason says.
sounds similar to the Buddhist’s conception of reincarnation, where there is no permanent “self” (like personality, phobias, talent) that returns in another body, but instead the mind (and/or consciousness) transfers itself into another body plainly through a “mind-stream” and the mind redecorates and reforms itself through lived experience, which may or may not juxtapose their past lives.
But anyway, they're just another bunch of dogmatists who think they know it all already.
i could be very well misinterpreting it, but i think it may just be the loose language angle. the concept is called Anatt?, which seems to be the antithesis of the Hindu concept Atm?n. (they do believe in a permanent soul/self/essence)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatt?
it puzzled me the first time i came across it, because if the self is perpetual and forever tumultuous, what exactly is reincarnating or moving on then?
I don't remember what the means/proofs of knowledge are called in Platonism but if I'm not mistaken they are (1) sense-perception, (2) reason, and (3) consensus or expert opinion. Any of these on its own could be wrong. Hence reason would need to be harmonized with at least one of the others.
But this isn't very important to me or to the topic so it can be left for later consideration. I think we agree on all the essential elements and I'm sure we can also sort out terminology like "mind".
Personally, I'm convinced that there is such a thing as "paranormal experience" in which the human mind or consciousness displays the ability to "see" or "foresee" things or events which ability seems to operate independently of the nervous system or physical organs of perception. For example, there are some reliable accounts of telepathy, clairvoyant dreams, etc. that a strictly materialist view of the mind is unable to explain. This doesn't prove reincarnation but it suggests that our mind or consciousness is not necessarily limited to the physical body.
It isn't possible. We have the cadaver farms to prove what happens to us after death, and as far as I know, exactly zero of those cadavers have been reborn. I suppose the only way to justify reincarnation is to posit a sort of dualism between that which is proven to turn to dust and that which is hoped, fantasized, imagined to arrive in another body.
I appreciate this sketch. I must have come across this back in the day and then forgot only for me to recall it here via my "rebirth-waking up again" metaphor.
Absolutely. As Plato and others said, learning is really a process of remembrance. Memory brings to mind things both unknown and forgotten. Maybe there is some good in this forum, after all ...
Stop there. What is the soul?
Yes; that's the follow-on question: the presumption is that Napoleon gets reincarnated as Apollodorus; but how is Apollodorus the same as Napoleon?
The soul is a form of intelligent energy. An immaterial substance that has the power of knowledge and action, of being aware of itself and of other things and of acting upon or interacting with itself and other things.
The physical body (soma) contains the metaphysical soul (psyche) which contains the spirit (pneuma or nous).
The spirit has two two aspects, (1) one that always contemplates the Universal Intelligence and does not descend into the physical world, and (2) one that is connected to the soul and incarnates in a body in the physical world.
The lower part of the soul is the part that retains memories and other impressions of past lives in latent form. When the soul is reincarnated, memories etc. remain dormant with the exception of basic instincts and it acquires a new identity during the course of the current embodied existence.
He isn't. Unless we also assume that Banno is the same as 180 Proof. But you're denying that.
Evidence for what?
Quoting Apollodorus
That.
As for 'mind', the term refers to an object that bears mental states.
You've called it "the soul" but haven't told us what it is.
One thing that we cannot conclude is that it is Apollodorus that is reincarnated - those beleifs, memories, intentions, desires...
So what's the point?
It's the opinion of those who studied the subject. Read Plato, Plotinus, and other philosophers. That's why I asked how reincarnation may be justified in philosophical terms.
OK, I see.
...energy as a magic cloud. This is where reincarnation meets bad physics.
How many Joules in a soul?
I get that. I normally refer to it as "consciousness" or "intelligence" in itself, like the Universal Intelligence or Nous (with a capital "N"), whereas by "mind" I tend to mean the individual consciousness or intelligence (nous with lower-case "n") especially in the embodied state. It doesn't really matter though.
How many Joules in anger or fear?
Not quite. The Universal Intelligence (Nous) emanates individual intelligences or souls (nous/psyche) which are reborn time and again until they eventually return to their original source like sea waves rising from and subsiding back into the sea. But that's just one way of looking at it.
I think you’d have a fair amount of difficulty supporting that with reference to original sources. I personally believe the notion of an ‘immaterial substance’ is incoherent, as no such ‘substance’ can be detected by means of the senses or instruments.
It’s also worth saying that there’s nothing like ‘intelligent energy’ in Buddhist doctrine also, that I’m aware of.
There was an opinion piece published in Scientific American, by physicist (and physicalist!) Sean Carroll, called Physics and the Immortality of the Soul. Carroll argues that belief in any kind of life after death is equivalent to the belief that the Moon is made from green cheese - that is to say, ridiculous.
But such an assertion is made because of the presuppositions that the writer brings to the question. In other words, he depicts the issue in such a way that it would indeed be ridiculous to believe it. But this is because of a deep misunderstanding about the very nature of the idea.
Carroll says:
I can think of a straightforward answer to this question, which is that the soul is not 'made of particles'. In fact the idea that the soul is 'made of particles' is not at all characteristic of what is meant by the term 'soul'. (I also think the claim that ‘the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood’ are strongly contestable, but I’ll leave that.)
But I think the soul could more easily be conceived in terms of a field that acts as an organising principle - analogous to the physical and magnetic fields that were discovered during the 19th century, that were found to be fundamental to the behaviour of particles. This is not to say that the soul is a field, but that it might be much more conceivable in terms of fields than of particles, or of energy.
Morphic Fields
Just as magnetic fields organise iron filings into predictable shapes, so too might a biological field effect be responsible for the general form and the persistence of particular attributes of an organism. The question is, is there any evidence of such fields?
Well, the existence of 'moprhic fields' is the brainchild of Rupert Sheldrake, the 'scientific heretic' who claims in a Scientific American interview that:
As the morphic field is capable of storing and transmitting remembered information, then 'the soul' could be conceived in such terms. The morphic field does, at the very least, provide an explanatory metaphor for such persistence.
Children with Past-Life Memories
But what, then, is the evidence for such effects in respect to 'life after death'? As mentioned previously in this thread, a researcher by the name of Ian Stevenson assembled a considerable body of data on children with recall of previous lives. Stevenson's data collection comprised the methodical documentation of a child’s purported recollections of a previous life. Then he identified from journals, birth-and-death records, and witnesses the deceased person the child supposedly remembered, and attempted to validate the facts that matched the child’s memory. Yet another Scientific American opinion piece notes that Stevenson even matched birthmarks and birth defects on his child subjects with wounds on the remembered deceased that could be verified by medical records.
Carroll, again
Carroll goes on in his piece to say that 'Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren’t any sensible answers to these questions (about the persistence of consciousness)'. However, that springs from his starting assumption that 'the soul' must be something physical, which, again, arises from the presumption that everything is physical, or reducible to physics. In other words, it is directly entailed by his belief in the exhaustiveness of physics with respect to the description of what is real.
He then says 'Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model. Most importantly, we need some way for that "new physics" to interact with the atoms that we do have.'
However, even in ordinary accounts of 'mind-body' medicine, it is clear that mind can have physical consequences and effects on the body. This is the case with, for example, psychosomatic medicine and the placebo effect, but there are many other examples.
He finishes by observing:
But that is not what 'most people have in mind'. If you start from the understanding that 'everything is physical', then this will indeed dictate the way you think about such questions. And it is indeed the case that there is no such 'blob' as Carroll imagines. But that is not what 'soul' is; but what it is, is something that can't be understood, given the presuppositions he’s starting from.
Quoting Apollodorus
"Studied the subject?" Those old dudes just made some shit up with which to spackle the huge cracks in the haunted houses of woo they'd built. Brilliant, even genius, woo is still just woo.
:death: :flower:
Is there more than one correct or accurate way of looking at it, or is it all just metaphor? And, if accurate, how do you know these things, anyway? Are you relying on authoritative texts, or do you believe you have direct knowledge? If you are relying on authoritative texts, how do you know they are authoritative?
Well, personally, I called the soul a form of "intelligent energy" because it has the power of self-awareness and knowledge as well as other powers or "energies" (Greek ???????? energeia).
You can't say something has powers or energies but it isn't a power, energy or force. I'm talking about Greek philosophy, of course, not Buddhism.
But the problem with non-believers in the soul is that they tend to believe that if there is no scientific description of a thing then it doesn't exist. A bit like a blind man who believes that because he can't see color it can't possibly exist.
Why would you need to justify it in any terms, once you have already accepted it?
Why would you need to explain something in scientific terms once you have already accepted it?
I think he's saying that many children report being somebody else or describe things connected to a recently deceased person that they wouldn't have any knowledge of, as soon as they start to speak. While in the West parents tend to dismiss such claims, they tend to be taken more seriously in societies where reincarnation is a common belief and, on inquiry, it is often found that the information provided by the child about the deceased person is correct.
You've gone back from energy to intentionality.
Basically in inventing "intelligent energy" you are equivocating.
I don't know. I do know that since the Western encounter with Tibetan Buddhists, that some Western-born children have been designated as incarnations of prominent lamas (e.g. Osel Hita).
Quoting Apollodorus
Here's a slightly rhetorical question - what power does reason have? It can compel, persuade, construct, and so on - but only through the agency of a rational being who is able to act according to its dictates. But reason isn't a substance, nor energy, although the 'force of reason' is certainly an acceptable expression. But even so, it's not directly analogous to energy. The power it has is not like 'intelligent energy'. With respect, I think you’re engaging in reification here.
Quoting Nils Loc
I have noticed that in cultures where re-birth is accepted, it's generally felt that the odds are not good that whatever realm you're born into will be as good or better than this one.
So it's not physical. Yet here's the thing: it moves physical stuff; the mind decides to move an arm, and the darn thing moves.
So you have to be able to provide a causal link between mind and arm. Now arms are most defiantly particles.
Ought not to be forgotten that ‘the atom’ is an abstraction. It’s not particles - it’s a particle zoo, which still confounds science.
- same issue as @Apollodorus has with the confused "intelligent energy".
And morphic resonance? Shame.
Another name for the magic intelligent energy cloud.
It'll all be quantum, won't it.
Is the best answer really a morphic intelligent energy field quantum resonance?
Hand waving.
I'd have very much more respect for folk who admited "I don't know"
Stevenson didn’t propose a mechanism - unfortunate word but tellingly the only one available - for the supposed transmission of memories outside a direct physical connection. That’s why I suggested morphic fields, as they at least provide some kind of conceptual basis. Of course I understand that Sheldrake is also taboo. It’s probably not coincidental that he is also a critic of scientific materialism.
The only point about the ‘particle zoo’ is simply to say that something - like the human body - is ‘particles’ or ‘made of atoms’ may not actually be saying anything much at all. We presume we know what is physical, but even that is an open question. ‘The world is queerer than we can suppose’, and all that.
I'm interested in the philosophical implications, and that means sorting out the conceptual stuff.
The key issue is "What is it that is reincarnated?" - think I mentioned that.
And a morphic intelligent energy field quantum resonance will not do.
I wonder how you would research that.
By asking advocates of reincarnation to explain what it is they think is reincarnated, perhaps? That'd be one way. Then we could examine what they suggest and see if it is coherent. We might see if it fits in with our understanding of other areas - ethics, psychology, physics. Stuff like we are doing.
A sentiment with which I agree.
Well, if consciousness is energy then it is subject to conservation, which means it could be recycled theoretically. Perhaps the brain may not be so much the source of consciousness as a window onto it, an intersection point.
So we agree then.
I think it wouldn't be wrong to assume this to be the case.
As already stated, the reason I chose to describe soul as "intelligent energy" or "consciousness" is that the Platonic texts describe it as having intelligence and powers or energies. Of course, there may be other/better ways of describing it in philosophical or scientific terms.
Before I respond, let me just say that because reincarnation carries a lot of religious baggage I don't like the term. However, that aside, I'll respond a bit to Banno's question.
First, even if the question can't be answered fully that doesn't mean there isn't evidence to support the idea that consciousness survives death, and may indeed be able to reside in other bodies. So, "...what is it that's reincarnated?" The answer is, your consciousness, viz., whatever it is that makes you, you, for example, your memories and your experiences. Do we know how that's possible? No. Do we know the mechanism? No. Do we understand any of the physics of such a process? It's doubtful.
Many investigations start out with unanswered questions, and many theories have unanswered questions, but that doesn't mean that there isn't evidence to support the theory. The question really is, is there any evidence to support the idea that consciousness survives the death of the body? The answer is emphatically yes. There is a ton of strong testimonial evidence, and there is some evidence to support the idea that consciousness can move out of a body, and back into another body, as a choice, i.e., we can choose to do it. If the testimonial evidence for NDEs is veridical (genuine objective experiences of reality), which I believe they are, then they, at the very least, demonstrate that our consciousness can move in and out of our body, and probably other bodies as well.
There are many unanswered questions about consciousness, but that doesn't mean that consciousness doesn't exist, or that consciousness isn't more than brain activity.
Correct. As testified by trustworthy people, "paranormal experience" such as telepathy, clairvoyant dreams and the like, rare though it may be, does exist. And this logically suggests that something like "consciousness" or "mind" can operate and exist independently of the physical body. Therefore it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand just because some people find the concept unsettling or beyond their intellectual abilities.
My personal experience with "accounts" of life-after-death was the Christian doctrine of Resurrection. It had the same general effect as Reincarnation -- a second chance for Justice and Happiness -- but in a one-shot deal. No need to try over & over to get it right. And no need for "philosophical justification", because it was based on faith in "reliable accounts", by witnesses to Jesus' revival after a gruesome death. Eventually though, I concluded that the testimony of those obviously biased witnesses was not "reliable". That's because they had an ideology (belief-system) to sell, and "the advertisement spoke well of it".
Nevertheless, if I had to chose, the straight-to-heaven Resurrection sounds much better than the unpredictable results of rebirth, and the possibility to Reincarnate as an insect. The bottom line is that I don't put much stock in second-hand "accounts" and hear-say anecdotes about events that I have never observed in my own experience. So, I'm not living in anticipation of Reincarnation or Resurrection. If I wake-up after death in a new body, or a naked Soul, I'll just think "what a nice surprise". :cool:
Resurrection vs Reincarnation :
[i]There is a great deal of “fuzziness of thinking” regarding death that many Christians hold besides reincarnation, Barstad added, such as believing that after death one dies and goes to heaven and stays there forever, rather than joining with their resurrected body at the end of time. . . .
“The vague notion that something called a soul or a spirit or a shade lingers after death in some kind of place or condition where it can be more or less happy is not Christian,” Barstad said. “A human soul without a body is a tragedy. . . .
Reincarnation is “irreconcilable with the Christian belief that a human person is a distinct being, who lives one life, for which he or she is fully responsible: this understanding of the person puts into question both responsibility and freedom,”[/i]
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/39710/why-christians-believe-in-resurrection-not-reincarnation
That's a perfectly reasonable approach. However, when I say "reliable accounts" I mean reliable accounts i.e. accounts that are about as close to established fact as you can get, not mere hear-say.
Plus, don't forget that even when we accept scientific theories we tend to do it on faith as we have no possibility of personally verifying all the claims that science makes.
This is the crux of the matter, so it speak, and it's telling that no one has yet proposed a coherent, evidence-based, 'transmigratory (metempsychotic)' candidate.
edit:
Btw, while dismissive of literal Reincarnation, I do find prospects of Not-Aging/Dying (e.g. 'immorbidity') and Resurrection (e.g. 'phenomenal self-continuity transfer/extension') philosophically plausable ... These prospects I elaborate on further here.
It makes for standard Hare Krishna doctrine:
And they claim (at the link) that they can prove all of this with the scientific method.
I answered your question. Why did you ignore it?
Quoting Banno
But you're like someone who claims to want to learn and talk about "gravity", and then insists on categorically ignoring all physics books about gravity.
What makes all this into woo-woo is that so many people insist on being Humpy Dumpty -- "When I use a word" -- they say in a scornful tone -- "it means exactly what I choose it to mean!!"
You're a semantic atomist.
Thanks for the find!
The discussion of recollection of past lives starts on page 404 here. It includes the differences between the ways different categories of people recollect past lives and what sense they can make of them.
Sadly, this seems to be the case here.
You're a fool.
Granted, not understanding the physics - if there is any - of the process does not rule it out. I agree. Note however that it's not just the absence of a process that is at hand, but that any process must apparently involve something quite new to physics. It's not like the water tank is leaking and we can't find the leak. It's like the water in the tank is turning into wine. It is an extraordinary claim, and hence requires very, very good evidence.
You say that what gets reincarnated is "your consciousness, viz., whatever it is that makes you, you, for example, your memories and your experiences."
It is apparent that only a very few people claim to have memories of previous lives. So if we take them at their word, reincarnation is a very rare thing indeed. Further, it follows that one cannot claim that one is the reincarnation of Napoleon, for example, and yet that one has no recollections of being Napoleon. I certainly have no memories of a previous life, and hence, if what is reincarnated is one's memories, I have not been here before.
There's also the issue of the distinction between self and memory. Suppose that on his death, Napoleon's memories become disembodied, drift around the cosmos and enter the body of a child named Fred. Will we choose to say that Fred has Napoleon's memories, or will we choose to say that the child is Napoleon? This to draw attention to the fact that one's self is not equivalent to one's memories.
I am aware of your strong interest in NDE's. I've read a bit about them, bit I remain unconvinced. While it is a topic that I keep one eye on, the absence of an explanation of the way in which a mind might be disembodied is a huge problem. All we have had so far is hand-waving talk of energy, fields and quanta.
Doubtless I will be accused again of scientism; better that than credulity. These are physical phenomena that are being described. A physical explanation is called for. In its absence, I remain unconvinced.
This is the question, and it has no philosophically satisfactory answer.
Nothing has changed since Socrates addressed this in the Phaedo. He gives two answers. The first is the one that will quiet the "childish fears" of his friends by presenting myths, metaphors, and arguments that appear to prove the continued existence of the soul after death. Only to those who can follow the arguments carefully enough he also points out how all the arguments fail. This leads to his second answer, which has two parts: a) we do not know what will happen, and more troubling to those who wish to preserve hope, b) there is no coherent idea or concept of the individual soul that is not tied to an actual individual. The question itself then is incoherent.
The same problem arises with those who replace soul with energy or consciousness.
The fact that 'they say it' doesn't provide any reason to believe it. The only science they mention is NDE, but they don't cite any actual science. It was just this kind of Hindu 'eternalism' that the Buddha rejected.
Nevertheless, the prevailing view of the Phaedo is that Socrates accepts, and argues in favour of, the immortality of the soul, even if he admits he doesn't necessarily understand the soul's destiny.
Yes, this is the prevailing view and it had a strong influence on Christianity, but follow the arguments rather than prevailing opinion if you want to see what is really going on. But if you are going to do so I suggest you use a good translation such as West's Four Texts on Socrates. His commentary is pretty good too.
Yes, this is the prevailing view and it had a strong influence on Christianity, but follow the arguments rather than prevailing opinion if you want to see what is really going on. But if you are going to do so I suggest you use a good translation such as West's Four Texts on Socrates. His commentary is pretty good too.
What does the soul amount to in this? Would in be analogous to something like consciousness or experience.
For this to be plausible, consciousness would have to be something seperate-able from matter. Putting aside the topic of considering if consciousness is physical or not, I don't know how can one speak of experience absent all matter.
I mean, would you be speaking of a kind of mind stuff than can be instantiated in different people or something like that?
One of the suggestions in the Phaedo is that what is immaterial can be understood in terms of the ideas. Likewise, what the soul ‘remembers’ are ideas that were understood before birth. And those are principles that are grasped by reason. I don’t think such ideas are objectively real. Whereas for us, what is objectively real comprises our cognitive horizon.
(I’m off to work, back later.)
There is a category error at hand here - as I think you indicate, presented by those who have said the mind is an object.
Mind is to brain as digestion is to gut. That looks pretty clear to me, if still debatable.
Suppose that someone were to suggest that digestion could become disembodied. That the digestion from one body could move to another.
Would you think this idea had conceptual issues?
Those are much the same as the conceptual issues I see in reincarnation.
Sure. And we can speak of such terms today in terms of genetics, though we have no clue how genes could contribute to the kind of innate knowledge we have.
As for cognitive horizons, I'm a little unsure what you may mean. If you'd said something like "the world is my representation.", then I'd have no objections.
Have a good day at work. :)
Yes. I agree. Mind is residue of the brain somehow.
Nonetheless, granting that, we could imagine mental processes leaving the brain entirely, and we'd have a zombie of sorts. Not that this actually happens, just pointing out the much postulated zombie.
For substance dualists, it is not an irrational belief to say that mind is qualitatively different from matter. I don't agree this formulation is entirely coherent, but it was an intuition back in the 17th century.
Quoting Banno
Initially, it faces the same problem as the mind does with the brain.
I assume we could have physiological problems with our gut in such a way that we couldn't digest things. But this doesn't imply that digestion is something over and above what some organs do in species.
Yes, I think that there are conceptual issues here. But I allow for the possibility of dualism, even if I think it's quite unlikely in regards to the mind/brain.
Plato solves one problem and makes another.
If your innate knowledge comes from a previous life, then either the chain of people is infinite, or there was an 'Adam' who learned without previous lives.
If this Adam could do it, anybody could. IOW, this Adam is an alternate solution to Meno's paradox, upon which Plato builds his case for anamnesis.
Or maybe the Soul he's talking about isn't like a chain of lives, but instead is an atemporal well. Straight New Age, there.
Not at all. Your second statement doesn't follow from the first. If only a few people claim to have memories of previous lives this may simply mean that only a few have the capacity to remember those lives not that those lives didn't happen.
That's exactly the position of Buddhist and other texts. Everybody has had past lives and everybody can develop the capacity to remember them by following certain mental training techniques as explained in my previous posts. If thousands of Buddhist monks had done those mental exercises for centuries without any result whatsoever, then I'm sure the truth would have come out by now.
Good point. But if there was this Adam then the myth of anamnesis cannot be taken too seriously, because it would not then rely on recollection from a previous life.
The single best work on this is Jacob Klein's Commentary on Plato's Meno. It is a powerful example of how to read a Platonic dialogue.
You could rework it so it only seems like a chain to temporally bound beings. The soul is like a touchstone for multiple lives playing out. Anamnesis is that connection to the eternal.
This is what I thought Plato meant when I first read Phaedo.
This would mean an eternal regress to past lives, there could be no life that was not a recollection from a previous life, so no life in which knowledge of the Forms first gained.
It is instructive to compare the myth of recollection of the Forms with intellection of the Forms. It is curious that in the Republic knowledge of the Forms occurs through direct apprehension of them with the mind in the present, but the discussion of past lives in the Republic says nothing about knowledge of the Forms through recollection.
Dammit, I just explained that. Why are you explaining it back to me? :joke:
The alternate soul is atemporal. Out of time. Or like the anima mundi, impersonal.
You suggest an Adam, but if knowledge is recollection there would have been no previous life to recollect. Hence knowledge cannot be recollection.
I don't see how there can be recollection without some prior life that is recollected.
Once again, you're telling me what I told you.
"Eternal" sometimes means atemporal. Are you familiar with that idea?
Yes!
What could it mean to say that my digestion was happening in your gut?
This is what you said:
Quoting frank
Now it may be clear to you but based on what you said it may not be clear to others that an infinite regress makes knowledge impossible.
There can be no Adam who gained knowledge without previous lives if knowledge is recollection from previous lives. This too makes knowledge impossible.
Quoting frank
How can there be atemporal recollection of what is learned in a previous life? How can there be a previous life that is not in time? What does previous mean atemporally?
You missed the bit where this was a reply specifically to the assertion that what is reincarnated is memory.
If what is reincarnated is memory, and you have no memory of a previous life, you have not been reincarnated.
If some activity - prayer or whatever - subsequently gives you those memories, then still, that is not evidence that you have been reincarnated, but that the memories have been reincarnated...
You now have Napoleon's memories; that doesn't make you Napoleon.
Again, memories are not synonymous with the self.
I don't think the infinite regress would make knowledge impossible. It's just that humans have only been around for a few million years. We'd have to come up with some bizarre explanation for the infinite number of people. Not metaphysically impossible, but definitely in need of some good reason to believe it.
Quoting Fooloso4
My point was that if we explain Adam's knowledge in some way, then we've produced an alternative solution to Meno's paradox.
It's that Plato's argument implodes, not that knowledge is impossuble.
Quoting Fooloso4
It looks previous to us. From outside of time, all the lives are happening simultaneously.
This is a New Age take on reincarnation. I didn't invent it.
It's about Meno's paradox.
The problem is that if we start with the premise that knowledge is recollection then there would never be a time when knowledge was learned. But it cannot be recollected if it had not at some time first
been learned.
Quoting frank
The failure of the argument indicates that knowledge is not possible if knowledge is recollection. Plato offers no way past this aporia. This is not to say that knowledge is impossible, but that it is not possible based on the premise that it is recollection.
With regard to reincarnation it means that if there is reincarnation the myth of recollection does not support it since it cannot even support its own claims.
Correct.
Quoting Fooloso4
Why? Why not an infinite chain of recollectors?
Quoting Fooloso4
I don't think so. It would just leave the conclusion without any support.
Quoting Fooloso4
Why do you keep calling anamnesis a myth?
I was reading your thread and find it interesting, although I spent some time really thinking about the possibilities of reincarnation and decided it was very difficult to know for certain. I would much prefer the idea to any other form of life after death, and so much could be learned through many lives rather than the restrictions of one body and one set of life experiences.
I originally began wondering about reincarnation as a child because one of my earliest memories was being in a cot, with one of my mother's friends offering me a biscuit. I had the thought 'I am coming round again'. It felt like a distinct waking up, not from sleep, but something more.
I was also compared a lot to my grandfather, who died 6 weeks before I was born and began wondering if I was a reincarnation of him.One particular strange experience which I had was looking for a fairly rare writer on school stories from an earlier time, and my mum telling me that there had been a copy of that book in my grandfather's books which she threw away. I never suggested the idea that I could be a reincarnation of him to anyone in my family because it was not an accepted belief. Of course, I realise that I may have read too much into a coincidence and built up a story in childhood, possibly as a result of my mother's projection of her loss of her father, so shortly before my birth.
One thing which I have wondered about in thinking about reincarnation memories, is if rather than people remembering specific personal memories, they are tapping into the collective unconscious of memories. However, I am aware that many people on this site find Jung's idea of the collective unconscious as rather unsound.
But, I do think that it is possible that we are individual beings of consciousness, interconnected with others in time. Perhaps, we all aspects of an underlying group mind. I am not speaking of consciousness as some abstract force, as the idealists describe, but as permeating nature. It could be that nature and consciousness is like a web.So, we may have some connection with previous lifeforms on some level, with some continuity between the generations.
I like to keep the idea of reincarnation as a matter for contemplation, as a possible way of seeing consciousness existing in other future lives. However, my own understanding is that the Buddha was uncertain about rebirth, so I like to keep an open mind.
Well I mean, you should probably ask for permission first...
But this is not Socrates argument. See Meno 81c-d:
The argument requires having at some time previous to this life learning what is to be recollected.
Quoting frank
See 81a-b:
Mythos is something told without logos, that is, without providing an account or defense. This is part of Socrates criticism of the poets. They are the mouthpiece of the Muses, reporting what they have heard but being unable to explain it.
There is very little evidence in this thread that reincarnation is a real possibility. I'm not saying there isn't any evidence, only that in this thread there isn't much in the way of evidence.
I would tackle the problem a bit differently. I would start with, is there any evidence of out-of-body experiences? Because the idea of reincarnation is dependent on whether or not it's possible that one's consciousness can exist apart from our present body. If it can exist apart from our bodies, then we have evidence that consciousness is more than brain activity. Thus, moving into other bodies (reincarnation) would be a real possibility, since we can move in and out of our present body.
Furthermore, I would still contend that even if we don't understand the mechanisms involved, we have a considerable amount of testimonial evidence that OBEs do indeed happen. It is also true that since the claim is rather fantastic to some, that you need an extraordinary amount of evidence to support the idea that disembodied existence is possible or highly probable. My contention, and I've made this claim in other threads (viz., Does Consciousness Survive the Body), is that there is an enormous amount of testimonial evidence to support the conclusion that consciousness does survive the body.
I often read, "There's no evidence," it's as if testimonial evidence, is not evidence. While it's true that testimonial evidence tends to be weak, it can also be strong under the right circumstances. What makes testimonial evidence strong is exactly what makes an inductive argument strong. What follows is a list of what makes the argument strong.
First, number, how many people are claiming to have had an out-of-body experience? Gallop did a poll years ago, and estimated that about 5% of the population had an NDE. Worldwide that's hundreds of millions of people. Now numbers aren't the be-all-and-end-all of inductive arguments, which is why you have to have more than just numbers.
Next, variety, viz., is it happening across cultures? Are there different age groups involved? Is the experience happening in a variety of circumstances? Has it happened through history? Is it happening to people with differing worldviews? The answer to all of the question is yes, it happens in a wide variety of situations and contexts, even to people who aren't near death.
Third, consistency of the testimony, the consistency of the testimony has been examined by many, and it has been found to be consistent. People are seeing basically the same things. Moreover, the consistency of the testimonial evidence is just as consistent as any testimonial evidence that involves large numbers of people. There have been many academic studies out of the University of Virginia detailing the consistency of the testimonial evidence. Here is a link to one such paper -
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2020/11/Nov-2020-NDE-C-CC.pdf
The fourth criteria is truth of the premises. To know if the premises are true we need corroboration of the testimonial evidence, a high degree of consistency, and firsthand testimony. In all or most of these cases, it seems clear that we have all three. We have millions of accounts that can be corroborated by family members, friends, doctors, nurses, and hospice workers. Corroboration is important in establishing objectivity to what is a very subjective experience. It lends credence to the accounts. One example of corroboration is given in Pam's NDE out of Atlanta, GA, which can be seen on Youtube.
Another aid in establishing the truth of the testimonial evidence are firsthand accounts, as opposed to hearsay. There are literally thousands of firsthand accounts being reported by the International Association of Near Death Studies (IANDS). Moreover, according to polling, there are millions of firsthand accounts of NDEs.
There are other points that can be made about what strengthens an inductive argument, but this is a good starting point.
The testimonial evidence, i.e., the various reports are all over the place, but IANDS is a good place to start.
I don't see how you get more compelling testimonial evidence, it's overwhelming. Do I need to know the mechanism for OBEs in order to know if NDEs are veridical? Do I need to know the mechanism of any experience to know if the experience is real or genuine? Of course not. We have firsthand experiences all the time without knowing the mechanisms involved.
There are a variety of academic papers on the following site dealing with the subjects of this thread.
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/category/academic-papers/
I am very disappointed in you. I thought you better than you've shown yourself here.
Quoting Banno
You apparently believe terms can be understood on their own somehow, completely apart from the context of theories.
As if terms like "gravity", force", "molecule" could be made sense of without as much as a dictionary definition, what to speak of a scientific theory.
Absolutely. It's peculiar how otherwise intelligent people can turn into morons once the topic is reincarnation/rebirth.
(Personally, I myself don't even believe in rebirth or reincarnation, I'm just familiar with the standard doctrines about them.)
Correct. What seems to be happening here is that some people have decided in advance that reincarnation is impossible, irrational and evil, and that any consideration of the possibility should be suppressed by all available means.
You had asserted that the infinite backward chain makes knowledge impossible.
Now you're just noting that Plato says the soul does learn.
My gripe was that you're tossing "impossible" around a little too freely.
Quoting Fooloso4
Anamnesis is not part of the myth of reincarnation passed down by priests. It's Plato's solution to a problem: that teaching is frequently a matter of bringing a person's awareness to what they already know. He's not wrong about that. Some things can't be taught, such as the meaning of "true."
Well, one thing doesn't necessarily exclude the other. If consciousness can operate outside of and independently from the physical body, then both scenarios are (theoretically) possible.
One theory I've heard of is that people can pick up "psychic" impressions left by others at their work place, on public transport or other places, which subsequently become activated during dreams, etc. when, like in meditation or contemplation, the mind is relaxed and detached from external objects.
Living beings can leave minute traces of scent on surrounding objects that can be detected from great distances and sometimes after a long time by other living beings such as dogs, wolves, etc.
What if thoughts and emotions can also leave similar imprints on the environment?
And what about out-of-body experiences, telepathy, etc.? As others have pointed out, the cumulative evidence seems to be sufficiently strong to suggest that even scientifically "inexplicable" phenomena may have some truth in them.
I think looking for evidence of rebirth/reincarnation or that consciousness can operate outside of and independently from the physical body is a dead end (and bound to be a dead end, as long as one insists on being Humpty Dumpty).
In Early Buddhism, belief in rebirth is not specified as a primary requirement for practice. The only such requirement is belief in kamma, ie. the belief that what you do matters.
In such discussions, many people are trying to take far too big steps, no wonder they stumble.
Eh, you're probably just bored.
A recipe for wasting time, and for confusion.
From my previous posts:
Quoting Fooloso4
Quoting Fooloso4
Quoting frank
I think it follows from the argument. Knowledge is recollection of what was learned in a previous life, but if it was learned then it could not have been in that case that knowledge was recollected. This a starting point. Recollection then is not an infinite backward chain. At some point each of us had to first learn if there is from that time forward recollection of what was learned.
Quoting frank
Anamnesis (recollection) refers to what was learned in a previous life and can now be recollected. Without reincarnation there can be no anamnesis.
Quoting frank
There is a difference between already know and known via an infinite regress.
So what I didn't make clear is that this is all me. It's my argument: that if my knowledge is recollection, then either there must be an infinite chain of lives and no one ever learns (which would probably fit with some forms of Neoplatonism since it says that our own minds are reflections of the Divine Mind), or there had to be an Adam, whose learning screws up Plato's argument.
I'm sure somebody else noticed this about Plato's solution to Meno's paradox in the last 2400 years, but I don't know who and I don't know how they dealt with it. So from my point of view, you're continually trying to teach me my own argument and nitpicking at the edges. You're concentrating on how it might screw up what Plato is commonly thought to have said.
Since it occurred to me immediately upon reading Phaedo, I just reworked his story so that it makes more sense. I guess I was influenced by new age ideas prevalent at the time, but I don't remember thinking of it that way.
Not according to Neil Gaiman. He says step one in creativity is to allow yourself to become bored.
That had crossed my mind, but with your mention of Plato, Meno, Phaedo, and anamnesis I took it that you were discussing the dialogue.
Quoting frank
That was not my intention. My remarks were all made with regard to the attempt to understand Plato's Meno. Perhaps in my eagerness to discuss Plato I missed what you were doing. My apologies.
Plato's Er's Near-Death Experience - Near-Death Experiences and the Afterlife
Personally, I find the story very interesting but I'm guessing that some people just get upset when they hear unusual stories like this one because they contradict their normal expectations and rattle their habitual thought-processes and the way they are used, or have been conditioned, to see things and interpret the world around them.
I'll run with that.
True. Daydreaming follows to allay the boredom. You end up either creating the Theory of Specific Relativity, or masturbating.
Oh, no problem, we were just getting more and more at crossed purposes.
I'm aware of your intrigue. I'm only peripherally interested, and responded to the request in the OP for some discussion of the conceptual apparatus around reincarnation. I pointed to the core problem with reincarnation - what is it that is reincarnated - and have not received a satisfactory reply. NDEs and OBEs are a different issue.
I'm not going to be convinced by anecdotal accounts alone, interesting as they may be, while it remains so unclear what it is that is reincarnated. A more critical browse through the posts here shows a pretence of agreement amongst a tangle of discord.
I'll repeat what I said about digestion, by way of explaining how the picture I have of mind does not lend itself to reincarnation.
Following Searle and others, mind is to brain as digestion is to gut. That looks pretty clear to me, if still debatable. Suppose that someone were to suggest that digestion could become disembodied. That the digestion from one body could move to another. Would you think this idea had conceptual issues?
Those are much the same as the conceptual issues I see in reincarnation.
Further, if what is reincarnated is memory, and one has no memory of a previous life, one has not been reincarnated. If some activity - prayer or whatever - subsequently gives you those memories, then still, that is not evidence that you have been reincarnated, rather than that those memories have been reincarnated. You now have Napoleon's memories; that doesn't make you Napoleon. Again, memories are not synonymous with the self.
I'm happy to say that there might be something in reincarnation, but the conceptual background is at best nascent. In that regard the simplest and best explanation for the anecdotes discussed here remains credulence and deception.
You've completely misrepresented what I have said, both here and in my post history, in order to suit your own narrative.
You don't rate a reply, only a rebuke.
That's a trite reply. What seems to be happening here is that some people have decided in advance that reincarnation is essential, rational and good, and that any criticism of the possibility should be suppressed by all available means.
Such rhetoric doesn't help. You might address the conceptual issues I have raised.
Quoting Apollodorus
Certainly any criticism of the possibility of reincarnation should be suppressed in a thread which is only about philosophical justification of it.
(A note, to be clear, that the bit you quote from me was written ironically. )
I don't think Searle's analogy holds any water, to say the least. First, it's clear that digestion is a biological process, there's no debate amongst philosophers and scientists about that. However, it's not clear that consciousness or mind is strictly a biological process. Of course if you assume your conclusion, then yes, it's a biological process, how could it be otherwise (being facetious)? It only has conceptual issues if you assume your conclusion, viz., that consciousness is a product of biology. However, this is the debate, and I for one would argue against Searle's analogy as being specious at best.
There are two main factors, and obviously others too, that make us who we are, continuity of memory, and continuity of experience. There has to be continuity of the self in order for anyone to say that that is Banno. I can't make any sense out of reincarnation if this continuity isn't preserved. Otherwise, you could claim to be anyone from the past, and there would be no way to distinguish you from anyone else. This would be a genuine conceptual problem.
Quoting Sam26
In fairness to Searle, it holds more than water. It also holds food and alcohol - digestion is complex.
Nothing further to say on this topic.
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/category/academic-papers/
I'm not sure what you believe to have "raised" as we haven't noticed anything.
I prefer dancing as an analogy for minding to Searle's "digestion" ... ; still, as Banno points out, "disembodied dancing" doesn't make conceptual sense, and the activity or process is localized and does not "travel" like a 'thing' from one container (body) to another. Besides, reification of "mind", or "consciousness", is just as groundless as the deification (myth-ification) of unknowns, so whatever is thingified about, or in relation to, the body rots away to oblivion with the body. Epicurus rather than Plato – or 'eternal recurrence of the same' rather than 'karmic wheel of rebirth'.
I've thought of the psyche as a kind of music.
The nice thing about reading Plato is you get a perspective on the assumptions of your own time. Plato was one who established ideas that worked well for people down to the Enlightenment.
So I think it's better to say "this works for me and my generation." than "I'll threaten you with censure for imagining that shit.". Socrates wouldn't approve of the latter.
I'd say identified as emergent, not reified. Emergence is the prevailing view in philosophy of mind right now (if you like to be fashionable).
Well, again, in this case, as in many other cases, what you believe makes conceptual sense is determined by your presuppositions, or your worldview. If it's true that people are having an OBE, and they are seeing deceased relatives and friends (as has been reported in thousands and thousands of accounts), then is it your contention that if one of these deceased relatives danced it wouldn't make conceptual sense? The only way it wouldn't make conceptual sense is if it's not logically possible to be disembodied. Don't you think that's a bit too dogmatic? Are you saying disembodied dancing has the same conceptual problem as a four-sided triangle? At the very least it would be metaphysically possible to dance as a disembodied person.
It is always an embodied person who has an alleged out of body experience. It is always an embodied person who related their experience.
Quoting Sam26
What does it mean to be disembodied? Who or what is it that is without a body? "You"? Is it not you who gets hungry? You who feels pain? You who feels loves and desires? What would such things be for a disembodied you? Is it not you but a body that somehow happens to be yours that experiences these things?
It's a common misconception, understandably held by atheists, materialists and communists, that a soul without a physical body has no body. The fact is that many traditions state that a disembodied soul does have a "subtle" or "astral" body that is visible to other (disembodied) souls. So, I wouldn't take the deniers too seriously. They clearly have nothing better to do.
And how does this woo-woo distinction make a factual difference? Changing words in itself almost never changes facts and usually just wallpapers over ignorance by trying to say what isn't sayable (or claiming to know what isn't knowable). "The fact that many traditions state that" e.g. spirits of various kinds rather than germs cause sickness or plague tells us only that most people are profoundly ignorant of – wrong about – most everything outside of their immediate everyday experiences (re: natural selection rewards such a parochial focus) ... such that they/we make shit up rather than admit "I don't know".
.
Factual possibility is the only modal distinction that makes a difference regarding matters of facts. Conceptual incoherence doesn't entail a nonexistent referent, only that incoherent concepts cannot be used consistently to refer. "Disembodied dancing", like "four-sided triangle", does not refer – both are empty names. Basic logic / semantics.
"Dogmatic"? I don't assume anything that cannot be changed or dismissed when having grounds to do so (like new evidence). As far as I or anyone is rigorously aware, "NDEs" & "OBEs" are, at most, uncorroborated anecdotes. Idle speculation, like idle doubt, maybe passes the time like daydreaming but that's context-free diversion which neither presupposes commitments nor entails prospects. Free-floating presuppositions or "worldviews" which admit just any "what if"-consideration as "possible" are indistinguisable from ad hoc make-believe (or indulgent neurosis), and thereby not philosophically probative. None of that p0m0 nonsense please.
So, your conclusion is that because it's an embodied person who does the reporting, it follows that disembodied existence is not true or couldn't happen? Don't you think that's a rather weak argument? After all, how could an embodied person report on something I believe is not possible.
Quoting Fooloso4
To be disembodied simply means that we can exist as persons apart from a biological body. Just because someone can't answer all the questions of how it's possible, that doesn't negate all the testimonial evidence showing that it's possible. In fact, it's more than possible. I will state emphatically that it's not only possible that people can be disembodied, it happens all the time. There is just too much evidence that it happens to discount it.
Yes, it's me that gets hungry and feels pain, etc, and it would be me as a disembodied being who would feel some of the same things.
I can't discount reports like Pam's out of Atlanta, GA who underwent surgery for an aneurysm deep in her brain. While not only sedated, but the blood drained from her brain, and her heart stopped, she described what doctors and nurses said and did to her, including describing instruments they used. And, she described it from a position outside her body according to her. Moreover, her eyes were taped shut and there was a covering shielding her face from the rest of her body. Her description of the proceedings were verified or corroborated by doctors and nurses at the scene. Now one incident is not particularly convincing, but there are literally millions of accounts across the world of people having similar experiences. The testimonial evidence is just too vast to just discount these experiences.
So once you accept nonreductive physicalism, then you'll see that you have no reason to require the symphony have an organic infrastructure. Chalmer's thought experiment about replacing a brain a few bits at a time with silicon shows this.
I'm not advocating reincarnation. I'm just aware that I don't have the means to rule it out.
Well, that depends, because if someone claims that something is not factually possible, as you seem to be claiming, then are you saying that it's logically impossible (viz., contradictory). If it's logically impossible like a four-sided triangle, then conceptually you can't even imagine it. Again, this seems to be what you're implying. But surely I can imagine things like dancing cartoons, which have no bodies other than what we imagine. Moreover, I'm able to conceptualize these kinds of things. We can even conceptualize dancing ghosts, and we know what we mean by dancing ghosts. You seem to want to say that if my dead father appeared before me, as a ghostly figure, yet recognizable, and he danced, that would have no conceptual meaning. Most people would understand what that meant whether they agreed that people really see dead people or not.
On the other hand, if we are referring to square circles, there is no conceptual framework that includes such a thing, unless you make it up. Under our current ideas of geometry there just isn't such a thing as a square circle, it's contradictory. But this isn't the same conceptual problem as disembodied dancing, because I can clearly imagine such a thing; and I can talk about it with some understanding of what it would mean.
Quoting 180 Proof
This just shows that you have really studied the issue. The testimonial evidence is not all just anecdotal. It has been corroborated in many many cases. There are objective means to verify what people claim to have seen while out of their bodies. Like interviewing doctors, nurses, hospice workers, etc, who can verify some of what these NDEers claim. The testimonial evidence for NDEs is extremely strong, and only those committed to a particular worldview seem to reject the evidence.
I love how people try to belittle the beliefs of other with whom they disagree. Using words like "idle speculation," or "daydreaming." Now to be honest, I've done my fair share of saying things to others that may belittle or otherwise dismiss them too, so I'm not complaining. I'm only pointing out that this is mostly done to make it look like your beliefs are somehow superior, and maybe in some cases they are. However, the only thing that counts are good arguments, not using words that dismiss others.
True, I dismiss them too, but for other reasons than most. I dismiss them because they are not relevant in terms of insight into how to make an end to suffering. The past lives acounts of those children don't contain any insight into the workings of dependent co-arising, nor the causal linkage between one birth and the next.
In phil of mind, the argument is sometimes about who has the burden if proof. Lacking facts, they resort to trying to discover the elephant like blind men.
It's intricate, but at stake is the right to call your opponent a bonehead, so it gets intense.
The point is that the report of an embodied person does not stand as evidence of a disembodied person.
Quoting Sam26
What is it that you do not think is possible?
Quoting Sam26
It is not simply a matter of explaining how it is possible but of giving a coherent account of whatever it is that inhabits or is tied to a body but is somehow separate from it. Whatever it is that perceives and feels and yet is not a body.
Instead of "all the questions" just one crucial one: if you eliminate the body how does whatever is left perceive the world?
Quoting Sam26
And yet when you are hungry it is the food you ingest, the food you take into your body, that satisfies your hunger. If you hit your hand with a hammer is it merely coincidence that your hand is damaged while you hurt?
The Buddhist monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu also makes a case for rebirth here: The Truth of Rebirth: And Why It Matters for Buddhist Practice.
What I don't get is this:
Why is it that scientifically inclined people wouldn't even dream of talking about terms like "gravity", "force", "mass" without reference to some established theory in the field of physics, nor would they talk about "molecules" or "atomic bonds" without reference to some established theory in the field of chemistry, etc., but they want to forgo this notion of the embeddednes of terms into some theoretical framework when it comes to "reincarnation" and "rebirth" (and many other religious/spiritual terms)? Why is that?
Is it that they feel that terms that denote something "close to home", terms that are ostensibly about "what a person really is" and "the meaning of life" should be treated differently than terms like "gravity" or "molecule"?
Some people are creative by nature, like Newton, who talked about gravity when, far from being established, it was accused of woo-ness.
He abandoned the world to his basement where he did weird experiments and dissected the bible looking for signs of the end of the world.
He was one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. I imagine the reason he paid no attention to his viscious detractors was a kind of innate arrogance.
This is why trying to shame creative people won't work. They really don't care what you think.
As for the shamers, who knows why they act as they do? Who cares?
Being creative, or just being Humpty-Dumpty-when-I-use-a-word-it-means-exactly-what-I-choose-it-to-mean?
That's exactly what Newton did with the word "gravity".
I don't know.
Most living languages are constantly evolving. It's creativity.
I sympathize with the skeptics, though. The available accounts of the recollections of past lives are, at best, confusing, opening up more questions, and at worst, trifles. So someone recalls, say, that in a past life, they drowned in a river where there are trees in groups of three on the banks. This is an actual event that can potentially be corroborated with empirical evidence. But so what? Does that prove there is a soul, an unchanging substance that gets reincarnated? Does it prove that religion X is the right one? Yes, people sometimes drown, and sometimes, they drown in rivers where there are trees in groups of three on the banks. How is any of this metaphysically relevant or has metaphysically relevant implications? How is it ethically relevant?
What does this have to do with good communication and communicating intelligibly?
Well, Platonism is a philosophy more than a religion. It is true that in those days philosophy and religion were closely interlinked but that isn't my fault.
Plus Plato clearly uses reincarnation (the Story of Er) as a parable illustrating his belief that souls are rewarded in the afterlife according to their deeds on earth. So, it is very relevant in terms of ethics, actually. But I can understand if Marxists don't understand.
Of course, I'm not disputing that. (This is why, in terms of theory of morality, I linked to Thanissaro Bhikkhu's The Truth of Rebirth: And Why It Matters for Buddhist Practice).
But it is quite a stretch to conclude that because some kid in Australia remembered something from a past life, this means that I have/am a soul that gets reincarnated or that religion X is the right one.
Quoting Apollodorus
*sigh*
Nobody is disputing that. As I said before, I was talking about reliable accounts, e.g. family, friends, trustworthy persons who're simply relating very vivid experiences without even mentioning religious beliefs or trying to sell you anything. In other words, people who are extremely unlikely to be telling you lies. It isn't "proof" but it makes it credible.
From the Visuddhimagga, linked to earlier:
So according to this doctrine, there are differences between the ways different categories of people recollect past lives and what sense they can make of them.
These differences also potentially explain how come people at large are not convinced by accounts of recollections of past lives when these accounts come from what the text above calls "other
sectarians". Because those recollections are low in quality, low in relevance, in comparison to what other quality is potentially available.
I wonder how Stevenson and other researches who study the recollection of past lives account for that.
And this:
My intuition was on the right track when I questioned about the spontaneous recollection of past lives.
Sure, but what on earth can I do with that??
AH. The head-in-the-sand response.
What is it that is reincarnated?
If it is the soul, then what is the soul? The answers so far amount to the circularity of "that which is reincarnated"...
If it is the self, then it is a different self to the one we talk about regularly, and requires some exposition.
Quoting Fooloso4
This.
Who cares?
Cheers. It pleases me that you agree.
Yes, I agree with what you say about the notion that mind is biological. It's not so much an assumption as a conclusion form the evidence. I know that my mind is integral to body; this is the foremost point against dualism: my mind controls my hand; but further what I do to my body influences my mind - from perception to drug use to brain damage, we know that the physical world changes mind.
But I agree that we do not know how this causal link occurs, and that there is room for speculation.
Mind your language - who you callin' a materialist?
The materialists of course. Are you feeling guilty or are you just upset?
Plus, you still haven't told us who you believe it is that is reincarnated.
Quoting 180 Proof
Is this a contradiction?
I think Apollodorus is about 14 years old.
You must have done a lot of thinking to come up with that. Don't overexert yourself.
An eliminative materialist is reductive. Since you say you're a nonreductive physicalist, basically I'm asking what you're eliminative about.
Processes and activities are things, though. I'm not clear on what you're eliminating.
Quoting 180 Proof
I don't think anybody tries to use qualia is an explanation for anything. It is the explicandum.
Quoting 180 Proof
You're not eliminative about qualia.
So, what exactly is it that you think is emergent?
Make that 13.
Ok. I'll just talk to the wall.
The SEP in nonreductive eliminativism:
”Like dualists, eliminative materialists insist that ordinary mental states cannot be reduced to or identified with neurological events or processes. However, unlike dualists, straightforward eliminativists claim there is nothing more to the mind than what occurs in the brain. The reason mental states are irreducible is not because they are non-physical; rather, it is because mental states, as described by common-sense psychology, do not really exist."
So an eliminative materialist can't really embrace emergence. There's nothing to emerge.
Quoting Apollodorus
No one. Think I made that plain enough.
I hear this quite often but not what is meant by "materialism" or what precisely invalidates it methodologically (not just metaphysically).
There's apparently an imperative in being convinced of something. One expects others to be similar convinced.
Newton made action at a distance - that is, without intervening billiard balls - central to physics by describing gravity.
Hence, the demise of materialism.
Methodologically, the equations of fields were just so convincing and so useful that folk decided to forgo the notion that causes must work by contact.
... so the ontology is atoms and fields... not just atoms.
Indeed, one of his books I read decades ago was The Matter Myth.
The problem is, what are fields? In the book I'm reading there's a case made that equates fields with Aristotle's 'potentia', which seems intuitively sound to me, but still leaves open the question....
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
It's food for thought and the question with this is where do we go that doesn't lead us back to speculative inanities. And back to the bad physics thread?? :razz:
Reincarnation is, all said and done, simply just a kind of causation, right? You reap (effect) what you sow (cause) kinda deal.
A vital piece of information in re causation is the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), one entry in it being that every effect has an cause. What will be relevant in a while is the missing causal principle in the PSR, the converse, every cause has an effect.
Time to get down to business, to the brass tacks...
1. There are certain occasions in one's life - usually unpleasant but also, sometimes, satisfying ones - when one is so moved by events in our lives that we ask ourselves, "why is this happening to me?" or "I can't believe my luck!" or "what are the odds of that happening?". The questions are emotionally charged and one is usually in the grips of strong feelings whether good or bad but, more importantly and also intriguingly, they indicate one crucial fact about the event that provokes the question - there are no explanations for them. Put differently, our attempts to find an appropriate cause in this life is unsuccessful.
Yet, the PSR necessitates a cause for such events and since none can be found in this life, it must be that the putative cause be in a past life. Ergo, reincarnation has to be a fact.
2. The second point is premised on the missing element in the PSR viz. every cause has an effect. If one performs a good deed or a bad deed and one is, for some reason, unable to experience its effects [repurcussions, an equal and opposite reaction in Newtonian terms], this law is violated. But this law can't be broken and ergo, you must be reborn to experience the effects of one's good/bad actions. Therefore, reincarnation must be true.
Basically, it all boils down to the following argument...
1. If there's no reincarnation then causality (cause and effect) is violated.
2. Causality (cause and effect) can't be violated
Hence,
3. There is reincarnation [1, 2 Modus Tollens]
N.B. General causality implies moral causality (good/bad karma)
According to Buddhism, beings are inexorably bound by karma (pending their eventual liberation). Actually in the early 20th C, it was fashionable to say that Buddhism was a 'scientific religion' due to its recognition of 'the law of cause and effect', by comparing it to 'action and reaction'. But of course it is no such thing, because science doesn't recognise the kind of intentional causality that is implied by karma; ‘action and reaction’ is bound solely by the laws of motion.
Buddhism also broadened the concept of karma by saying it arose from any intentional action whatever, whereas in Brahmanism karma was accrued by making the right sacrifices and observing the ritual discipline. Typically of the Buddha, he retained an element of the Brahmin religion but changed its scope and meaning.
But again, I can’t see how there can be any scientific provision for karma in explaining the causal connection between action and result, especially from one life to another. From the Buddhist’s p.o.v., there need be no such validation, but from the Western p.o.v., it can’t be considered effective in the absence of a scientifically-comprehensible causal medium.
My thoughts exactly. I once opened a thread on Buddhism along those lines. How very comforting to know there are others who think like me.
Do you think this scientific quality to Buddhism sets it apart from other religions or are other religions equally scientific for the reason that they too subscribe to causality albeit a moral version of it?
Quoting Wayfarer
My take on this is rather simple: first of all, in the life we're living now as we engage in this conversation, moral causality is real, as real as a these words (effect) follows from my hitting keys on my phone (cause); look around you. if I were to, god forbid, insult you, you would feel something and that would make you react in a predictable way, assuming you aren't acquainted with some philosophy that explains why such behavior is silly/foolish.
All this is perfectly understandable against the backdrop of the lives we're living but we all know that sometimes the response (effect) to an action (cause) doesn't/can't take place as when we die. This, whatever else it might be, leaves the cause hanging in the air, in suspended animation as it were, unable to, in a sense, discharge the responsibility causality has conferred upon it viz. to produce a reaction/response. If this is the case, it has to be that a person be reborn to complete the causal process - allowing the cause (action) to, in a sense, complete itself as an effect (reaction).
This squares well what Buddhism and even other religions recommend viz. calm and poise in the face of harm, deliberate or unintentional - the idea is to break and thus break free from the chain of causation. What this amounts to is a refusal to let yourself (by reacting) and others (by acting) get sucked into the karmic cycle of samsara. I suppose the main point of Buddhism is to end/snuff out karma...nirvana is essentially liberation from moral causality i.e. karma and the net effect is you'll be shown the door out of the six realms of existence.
There's more that can be said but chew on this for the time being.
Read what I said again. I'm saying that it was fashionable to say that Buddhism was a 'scientific religion' - not that I think that it's true. It's not that Buddhism is anti-scientific, but the principles are beyond what can be ascertained in any empirical sense; they can only be really understood in the first person (take them or leave them.) The promotion of Buddhism as being 'compatible with science' was very much associated with various translators and interpreters who were active in the early 20th century who sought to harmonise Buddhism with Enlightenment principles - hence their appeal to science.
I agree with you on an intuitive level, but as it's a discussion about philosophical principles, then it should be assessed accordingly.
Quoting TheMadFool
:up: Stoicism comes to mind, also. But it's certainly not a universal trait of religion. 'Turning the other cheek' is a Christian principle, but I don't know how universal it is. Some religions have a 'f***k with me and you die' attitude.
Quoting TheMadFool
See through it, rise above it. It can't be 'snuffed out', the Gordian knot has to be untied, somehow or other.
:clap: :up: Fantabulous. You took the words right out of my mouth! The general sentiment expressed therein seems to be at the heart of what's offered to us as so-called wisdom. Whatever wisdom/liberation/nirvana/moksha is, it always seems to have a, for lack of a better word, subjective side to it that's above and beyond that which is objective about. Remaining within the buddhist context, nirvana, for example, what it is to be precise. can't be described in a way that we can get; no third-person point of view of nirvana can accurately and completely describe what it is like to be enlightened. I suspect many areas of life are like this - the proof of the pudding, I guess, is in the eating. I think you touched on this issue in another thread where you emphasized the importance of practice in religion.
Quoting Wayfarer
:rofl: You can say that again but just out of curiosity which religion would that be?
Quoting Wayfarer
This is the kind of insight that puts you well ahead of the rest of us in what is evidently a rat race to the finish line whatever one believes that to be. Excelente señora!
The wise would say that this is the perspective of the disinterested intelligence, subjectivity unsullied by egotism. (Don’t include me in that, by the way, it’s only something I’ve read about.)
Quoting TheMadFool
:up:
Quoting TheMadFool
Better not say. I don’t want to die. :rofl:
Of course, of course.
Quoting Wayfarer
My hunch is that you're already a part of what you don't want to be a part of. It's a good thing so don't fret!
I see, so the corroborated testimonial evidence while my heart is stopped and I'm no longer breathing, i.e., the testimony that I'm observing my operation from a point outside my body is not evidence. The fact, again corroborated, that I'm describing conversations and the equipment used in the operation is not evidence of being disembodied? Or, describing a conversation of relatives in a waiting room while the operation is being performed in another part of the hospital is not evidence of being disembodied? I'll refrain from saying what I really want to say. The point is that many people who are materialists, or who just deny that such events can happen refuse to open their eyes to the evidence. Firsthand testimonial evidence, is evidence, and whether its good evidence depends on factors I've already given in this thread and in my thread https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1980/evidence-of-consciousness-surviving-the-body/p1. So, I wouldn't wouldn't put much stock in these kinds of statements.
Quoting Fooloso4
This just doesn't follow, i.e., because I can't explain how it is that people are able to have an OBE, then it follows that they aren't having an NDE. Of course I can't give a coherent account of how it's possible. Nobody understands the mechanism whereby these OBEs happen. Moreover, I haven't tried to give a coherent account other than speculation. This however, doesn't negate the fact that it's happening, i.e., people are experiencing corroborated OBEs. When people first conducted the 2 slit light experiment no one knew what was going on, and no one could give a coherent explanation of what was happening, but did that negate the evidence that something weird was happening? No. Did it negate further research? No.
If you have an open-mind and are not completely shut off from reason, then you have to say, at the very least that there is something to these NDEs. Here is an example of an NDE that can't be explained away with the arguments that disembodied existence just isn't possible, or that it's incoherent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKyQJDZuMHE
So, you finally got it. Nirvana, like reincarnation, is something that you need to experience to know exactly what it is. You may choose to dismiss it as "subjective", but you can't prove that it doesn't exist and you haven't persuaded anyone. That much should be clear to you by now. But apparently not.
No, for better or worse, I didn't get it! :rofl:
That's a very big "IF" there. You don't really expect these people to have an "open mind"? Obviously, they're basing their arguments on unexamined assumptions and unfounded hypotheses for the sake of being contradictory because they've got nothing better to do.
There are some people here who have an open mind, and there are some people here who really do care about truth, even if they disagree. So, I wouldn't necessarily agree that people are just arguing because they have nothing better to do, or because their communists. I don't quite go as far as you. But one thing is for certain, convincing people, whatever side of the argument you're on, is a very difficult thing. As Banno would say, cheers.
Well, there are some who seem to think that belief in reincarnation is "irrational nonsense" while failing to show that this is the case. They seem to think that they bear no burden of proof in support of their claims. So, it does make you wonder.
But I think that in philosophical terms @Bartricks and one or two others have done a good job so far.
There's an irrational aspect to every belief system, if we define irrationality as embracing a belief without good reason.
Good reasons can include things like the testimony of experts or evidence combined with reason.
Pure logic is actually not a rational approach to an ontological issue. Is it?
While your heart stops and you are no longer breathing you are still alive. Clinical death is the irreversible loss of brain function. What the mind sees when blood is restricted to the brain is not evidence of out of body experience. One of the drugs given with anesthesia makes you forget what you may be aware of during surgery. There may be, to varying degrees, depending on the individual, some awareness of the surgical procedure. This is well documented in the medical literature and is the reason drugs are administered to make you forget.
Quoting Sam26
This is not what I am asking. What is being asked by me and @Banno as well is what it is that is separate from the body and functions and endures without it. Giving it a name, soul or consciousness, does not say what it is that perceives and feels but is not a function or process of the body.
Quoting Sam26
If you have an open-mind and are not completely shut off from reason, then you have to say, at the very least that there is something that is not fully understood. To conclude that these people have left their bodies is not being open minded, it is to insist on a desired outcome.
The did not give me enough of the "forget me" drug.
Back eight years ago or so, when I was grossly overweight, I had to undergo a proctologist's exam. They kept pumping anesthetic into me intravenously, but not the full dose. It is known that the fat tissue in the body takes up the anesthetic, and releases it, so they may have fried my brain in the process if they gave me the dose I required. So I was under-anesthysized.
I screamed through the whole procedure. I don't remember any pain (the forget-me drug was effective in that), but I did register during, and remembered after the procedure, hearing myself scream loudly.
The doctor came to my bedside after the process, while I recuperated, and explained what had happened.
I just wonder what the other patients in the waiting room thought about that.
They call it the soul. Why is that answer insufficient?
Logic can serve as a basis or start for philosophical inquiry even into ontological issues. But if others introduce arguments like "woo" and "shit" or whatever, then there can be no inquiry of any kind and no discussion.
You can have discussions with the people who do want to discuss it. Just ignore the others if they're bothering you.
The term has a long history and has meant different things. To say that the soul is something other than the body does not tell us what it is, it just gives it a name.
Sounds horrible. During surgery they give the patient paralytics. There are cases where the paralytics works but the patient is still aware and can feel the pain of the scalpel and has no way of signalling that they are awake.
What all definitions have in common is that it's an animating force (anima). For Neoplatonists it was part of a divine emanation. This is monistic idealism.
For a substance dualist, it's made of mind stuff.
Stories spanning back to science fiction's golden age picture it as information.
Does that help?
Quoting Sam26
i think it would be better off if you just leave it as whatever makes someone themselves, but if one’s self is tied to their memories and experiences (and rightfully so? i guess?) i do see an issue with how is one reincarnated if they cannot recall their past lives without specific mystical intervention? (which could be wishful thinking as well, but highly trivial since there’s so many cases!)
i think a less problematic explanation is that it is your consciousness that moves on into another body, and then it adapts or transforms to whatever body it may inhabit, and accrues a “self” for that particular body in the mean time
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstream
“Citta-sa?t?na (Sanskrit), literally "the stream of mind", is the stream of succeeding moments of mind or awareness. It provides a continuity of the personality in the absence of a permanently abiding "self" (?tman), which Buddhism denies. The mindstream provides a continuity from one life to another, akin to the flame of a candle which may be passed from one candle to another“
i don’t understand “a continuity of the personality” at all though..
Right, but the idea of a soul that reanimates a body which is not the same body but is still somehow "you" is not the same as Aristotle's psyche or the Hebrew ruach, breathe of God.
The title for my video's will be - Near-Death Experiences and the Testimonial Evidence. There is a possibility that I could change the title, but that's what I have so far.
Is that a problem?
The problem is using a term that has various meanings does not tell us what it is that endures beyond life. Neither Aristotle's psyche or the Hebrew ruach does. Calling it "soul" means no more than calling it "something". "Something" is not an account of that something.
It's you. Your experiences, your skills, your fears, your disappointments, your failures, your relationships, etc.
I make no distinction between me and my body. I would have none of the things you mention if I was a disembodied entity somehow tethered to a body.
*sad*
Why do you say that? What makes you think that I've "made up your mind that souls don't exist"?
Do answer that.
There are many doctrines about what the "soul" is. How is one supposed to know which one is the right one??
Now that's a productive approach to discussion!
In an atmosphere of goading and cynicism, how can any decent person hope to have a meaningful conversation?
Indeed. This is why doctrines about the soul tend to contain the desription of the mechanism by which the soul gets reincarnated. The "downside" is that one actually has to find and read those texts ...
Quoting Banno
This is true for some people.
But beyond that, a discussion about reincarnation/rebirth needn't be more than just about learning the terms of the discourse at hand and engaging in the discourse accordingly. There's no need to believe any of it.
How do you know that?
There was no goading or cynicism there. Try thinking the best of people.
I would have no manual skills without a body. Those skill involve muscle memory. Fear has a bodily component, flooding the body with adrenaline, fight or flight. Some of my relationships are to varying degrees physical. I would not have my biological children. Failure of children to thrive often has something to do with the lack of physical contact.
No one denies that physical life is an important component of the generation of your skills, memories, and so forth.
I'm asking how you know these things, once generated, disappear with your body?
In the case of muscle memory I don't see how it can be carried into another life if the muscles are not part of that life. Besides, I might be reincarnated as a slug.
Muscle memory is the result of the nervous system's ability to be set and reset. If you were being hunted by the CIA for several years, your sympathetic nervous system would be ramped up. Your muscles would demonstrate that. If you subsequently made peace with the US and retired to live the life of a fisherman in Indonesia, your nervous system would eventually settle down.
Was that your main argument though? Muscle memory?
Eh, I don't see that you have any good support for your assertion. You're just like those you criticize.
Main argument?
You asked:
Quoting frank
Manual skills are bodily skills. They involve touch and specific bodily movements. How are they maintained if you no longer have a body?
What is reincarnated? The Soul. What is the Soul? That which is separate from the body and functions and endures without it - ie, that which is reincarnated.
What is reincarnated is what is reincarnated.
But what is reincarnated?
I don't think a person who believes in reincarnation would say that you retain specific bodily movements from one life to the next. I think they would say that just as you are the same person you were seven years ago (the rate of cellular regeneration), you are the same person in the next life, with a different body and of course, substantial memory loss.
I think they believe that what you basically are is a soul that enters into physical life repeatedly. So it's you.
In that case, contrary to what you said, they do not retain the experiences and skills that involve bodily movement. The reincarnated Jimi Hendrix would not be born with his ability to play guitar and would not have "ever been experienced".
Quoting frank
There is a fundamental difference. Cellular regeneration does not transfer from one body to the next. That would certainly make giving birth difficult.
So the soul is one's personal identity?
Then all the problems of personal identity are summoned by reincarnation. Persistence, evidence, population, ontology and import, for starters.
I have used persistence in this thread, but the others provide equally difficult conceptual issues for reincarnation.
So, looking at persistence, what is it that makes you the same person as the one pictured in the school photo from when your were five? The simplest answer is that you have the same body, which has grown.
What is it that makes you the reincarnation of Genghis Khan? Certainly not that you have the same body.
Nor will memory do. You have the same memories as the child, but from what has been said you do not have to have the same memories as the Khan in order to be his reincarnation.
The problem for reincarnation is that of tracking persistence across distinct lives.
Notice that this is not a problem for NDEs or out of body experiences.
And notice that we still have evidence, population, ontology and import to consider. This could be a long thread.
Of course not. The new Jimi would probably be drawn to guitar music or something like that.
Quoting Fooloso4
The point was that you endure as your body passes away.
What is "You"?
Sure. What I'm really looking for from Fooloso4 is his or her basis for ruling out reincarnation.
That it's problematic isn't a reason to rule it out. I doubt there's ever been a worldview that wasn't laden with problems. The 21st Century scientific outlook certainly is.
Quoting Banno
As I mentioned to Fooloso4, large doses of idealism can fix that.
I'm sure you can use the word correctly in a sentence. What more is there?
Well, go on then - present us with large doeses of idealism. Follow one mistake with another. :wink:
Quoting frank
That, my friend, is exactly the question. Are you the reincarnation of the Khan?
I'm what the Khan became.
Because the priest told me so.
As I said, I'm looking for a reason to rule it out. You haven't given me one.
If your point is that we should rule it out because we can't confirm it, surely you see the problem with that.
Oh, indeed, my time here has been an utter failure. I've not been able to prove reincarnation does not exist; nor have I been able to elicit a clear notion of what reincarnation is from those who advocate it.
Did you know that if you cook carrots, onions, and celery together it tastes amazing?
Curious that you might mention this, since it lead in to my answer to
Quoting frank
When you die, your memories, experiences, desires, intentions - all that stuff - dissolves into nothing. However your energy and substance persist. The stuff of you body might become over time the bodies of microbes, of the invisible hoards; then progressively it might enter into the bodies of the boneless or those with shells. The energy that was you becomes the energy of mud and muck, but then by chance might progress to that of a rodent or other vertebrate. If you are worthy, what was once you may become part of a beggar or a vagabond, or that of a fair maid or emperor.
Drop the persistence of the self, and reincarnation becomes a fact.
Hence, the only moral thing to do with your corpse is to dig it into the compost and use it to grow carrots, onions, and celery.
Being the master musician and innovator he was is essential to the identity of Jimi Hendrix. Someone with a different identity would not be him.
Quoting frank
I have not ruled it out, I just have not ruled it in. I find no compelling argument to do so and cannot make sense of what a disembodied soul even is.
I like that.
People have understood it for thousands of years. I guess you're cut off from the vast majority of people in your own culture and broader language group.
See my earlier comments about Plato's Phaedo. While ostensibly he is laying out an argument to support an immortal soul, he is at the same time showing that there is no coherent concept of an immortal soul.
Added: I also cited two seminal sources from my own culture: Aristotle and the Hebrew Bible. Neither posits an immortal soul that exists apart from a particular body.
I don't think so.
Quoting Fooloso4
Christianity.
Does Christianity provide a coherent account of the soul or simply claim it? Which version of Christianity are you talking about? The one that claim bodily resurrection of just the soul or Paul's spiritual body, s?ma pneumatikos?
C'mon. It's been pretty simple for thousands of years.
...simple...
Well, for the average person it was simple.
Besides, this thread has it's little moments... did you notice:
??
I do wonder, however, in the case of young musical prodigies, and other kinds of genius kids, whether there’s a sense of past-life recall at wor, or alternatively, tapping into some kind of supra-personal form of intelligence. I don't see any feasible genetic explanation for those abilities, not least because being an excellent pianist will not, for example, prevent you being gored by a wild buffalo. :-)
Quoting Banno
That is the 'ship of Theseus' problem. If every timber is replaced, is it still the same ship? I would say 'yes' if it maintains the same shape and is owned and operated by Theseus. That doesn't mean it has an intrinsic essence, but it does preserve it's identity. If for instance it was replaced by a totally different kind of ship then obviously it wouldn't be 'the same ship' even if owned by Theseus.
The Buddhist doctrine is that there is no individual self or soul who transmigrates from one life to another. That is actually a heretical belief in Buddhism and for that reason, it is said that Buddhism doesn't accept reincarnation as such (although in Tibetan culture, where there are incarnated lamas, it seems like a somewhat artificial distinction.) When asked why there is no person who is reborn, comparisons are given to, for example, a fax transmission - the information that appears on the sending and recieving ends is the same information, but the individual pieces of paper are completely different.
There are obviously many knotty problems of identity involved.
Perhaps for the average person who did not know what questions to ask and simply believed whatever it was they were told to believe.
@Banno
How dare you bring facts into a discussion of the soul!
It's not. Changing one physical part with another has nothing to do with the nebulous notion of a soul.
You responded to a question about the soul. I assumed your response had something to do with what was asked.
What I'm pointing out is that in the Buddhist view, there is no entity that incarnates, but that a set of causal factors originates from the living being's actions, which then assume the form of another being in 'the next life'. There's no literal soul, entity or person who 'goes' from life to life, or who is 'reborn' in that sense. That's why I said that Buddhism is often compared to process philosophies, like Heraclitus and Whitehead.
There's more to it: You've probably left behind buildings, works of art, heaps of trash, you might have changed the landscape, etc., things that other people and other beings have been and will be affected by. The things you do involve your memories, experiences, desires, intention; at the same time, the things you do affect other people and other beings, so others are indirectly affected by your memories etc.. So that even when you, as a legal entity, cease to exist, your legacy lives on, not just the chemicals that make up your body.
This is what I was looking for. It's not incoherent. It's entirely conceivable. Asserting otherwise is going too far. :up:
Theoretically, as far as the workings of kamma go, it seems possible that something that one cultivates in one lifetime should come easier the next time around.
Of course, this doesn't mean that if you drop dead halfway through your doctoral dissertation, next time around you'll pick up where you left off, but your academic tendencies could be carried on.
However, in Buddhism, a lot depends on your intentions for doing things, so the continuations between lifetimes might not be externally obvious. For instance, if you took up a dissertation with the intention to please your parents, next time around this intention could show as you marrying the person your parents chose for you. The exact ways in which kamma works out are extremely complex.
Also, recalling past lives might be quite common -- it's just that one recalls such ordinary things that they don't seem like being parts of a past life at all, but seamlessly merge with this one.
It's ill-defined, the definitions being inadequate or incoherent...
I haven't ruled it out either, because it is so unclear what "it" is.
Quoting frank
How??
The basic idea is pretty simple. If you don't understand it, I don't know what would remedy that.
To understand others you have to shift to their point of view. Temporarily adopt their metaphysics. If you can't do that, I suspect that you just don't want to.
But there are soul doctrines that have all this figured out.
The Hare Krishnas come to mind. (In fact, one of the objections that the more traditional Hindus have against Hare Krishna theology is that it is too clean, too coherent to be something that was inspired or narrated by God himself long ago and preserved throughout the ages, but that instead, it looks like a doctrine that was painstakingly developed specifically to address the pitfalls and objections that might be raised against a theology and a soul doctrine.)
You mentioned that before. It seems, as you say, just too obvious.
Odd that you say that, given your earlier objections to my points about intelligle and good communication.
Temporarily adopting another's metaphysics doesn't change anything, though. I can even argue in favor of Catholic, ISKCON, and Early Buddhist doctrine as well (and sometimes even better) than their members can. And yet it doesn't shift me in the direction of believing any of it.
Conceivability was the issue.
I can conceive of a flying spaghetti monster!!!
Do answer this.
I imagine that it's been "pretty simple for thousands of years" for "the average person", but that's not because the average person would have the advanced knowledge required to figure out which soul doctrine is the right one, but simply because they lacked knowledge of any other soul doctrine than the one they were familiar with, and/or because they had real life commitments that would be threatened by them even considering some other doctrine.
Or what? Do you think that "average people" have access to a higher wisdom that philosophers are barred from?
In this case your metaphysics comes first. Everything else revolves around that.
That's just an aspect of the times you were born into. A set of ideas just seems right to you. You resist questioning it.
George is my favourite Beatle, and as a starving student I was not at all reticent in Chanting the Names of the Lord in return for what was always a welcome vegetable curry.
But this is philosophy; if you are going to carry a point, you are going to have to first make that point.
What is it that is reincarnated?
Telling us that there is no problem will not do.
What is it that is born and dies? If we can clear that up, then probably there's nothing further to discuss.
What's your answer?
I already told you, several times: the soul. Do we really need to go through a couple of hundred pages of summaries of soul doctrines?
I find it hard to believe that while chanting the Names of of the Lord and eating all that curry, you didn't pick up on the theology.
What is the soul?
As far as Hindu-style reincarnation goes, it's the soul that gets reincarnated, and the body is that gets born and dies.
The question as to what, specifically, belongs to the body and what to the soul, is answered differently by different soul doctrines.
I think the real question is which soul doctrine to choose and commit to, and whether such a choice can be made and justified rationally or not. I'm inclined to think it can't.
Vicarious guilt (or redemption). In other words, fate – and whether one affirms or denies it, those "causal factors" afflict some yet-born life. Ok. So why should I care about some "next life" which my actions (karma) in this life will have fated if that "next life" isn't mine?
So the question was "What is it that is reincarnated", your answer is Quoting baker
which is...Quoting bakerand...Quoting baker
...but when one tries to track it down, Quoting baker
...and this is supposed to be adequate to our purposes.
Oh, well, Quoting baker
How about answering that question yourself, seeing that you know better than anyone else?
I did, in the only way that I can see that is sensible...
Quoting Banno
Nobody says you should care. It's your choice. Plus, different traditions explain reincarnation and karma in different ways. Which they're entitled to do.
I don't think that answers the question. People who believe in the self or soul aren't mad. In fact, most inhabitants of this planet do. The non-believers are a minority. Even atheists and neo-Marxists say "myself".
Whoever it is that lives, he sees his life and sufferings as ‘mine’.
Quoting Apollodorus
Yep; just wrong.
Edit: No, I take that back - you are also vacillating, "self or soul" as if they are the same.
But that is not the same as this:
Quoting Wayfarer
The form of another being does not maintain the same shape or is it owned and operated by some other being.
Put differently, why should I care about another being in the next life? In what way have I been liberated from the cycle?
Edit: I see that @180 Proof asked the same question.
I'm just jumpin' in, so I may say things that have been resolved already, so please I beg you to be patient with me.
There is something, according to reincarnation, that you share with some strange singular future being: your thing that reincarnates.
Whatever that thing is, is not operatively important to know its precise identity. There is a thing that gets transmitted to a new living being. That thing was in your body, and it is suggested that it owned your body.
It is true you have the reason to not care what the body's lot in life will be after the thing gets passed to him or her from you. But you don't focus on the body; it is not the body that gets to Nirvana, but the thing.
So you care not about the next body and its relationship with the thing, instead, you wish the thing will get to nirvana sooner than later, and therefore you do your part to expedite that. You do your part, and don't fret what other housers-providers do with the thing, because you have no control over that. (Recite the serenity prayer here.)
I'm not "vacillating" at all. They're often treated as the same. In normal life, we identify with our thoughts and emotions, i.e. the lower aspects of the soul. That's precisely why Platonic and other philosophical systems recommend identification with the higher aspect of the soul for the purpose of spiritual elevation and salvation.
Correct. BTW, do you actually believe in reincarnation?
I do at least for the purposes of this discussion. Nobody denies that terms like "soul" are hard to define but it doesn't help when people ignore the sources and try to relegate reincarnation to clinical psychology.
So you're being a devil's advocate?
Truth is also hard to define. It's indispensable, though.
IMO it's a legitimate topic on a "philosophy forum".
As already stated, I believe that @Bartricks' argument(s) come very close to what I had in mind.
I don't read his posts. He's kind of a lunatic.
You're re-born in one of the six realms until craving for becoming (or even craving for non-being) are overcome. I don't say I believe it or necessarily understand it.
But I am not an entity that is re-born?
I think, possibly, that is just the kind of interpolation from Hindu culture that Western secular Buddhist critics refer when they seek to show that belief in re-birth is not indigenous to Buddhism. But I don't know for sure.
In any case, there is said to be continuity between births, although the theory is, that there is no eternal changeless core or entity. That's why I keep referring to it being a process philosophy.
My personal feeling about rebirth is that first, the evidence of children who remember their past life can't simply be wished away. There's far too many corroborated details - places and dates and times of birth and death, possessions, geographical features, accident reports, and so on. There's a mountain of detail. Besides, I had early in life a sudden vivid sense of having remembered or known something from before birth (although of course it accounts for nothing objectively). I'm open to it and it seems to me some form of it has to be true. Myths of heaven and hell are more than simply cultural artifacts in my view; this present life is part of a continuum that spills over the book-ends of birth and death. I believe it enough that it concerns me.
It's a very vexed issue for Westerners who are interested in Buddhism, so much so that the 'secular Buddhism' movement posts long polemics against the idea of 'literal re-birth'. There are heated arguments about it on the Buddhist forums I used to frequent. The best account of it from a traditionalist point of view is facing the great divide by Bhikkhu Bodhi (who is an eminent translator and monk).
I tend to favour the traditionalist view, even though I'm plainly a secular type.
Quoting Apollodorus
Problem with Bartricks is that his polemics are powerful but he constantly insults and derogates anyone who challenges him.
It's difficult to discuss these things with people who aren't fluent in Buddhist doctrine, specifically, in dependent co-arising, and it's too much to try to present these doctrines in forum posts and discussions.
(Earlier, I posted some passages from the Visuddhimagga, but nobody took note of them. If already that is too much, then what about the suttas that explain dependent co-arising?)
Quoting 180 Proof
Oh, but it will affect you, because you do not simply stop when your heart stops beating. The "stream of kamma" that is "you" continues on after the death of this current body. -- But this doesn't mean much to you, does it ...
Like I said above, the discussion here breaches what is normally possible for forum discussions. I cannot rightfully expect other posters to study a topic that even many Buddhists shun because of its complexity and extent. So I'm kind of at a loss here ...
( I write here about Buddhism to test my own understanding of it, not because I'd be an advocate.)
Well, I can't go into that. I just thought that his arguments were neatly formulated and they seem to be consistent with philosophical traditions that believe in reincarnation, such as Platonism. I still believe that Platonic sources like Plotinus would be a good start. Defining "mind" or "soul" may be hard to crack - Plotinus himself explains why - but I think that, in general lines, the original philosophers were on the right track.
It's Mahayana/Vajrayana style. Some Tibetan monks, for example, regularly have debating practices where heavy insults are part of the course. The practice of dishing out and handling insults is supposedly good for one's ego, or for overcoming one's ego (it works both ways).
Greek philosophers and even Christians indulged in a bit of that, too.
Just out of interest, do you identify as a Buddhist?
Do people have agency in Buddhism? That's often how reincarnation is interpreted in the west: as a solution to earthly injustice. That's obviously the main use of the concept of immortality of the soul, though that's not at all what Plato had in mind.
I think that deep need to see divine justice comes from Christianity's role as the religion of the weak and oppressed.
Justice or righteousness was central to Platonic thought. The Greeks even had a goddess for it: ???? or Dike.
From the point of view of the intended target of the insults, it may be a good opportunity to practice building ego-shields. Unfortunately the ability to raise ego-shield is a highly variable human trait: some can, some can't. High-ranking politicians normally have a high coefficient of this trait; children typically don't.
Teachers and educators in lower grades publicly shame name calling among children. This may be beneficial or not, I don't know. However, teachers are normally very empathetic creatures, so to them hurting another, especially when causing permanent psychological damage, is abhorrent.
Now I don't know what would be better: allow children to take natural revenge, or suppressing hurtful behaviour in its bud. Allowing children to take natural revenge may end up in murder and cannibalism, but hey, we're overpopulating the Earth already. Plus, the survivors of kindergarten sandboxes may be all much better adjusted psychologically, even to the point of being able to use beneficially all the functions of a smartphone or tablet.
So that's why all the so-called just judgments were feminist rants against white, balding, overweight, privileged, middle-aged white men.
Poor Socrates, being judged by a bunch of rabidly feminist Justices.
Sure. Explaining otherworldly justice didn't drive his presentation of immortality of the soul, though. Did it? What am I missing? I think he was more focused on explaining how knowledge works.
Depends on how you look at it. The story of Er does involve the concept of divine justice. And the whole book revolves around just government and just living. So, justice was a key element.
The cosmic order (taxis) is a manifestation of the cosmic mind and justice in human society is a manifestation of cosmic order.
Injustice is like a disease that leads to disorder (ataxia). To restore order and justice in society, the human mind must operate in harmony with the cosmic mind.
So, it isn’t just about “how knowledge works” but also about how knowledge should work in harmony with divine order and justice in order for man to live a just life in a just society.
“In the study of Plato, two points seem so obvious as hardly to need restating. One is the special place of justice in his writings. As Eric Havelock observed, though Plato devoted several dialogues to single virtues, only justice received the honour of a treatise in ten books: the Republic, or “On Justice” as its first editors subtitled it. Yet justice is also prominent elsewhere, as in Euthyphro, where it eventually supersedes holiness, as the principle regulating man’s relations with the gods, or the Theaetetus, an inquiry into knowledge trained specifically on the question of what is just. Indeed, as Jay Kennedy has recently shown, justice was often literally central: the cluster ‘philosophy, justice and god’ recurs at the exact centre of many Platonic texts.”
D. Cammack, “Plato And Atheinian Justice”, History of Political Thought, Vol. 36., No. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 611-642
Doubtless, given the title, the thread will be reincarnated every few months or years.
Are zombies reincarnated?
Well, by your own account you didn't rule it out. It was too incommensurate for ya.
No, Christians don't hold monopoly over this notion, as there is a parallel in Eastern folk theories of karma.
The basic formula in such folk beliefs about karma is: "If this time around, you suffer from X, this means you did X to someone in a past life. If you do X to someone this time around, you will suffer from it now or the next time around."
The actual, scripturally based doctrines of karma suppose that the process of how the consequences of actions play out over the course of lifetimes is much more complex than what those folk beliefs have us think.
Not at all. Discussing it in this context is part of my effort to find closure to my involvement with it.
(In a Buddhist setting, there is such immense pressure to approve of and agree with the doctrine that it paralyzes one's critical thinking abilities.)
What are you talking about??
He and I are having a discussion here too.
I'm getting tired of all these balls I'm supposed to drag around ...
Interesting.
Good point. Personally, I think Buddhism has some interesting theories but it doesn't seems to contribute much to the discussion because its explanation of reincarnation is too nebulous.
IMO, the Platonic (and possibly Hindu) view is more detailed and better suited for finding a satisfactory or acceptable solution.
For example, Plato's Politeia starts with a discussion of justice, it mentions justice more than 250 times and ends in the story of Er which clearly involves the concept of divine justice.
So, @Bartricks’ argument from God was basically correct:
“An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being - God - exists. Life here is dangerous and we who are living such lives are ignorant of most things. God, being all powerful, let that be the case. But God, being omnibenevolent, would not have subjected innocent persons to such a life. Thus we are not innocent. But when we are born we have performed no actions in this life. Thus the moral crimes for which this life is a punishment must be ones we performed in a past life. Thus we must have lived previously.”
This was similar to my own:
“If God is just as is generally admitted, then it stands to reason that he might give us a second chance and not judge us after just one life. Therefore, we (the soul) must have more than one life.”
Yay!
There is always the possibility. But most philosophers have believed in God and in Justice, so an argument from justice isn't quite as outlandish as it may seem to some.
Isn't Socrates supposed to have said "There is no such thing as Zeus"?
"Supposed" is the right word. He was talking about the "Zeus" of mythology, not about "God" in general.
As already explained on other threads, Platonism believes in an indefinable and indescribable ultimate reality ("the One"), from which the divine Cosmic Mind ("he Theou Noesis" or short "Nous)" emanates, which in turn emanates the World Soul (Psyche):
"Reality itself was seen as comprising three basic levels of intelligence: the indescribable "One", the Cosmic Mind (Nous) and the Cosmic Soul.
If we compare intelligence with light, then these levels would be as follows:
1. Pure, changeless light in itself = the One
2. The Sun = Cosmic Mind or Universal Intelligence (Nous)
3. The Moon (whose light is a reflection of the light of the Sun) = Cosmic Soul (Psyche).
The human soul (psyche) itself has three basic levels:
1. Intellectual aspect responsible for thought processes.
2. Emotional aspect responsible for feelings and emotions.
3. Sensual aspect responsible for sense perception, imagination and bodily desires.
The core of the human soul, which we may term "spirit", is essentially identical with the Cosmic Mind (Nous) from which it emanates.
Although it is described as having different "parts", the soul is one. Its aspects may, to some extent, operate separately from one another but they are largely interdependent and form part of the same one mind.
For example, the sensual aspect registers discrete sensory perceptions and combines them into a mental image. The image is taken up and analyzed by the intellectual aspect, given a name and assessed in terms of its relevance to the self. The emotional part then reacts emotionally to the image and a decision is reached as to the course of action (if any) to be taken. All these mental functions or operations exist within, and are illumined by, the light of spirit or nous."
"... Terms like “consciousness” aren’t normally a problem because the meaning is understood from the context.
But if we insist on having a definition it can be deduced from the sources.
It looks like the original meaning was “knowledge with” and by extension “self-knowledge” ("knowledge with/of oneself"), “self-awareness”, “consciousness”.
Greek: ?????????? suneidesis < sun + eidesis
Latin: conscius < con + scio
Sanskrit: ?????? samvid < sam + vid
So, the simplest definition in modern language would be something like “self-aware intelligence” or, more precisely, "that which is aware of itself as itself"...."
Neoplatonism, yes. But I was talking about Socrates. The charge against him was of failing to show respect for the gods.
You mean "failing to show respect" and "gods" as interpreted by his detractors.
"Neoplatonism" is a modern concept. Platonism is a tradition that stretches from Plato to the present.
There is no logical reason to substitute supposed statements by Socrates' detractors for a centuries-long Platonic tradition that clearly believes in God, soul, divine justice and reincarnation.
Sure. It's just that you said the philosophers believed in god. I don't think Socrates did. Plato used him as a mouthpiece. Plato wasn't the only one who did that.
Well, in my view, Socrates did believe in God.
According to Socrates, a philosopher's life was a preparation for death. And the only reason for that was that he, and other philosophers, believed in God, soul, justice, etc.
Regarding soul, Socrates in Phaedo, before his death, says: “But now, inasmuch as the soul is manifestly immortal, there is no release or salvation from evil except the attainment of the highest virtue and wisdom…”
However, Socrates' beliefs are immaterial because Platonic belief in reincarnation goes back to Pythagoras and others so it isn’t dependent on what Socrates (or his detractors) believed.
Moreover, metempsychosis (Greek: ????????????), in philosophy, refers to transmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death. Generally, the term is derived from the context of Greek philosophy where it is closely connected with the concepts of “soul”, “God” and “divine justice”.
The Buddhist theory of reincarnation, in so far as it doesn’t admit of “soul”, “God” and “justice” is a different thing and is less helpful, IMO.
Well, not like a personal god, right? More like animism of some kind?
Not at all. Socrates/Plato make different statements from which it is possible to infer that they believed in:
1. Gods (described as being virtuous).
2. One God (especially in Socrates, Apollo).
3. One indescribable Supreme Being (similar to what Plotinus calls "the One").
As I said, the idea that Socrates didn't believe in God/gods is what his detractors claimed, not what follows from his own statements.
In any case, this is irrelevant to the topic which is how we justify reincarnation in philosophical terms, not whether Socrates believed in God.
The One is definitely not a personal god.
Quoting Apollodorus
Oh it's only justification is its value, whether it provides for otherworldly justice or it serves to explain knowledge.
There's no vantage point from which to confirm it or reject it.
It isn't "animism" either. God is God, whether personal or not. That's the accepted meaning of Greek "Theos".
If you have a system that believes in "God", "soul", "divine justice" and "reincarnation", then it is legitimate to look into how it justifies reincarnation.
In contrast, since reincarnation or metempsychosis implies transmigration of soul, a system that does not believe in soul, e.g. Buddhism, seems less suitable for that purpose although Buddhist teachings regarding recollection of past lives may be adduced in support of it.
Plotinus' view is kind of like animism. Everything is God.
Quoting Apollodorus
In the US you have the sovereign protection of the First Amendment to 'look into how' divine justice justifies reincarnation.
Not at all. It's a common misunderstanding, but Platonism is monism. Very different from animism.
Plotinus did believe everything is God. You're just not accepting that as a form of animism.
Well, I do appreciate your sense of humor. However, monism is definitely not animism.
Animism means a multitude of spiritual beings. Monism means everything is a manifestation or emanation of the same one God.
In one you've got multiplicity, in the other you've got unity. Big fundamental difference.
There are different kinds of animism. To believe that the universe is alive counts.
I've got nothing against animism. I'm only saying that Platonism is generally defined as monism. It revolves on the concept of Oneness, hence the Platonic belief in "the One". There are also different definitions or interpretations of "alive".
such as?
Neoplatonism does affirm the One, but that's not all there is to existence (obviously). So there is multiplicity in the emanations. There are daemons everywhere.
This belief in daemons has its roots in animism.
As long as you don't identify the Neoplatonic One with the Christian God, you're good.
Where belief in daemons originated is irrelevant. The point is that Platonic monism is not the same as animism.
In Platonism, the world emanates from the One and returns to the One. In animism, you have a multiplicity of spirits and that's it. They're two different systems.
Plus, animism has no bearing on reincarnation.
In a way it does, animal reincarnation, for instance. What's a daemon?
"In a way" is not good enough. That doesn't make Platonism animism. They aren't even similar.
Fine. They're not even similar. What's a daemon?
Of course they aren't even similar. Animism is just a belief in spirits. Platonism is an evolved philosophical system that aims to elevate the human soul to higher levels of experience leading to union with God. You need to read basic texts like Plotinus to understand that.
But anyway, if you think you can justify reincarnation on the basis of animistic belief in animal reincarnation, go ahead. I'm not holding you back.
I've read some of the enneads just to see what it was like. I mainly stuck with secondary resources during my Augustine phase.
You're pretty defensive about this.
Do you mean by this that there is 'pressure to approve of and agree with the doctrine of re-birth'? In the Buddhist circles I have interacted with, I've never experienced anything like that. I've given introductory talks at a Buddhist Library over the years, and the idea of re-birth comes up from time to time. My view is that nobody should be under any pressure to believe it, or to believe anything, for that matter. Ehi-passiko - 'come and see'. We discussed secular Buddhist approaches, the idea that re-birth is a moment-by-moment thing, and so on.
The 'secular Buddhist' organisation (yes, there is such thing) generally deprecates or rejects the idea of literal re-birth. They have long philosophical articles against it, saying that the belief was imported into Buddhism from the sorrounding culture. I don't agree with them, but there's nothing and nobody stopping them from saying it.
Quoting Apollodorus
I think that's very much Platonism as filtered through later Christian theology. As is well-known, the Greek-speaking Christian theologians such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and others, absorbed a great deal of Platonism and neo-platonism into their systems, because it provided a philosophical framework for the discussion of eschatology (the fate of the soul).
But I'm not aware of many explicit discussions of metempsychosis (the Greek term for reincarnation) in those sources - much of it is implied rather than explicit. Not saying it's not there, but it's not spelled out very clearly.
Well, I thought so. Probably not much of the Enneads at all, and definitely not with a teacher.
And how am I "defensive"? If you're saying that Platonism is "animism" which in my view is totally wrong, what am I supposed to do? Agree with you?
Well, I think Iamblichus, for example, would certainly qualify as highly evolved Platonism and not due to Christian influence.
My point about metempsychosis or reincarnation was that, by definition, it implies the existence of soul, for which reason traditions that deny its existence, such as Buddhism, are less suitable to justify or explain reincarnation in its accepted sense.
It is true that Platonic texts do not as a rule provide much detail on reincarnation. This is because Platonism is concerned with the ascent of the soul to higher planes of existence which is to be achieved through philosophy as a spiritual practice.
However, we can still infer from the Platonic sources that the soul who reincarnates consists of intellect and the lower psychological faculties (the psyche proper) plus an ethereal body (?????, ohema) resembling the physical one. This is consistent with other traditions such as those of Hinduism and shows that reincarnation isn't quite as "nebulous" as some might think.
A few quick points:
You are correct in noting the charge of atheism against Socrates. This influenced how Socrates was depicted by Plato and Xenophon. They had to defend both him and philosophy against this charge. Socrates was silenced. The same could not be the fate of philosophy.
In the Republic it is the Good, not God or gods, that: "provides the truth to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows" It is "the cause of the knowledge and truth". Further, "existence and being" are the result of the Good. (508e - 509b) Socrates previously called the sun a god, but this god too owes its existence to the Good.
Far from being a denial of Socrates atheism, it is an affirmation of it.
Some here have failed to properly distinguish the works of Plato and Platonism. They are two different things.
True. Scholars agree.
I think that's your interpretation of Socrates.
Quoting Fooloso4
And some here have failed to properly distinguish "Socratism" and Platonism. They are two different things.
You externalize.
"Nebulous" is certainly not the word I would use. I think the Early Buddhist take on rebirth is so complex and requires one to keep in mind so much doctrine that it's just too much for the ordinary person to bother with it.
No, I mean in general, about anything.
You're flying first class, I'm flying coach. I have no doubt that your experience with Buddhism was markedly different than mine. You're an educated, classy person, people tend to naturally give you a measure of respect. And you're male, which is often really really helpful in religion/spirituality.
(Bear in mind that if I want to speak to a monk, I, on principle, need to have with me an adult male chaperon who understands the topic at hand.)
I know. One such secular Buddhist once asked me what my favorite Buddhist book was, and I said "the Pali Canon". He never spoke to me again. Ha!
The two of you don't seem to understand the epistemic and normative nature of religious claims. There's a reason why "philosophy" and "religion" are two categories.
A religious claim isn't intended to be analyzed by outsiders by their own standards (that are extraneous to the religion). One is supposed to "take it or leave it". One either understands it, or one doesn't. One either agrees with it, or one doesn't. That's it. The only action one is intended to take in regard to a religious claim is to try to make oneself see the truth of it.
Religious people and texts will usually not spell this out so clearly. (The Buddha did once.) One usually discovers the above truth the hard way -- when the religious person becomes so exasperated by one's questioning and attempts at discussion that they verbalize it like I did above, or else one can infer that this is what they mean when they assassinate one's character (like when they say things like, "How can you be so foolish that you don't see that this is the truth?!").
This is one of the reasons why outsiders' attempts at discussing religious claims are bound to be abortive.
Well, that's actually what I meant by "nebulous", i.e., in the sense of not easy to grasp by an ordinary person. Obviously, monks and ascetics would be a different story. In fact I find certain Buddhist practices very helpful in getting a deeper insight into certain theoretical assumptions and as I explained in the thread on Greek and Indian philosophy - parallels and interchanges I tend to see some close parallels between Platonism and Indian traditions that may be worthwhile exploring.
I totally agree. Some pretend to take an "objective" or "scientific" approach to religion that is bound to fail given that religious experience is largely subjective. This is why, for example, you get self-appointed "scholars" and "experts" who come up with the peculiar notion that because Platonists view Ultimate Reality as indescribable, ineffable, etc., they are really "atheists". They forget that even Christian mystics often describe God in very similar terms and that all it means is simply that God is a reality above ordinary experience involving words and thoughts. Apparently, this is too difficult for "scholars" to grasp.
I agree. This is exacerbated by the fact that much modern scholarship deliberately downplays the transcendental dimension of Plato so as to present his works as more compatible with their assumed scientific materialism.
Precisely. This is where I point out to critics that their presumed "scientific objectivity" is akin to (unconscious) "neo-Marxism", in view of the fact that Marxism has always used scientifically sounding language to legitimize what is otherwise material lifted straight from the more utopian brands of socialism which Marxism dismisses as "unscientific nonsense". But to admit this much would require rather more self-examination than materialists are willing to undergo. In their worldview, there is nothing higher than themselves. Thus, they prefer to take Marx's path of "criticism of everything" except of themselves. That's always the easy way out. It's intellectual laziness disguised as "science" and doesn't solve anything, but it's good for that old materialist ego that likes to worship itself.
Oh, they wouldn't put it like that. They'd say there are no scientific grounds to consider the transcendent dimension of Platonism. (Never mind that they themselves have already decided what constitutes 'scientific grounds', but the comparison with Protagoras would be lost on them.)
To be quite honest, when I read statements like these:
“... this temporal relation is also an ethical one, because it suggests that we’re the products of other lives and the creators of other futures, and thus share a global and temporal interdependence ...”
and
“... The Buddhist ideal of ending the cycle of reincarnation has a secular corollary in the ideal of removing all traces of our past mistakes – truly living in a society without patriarchy or poverty or violence ...”,
I immediately thought how this could be used to put a political spin on it. By the time I got to the author’s views on Marx’s stance on reincarnation, it all became clear.
I should have known that the minute he mentioned Slavoj Žižek. But I suppose that's what tends to happen when you give people the benefit of the doubt ....
Yeah, religious discourses are language games grounded in forms of life which when interpreted in terms of non-religious language games tend to generate – degenerate into – (polemical) misunderstandings & nonsense. I won't put words in @Banno's mouth, but I've not reduced any religious language game to, say, a philosophical language game; I've been quite charitable and repeatedly asked you insiders Just questions, Mr. Insider, not evaluations or reductions to exogenous terms or anything misguided or sinister.
I call bullshit whenever someone claims an "outsider" or uninitiated can't understand what an insider understands – how does an insider know he discursively understands something if he can explain, or convey it intelligibly, only to other insiders? That's groupthink, right? Preaching to tf choir? Blowing sunshine (or smoke) up each others' arseholes, no?
I agree. I think the problem with Buddhism is that it seems to have taken reincarnation from Hinduism but it reinterpreted it in a Buddhist context that has no reference to soul. What reincarnates or is re-born is an aggregate of karmic imprints whose “transmigration” from one birth to another is difficult to explain in everyday language. In contrast, the Platonic and Hindu explanation is much easier to understand even for non-specialists.
The difficulty of the Buddhist theory has been noted by many, e.g. in this article from Psychology Today, The Problem with Reincarnation
Aren't you just looking for an opportunity to press your metaphysics? Otherwise I don't get the point of the "what is reincarnated" question. It's been answered.
Quoting Apollodorus
This is where Buddhism is very different from the 'substance and attribute' metaphysic of Aristotle.
It also differs from the Hindu view of an unchanging self that exists from life to life. ‘Eternalism’ was the indigenous idea that through the right practices and disciplines an ascetic could be reborn in perpetuity, an unending series of lives. On the other hand, nihilism is the idea that at the end of life there are no karmic consequences to actions. Basically all such views are driven by desire (will, in Schopenhauer’s terms) - thirst for continued existence, or desire to escape from existence. Neither is ‘seeing things as they truly are’, which is that craving gives rise to continued re-birth. There is a kind of karmic continuity, but nothing unchangeable within it. It was called in later Buddhist schools citta-santana, sometimes translated as ‘mindstream’.
As for the identity of the Tathagatha, the ‘awakened one’:
This is in keeping with the principle that Nirv??a is essentially inconceivable.
This is criticised by both Christians and Hindus as being nihilist. Christian doctrine is that individual souls realise eternal life in heaven. Christians object to Buddhism for being impersonal or annihilationist. Hindus say something similar, although Buddhism greatly influenced Hindu doctrines of Advaita Vedanta through the dialectics of emptiness. (Adi Shankara, legendary Hindu sage, was called by some other Hindu schools ‘quasi-Buddhist’.)
As I might have mentioned elsewhere, I did an academic thesis on anatta in early Buddhism (readable here for those interested.)
I agree. I wouldn't go quite so far as to call Buddhism "nihilist" in all respects. It still has some interesting contributions it could make.
However, some Buddhist traditions claim that imprints of past experience are stored in a “store-consciousness” (?layavijñ?na) from where they arise in the form of memories like plants germinating from seeds. But that doesn’t explain where the store-consciousness itself is stored. Even if we grant that the store-consciousness is nothing but the totality of imprints or seeds, we still need to explain how the seeds are held together and where. The same applies to the chain-of-consciousness or chain-of-causation theory.
In contrast, Platonism and Hinduism say that remembrance, for example, is a function of the soul who stores impressions of past experience within itself.
In my view, the Buddhist theory sounds like an artificial device intended to spare the Buddhist an admission of soul, necessitated by the no-soul theory (anatt?/an?tman). This is also suggested by the negative description of memories. Once you postulate the non-existence of soul, you need to negate other things normally associated with a soul and you may end up appearing to be "nihilist" without necessarily intending to.
Oh, it's definitely NOT nihilist. This is what was always thrown at in by it's Hindu opponents. It's one of the reasons it died out in India.
Quoting Apollodorus
Well, in my view, you'd be mistaken. You'd be reifying the dynamic process which is 'the self' into an objectively existing entity, which it isn't. In Buddhist terms, it gives rise to clinging - the idea of 'me and mine', transposed into some supposedly ethereal domain of existence.
You ought to consider the link between Buddhism and scepticism. The Buddha is actually a sceptic, but his frame of refence is very different from that of the armchair sceptics who cling to the treacherous testimony of sense only.
(Logging out to go to work, back much later.)
Where, exactly?
Or could you provide a summation, perhaps?
Which tradition? And why exactly can't you look it up?
Sure, I might of course be wrong. I was just stating what my personal impression was after seeing that Buddhism which is otherwise quite thorough in other respects has failed to come up with a more satisfactory account of remembrance, rebirth, etc.
People do ask questions, it isn't just @baker
The Problem with Reincarnation - Psychology Today
But there is no big rush to answer my points at all. Do take your time. I happen to work from home at the moment so I know what it's like trying to juggle many things at once. My multitasking abilities tend to be way below what I would like them to be ...
What condition is that?
Given the obscurity of many esoteric texts, it's an open question whether insiders are able to convey their ideas to other insiders as well.
That said, I don't subscribe to the idea that that which exists must be necissarily be something that can be described with language. So I find it entirely possible that some mystics are attempting to describe an insight and failing to do so in clear terms because such transcription is impossible (for them, or entirely).
He makes some interesting points, but I note his byline says 'Alex Lickerman, M.D., is a general internist and former Director of Primary Care at the University of Chicago and has been a practicing Buddhist since 1989.'
Quoting Apollodorus
The term 'soul' is foriegn to both Buddhism and Hinduism. The Hindu word 'atman' is simply the first-person participle of 'to be'. As said above, Buddhism challenges the notion that there is an entity or being which is always the same, which remains the same from one life to the next, but it's very tricky to understand exactly what is being affirmed or denied in these debates. It's true that in popular Buddhism, there might just as well be a soul that passes from life to life even if that is very different from what the texts actually say.
My view is that 'the soul' is shorthand for 'the totality of the being' - the sum total of your past, your destiny, talents, proclivities, memories, habits and so on. It's a larger idea than the ego, person or self, because aspects of the totality are hidden even to oneself (as Jung knew well).
That's why I found the article interesting, because it's written by a practicing Buddhist. Obviously, a beginner or non-Buddhist would find the matter even more confusing.
But I agree with "soul" as the "totality of being". Interestingly, the Platonic term for the embodied soul or totality of man as a “living being” is ?? ????, to zoon. Its Hindu equivalent is jiv?tman which means pretty much the same.
Incidentally, the Platonic nous is also equated with "being" just like Sanskrit atman. As Plotinus puts it:
"For we and what is ours goes back to real being and we ascend to that real being" VI 5,7, 1-8
The pure soul and intelligible being are one and the same.
So, essentially, man consists of (1) a pure spiritual core (nous or pneuma), (2) the soul proper (psyche) which is the psycho-mental apparatus attached to embodied spirit and (3) physical body.
Disembodied spirit, as in the after-death state, consists of essentially the same, viz. spirit (nous) and soul (psyche) with the difference that its body is not physical but a slightly more "palpable" extension of soul consisting of the same psycho-mental "substance" as the soul, including perhaps impressions or memories of the physical body left behind.
This metaphysical body is termed ohema in Platonism and sukshmasharira ("subtle body") in Hinduism. The soul is endowed with this subtle body prior to rebirth and apparently during "out-of-body" travel and other OBE states.
I'm not sure to what extent certain Buddhist traditions agree with this but the Platonic and Hindu accounts seem to make reincarnation fairly easy to explain.
Thanks, but I'm not a believer. Damn, thought you were going to cure me. :broken:
Pa?iccasamupp?da explains these things. Unless you think that pa?iccasamupp?da requires an additional explanation/context/foundation?
Oh?
Would you say that if you cannot explain, say, advanced math to someone who totally isn't into math, or to a small child, this means that " it's more likely than not that discursively you don't understand it or the discourse itself is unintelligible"? And that it deserves to be called bullshit?
It's like this for any specialized field, whether it's advanced math, or cooking, or engineering, or hair-styling.
The prospective understander needs to have the required basic knowledge of the field, or he won't understand what the other person is saying.
People sometimes say "If you can't explain it to a 5-year-old child, you just don't understand it". Yet this is patently wrong. Small children simply can't understand anything about advanced math, or how to make a proper souffle, or how to cut a bob, and so many other things, no matter how much things are dumbed down for them. (But one thing small children might be good at is keeping up the appearance of understanding.)
Like you say -- you're an insider in those fields. So no surprise that you had "many productive, informative, discussions with scholarly & thoughtful insiders of quite a few religious traditions".
Although I wonder what you mean by "productive discussions".
And you think that your attitude that you display here is conducive to a productive exchange?
You didn't read the sources that we referred to.
But not questions asked in good faith, as you yourself noted earlier that you engage in these discussions because you're bored.
In the same way that there is a special linguistic understanding among the native/fluent speakers of a language, an understanding that outsiders characteristically lack.
*sigh*
Looks like you're having some hangups about the social nature of knowledge.
Also, note the emic-etic distinction.
Fuck you for this.
You don't read posts. I'm not going to defend claims you merely imagine I made.
Suit yourself. I'm leaving you to heavens and to the thorns that in your bosom lodge to prick and sting you.
What I meant was that the Buddhist explanation may be OK to Buddhists, but it seems less satisfactory to Platonists and Hindus, for example. And it looks like some Buddhist traditions do accept something that comes close to the soul of Platonists and Hindus.
Plus, as your Wikipedia article says, there seem to be issues of interpretation, etc. and several scholars have identified inconsistencies in this theory of “dependent origination”.
It may be true that the soul or individual mind/consciousness is not eternal and changeless in its normal everyday aspect, but it may still be eternal and changeless in essence. Otherwise, what is nirvana?
Why is German "unsatisfactory" to people who want to speak Italian?
It's bizarre that one religion should employ concepts that another religion finds acceptable.
Yes, they do. What's your point?
Yes, "Buddhism" can mean a lot of things ... There's an air of Humpty-Dumpty about it.
I'm curious about what you say above, and earlier. You seem like a semantic atomist.
Pointing out that different religions mean different things, even though they might be using the same terms, is not an act of rationalizing immunity from critical examination for religious discourses.
It would be such a rationalizing if we started off with the premise that all religions are, aspire to, or should talk about the same thing. It's not clear how such a premise can be defended, much less that it is self-evident. Without such a premise, we're left with numerous potentially incompatible religious discourses, even though they sometimes use the same or similar terms and concepts.
How can one hope to understand a term without immersing oneself in the field of expertise from which this term originates?
That was what I was saying. Buddhist theories are more difficult to process and assimilate if they require "immersing oneself in that field of expertise". Platonic or Hindu theories such as reincarnation are easier to understand as they are using everyday terminology like "soul" with which most people are already familiar. By the way, it wasn't a criticism of Buddhism, just an observation or statement of fact.
Yep.
There's no philosophical content here.
The problem is, it is something that does not exist. Try as you might, with all manner of instrumentation or argument, you will never locate such a 'pneuma' or soul. It is a poetic expression, a metaphor, a way of visualising reality, but there is no such thing. Likewise the 'physical body' is not merely physical, or rather, what 'physical' means is unknown. So these neat schemes are devised, 'physica' and 'mental' and 'soul', which purportedly describe different things, but they're simply reifications and abstractions in which you then get enmeshed.
There were once Buddhist-Christian churches in Central Asia.
Yes, but that's how the human mind works, by classifying and organizing experience and trying to make sense of it all. But one can equally get enmeshed in denying everything. And, as we don't know until we're dead, we just can't tell. It might make people feel better to think that everything is an "illusion" or "emptiness" but in the final analysis there is no objective proof, nor can there be if neither objective nor subjective reality exists.
Buddhists pay very close attention to the nature of experience, or experienced reality, which amounts to the same. But they don't posit unknown entities to account for it. Following is an excerpt from my thesis work:
This can be read as a direct repudiation of anyone who claims to speak of something ‘beyond the sense-gates’ as being ‘beyond range’. It might be tempting to say that this represents a kind of proto-naturalism, or even positivism - a repudiation of anything beyond empirical observation. However, that would be mistaken, for the Buddha, having established the identity of ‘the All’, then advises the monks to abandon it:
Does this say, then, that beyond the ‘six sense gates’ and the activities of thought-formations and discriminative consciousness, there is nothing, the absence of any kind of life, mind, or intelligence?
(Emphasis added.)
The phrase ‘objectifies non-objectification’ (vada? appapañca? papañceti) is key here. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu notes in his commentary, ‘the root of the classifications and perceptions of objectification is the thought, "I am the thinker."
-----------
So this is key to understanding Buddhist philosophy. There is no self that goes, no thing that thinks, no God that creates. But it is also not the denial of those, because they had no reality in the first place, they are all mental constructs. The aspirant needs to be able to break out of the endless constructive process of assertion and denial. Humans get caught up in castles in the sky, in magnificent thought-constructions that take on a life of their own. But that is not reality. It's not positivism or materialism, however, because it doesn't start by positing something and then declaring it non-existent, which is where modern materialism originated; it sees through the whole process of believing and denying. That is the 'mahdyamika dialectic' (philosophy of the middle way) in a nutshell.
Well, I'm not disputing that. And perhaps Platonic, Christian and other mystics (or Hindu yogis for that matter) aren't totally different. However, it does seem to me that this applies to Buddhist monks specifically, not to Buddhists in general. The vast majority of the Buddhist population seems to be going about their daily life just like the rest of us without concerning themselves too much with Buddhist doctrine.
That's because we're uneducated worldlings, what Plato would designate the hoi polloi. 'The many live each in their own private world, while those who are awake have but one world in common' ~ Heraclitus.
I think that might be key to solving the puzzle.
And using the definitive article before "hoi polloi" makes one a real uneducated worldling. :razz:
*sigh*
What I've been saying is that "philosophy" and "religion" are two categories. This isn't intended to rationalize immunity from critical examination for religious discourses. It's intended to show that attempting such a critical examination is a waste of time for an outsider to said religious discourse.
One would think people value their time more highly.
Good luck to you and Witti with explaining advanced math or engineering to preschoolers!
The issue at hand is jargon, not private language.
But teeth do rot, hair does grey, skin does wrinkle.
Yep. Faith as belief despite any conceptual problems will do that. All you are doing is putting your hands over your ears and humming loudly.
Btw, I have somewhat recently explained advance math (axiomatic set theory) to my math-phobic english major nephew (why he took elementary logic as an elective is still a mystery to us both) and decades before engineering to a nonengineer (when I was a mechanical engineering undergrad and my mother the trauma nurse wanted me to explain what she had been (partially) paying for and why after such expense I was changing my major).
The point is, if you can't explain X in translatable terms Y then you do not sufficiently understand X yourself. If this is not so, baker, then account for libraries of scholarly studies and texts on comparative religions, the philosophy of religion, scriptural hermeneutics & classical philology. Your cognitive defects, sir, are not to be confused with cognitive limitation as such.
Is then reincarnation without past life memory, a reincarnation? Because, even if we suppose that we all have reincarnated from our past lives, no one seems to remember, or knows who they were in their past lives.
Well, people don't remember what they did or who they were in early infancy. This doesn't mean they didn't exist at the time. Absence of memory is no proof of nonexistence.
Physical existence is not the issue here. The souls (mental entities, most significance being memories) are??
That's what I'm saying. The soul's memories. Absence of memories isn't evidence of absence of existence. Temporary or partial amnesia is not unheard-of.
It proves that reincarnation can never be proven. Therefore the OP is a meaningless question.
It doesn't prove that. There is still a theoretical possibility that people can remember. And some apparently do remember.
Theoretical possibility of existence of immaterial existence sounds illusional imagination without strong concrete evidence.
OK, you talk about someone remembering their previous lives, but how many are they, out of the whole human population? It is also possible that, they could have been having day dreams or some fantasy? Sometimes, I seem to remember my time in the garden of Eden, but don't believe it ever existed in real world.
You don't seem to have followed the discussion or read the OP.
I gave my own opinion on the proof of reincarnation issues on the OP. Even if, I seem remember on something, that cannot qualify as proof of existence on the object. But if even the memory is not present, then what chance of proof or verification have we?
I stand by my first post on this thread: reincarnation is only a metaphor, an existential reminder to live each day, not as if it's your last day, but to live so completely and mindfully as if it each day is an entire lifetime. Thus, Cicero's maxim: "To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die." And so we blind ourselves to the insight when we take reincarnation literally as most believers, I suspect, have done since the Upanishads or the Phaedo.
"What get's reincarnated?"
"NowHere."
:death: :flower:
There is no doubt that reincarnation has been used metaphorically. But the more prevalent view was religious, including in relation to preparation for death. So, both are possible.
As I pointed out on the other thread:
"The ancient Egyptians viewed death as a temporary transition into what could become everlasting life in paradise. The Egyptian outlook on death was not focused on fear as much as it was preparing and transitioning into a new prosperous afterlife.
The Egyptian Gods judged the merits of human character and deeds when deciding who was permitted to be immortal. As a result, much of human-life was centered on the hopeful attitude that if one is moral, one will live forever in a blissful afterlife. (This is somewhat comparable to Christian conceptions of religion.)
So, basically, for the Egyptians – at least the wise or the initiated into wisdom traditions – life was a preparation for death. It seems to me that Greek philosophy was influenced by the Egyptian outlook.
There are traditional accounts of Pythagoras going to Egypt in search of secret knowledge which he apparently obtained from Egyptian temple priests.
“[Pythagoras] was also initiated into all the mysteries of Byblos and Tyre, and in the sacred function performed in many parts of Syria […] After gaining all he could from the Phoenician mysteries, he found that they had originated from the sacred rites of Egypt […] This led him to hope that in Egypt itself he might find monuments of erudition still more genuine, beautiful and divine. Therefore following the advice of his teacher Thales, he left, as soon as possible, through the agency of some Egyptian sailors […] and at length happily landed on the Egyptian coast […] Here in Egypt he frequented all the temples with the greatest diligence, and most studious research […] After twelve years, about the fifty-sixth year of his age, he returned to Samos …” - Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras
Another point I would like to add is that, immaterial objects such as souls cannot be used with concept such as existence. The word "exist" only applies to material objects. Using "exist" with immaterial mental properties is a categorical mistake. Mental properties don't exit. They process and emerge.
The concept of "Existence" applies to concrete physical objects with weight, dimension and texture, or at least one of them (e.g gas). It also must have temporal continuity of the existence prior to transforming to another material object. No matter how the physical objects transform, they will always exist as another form of physical object or substance e.g. you burn the woods, and it will become ashes. You burn the propane gas, and it will emit CO2. It can be trapped physically in a bottle.
Mentalities? Nothing like that is possible. Because they are not any form of existence. They are properties, states and tendencies emerged from the matter called "Brain".
I think you've copied that from Wikipedia or some other materialist source. The sense of self doesn't "process and emerge". Ii's always there.
I am afraid your conjecture and thought are wrong.
That is 100% from my opinion. What is the point, copying ideas or texts from Wiki or some dodgy internet site, and bringing here? That would be a waste of time. I will say clearly and ALWAYS, where I got the ideas or quotation, if I were using them.
I come here to read other people's ideas on the philosophical issues, and then debate from my own ideas. I could be wrong of course, but if someone convinces me with his / her logic, reasoning and ideas, so be it. That is the whole point of being here, and worth time and effort of all.
When you die, it evaporates forever too. Don't be afraid to admit that you won't know where it has gone to.
That's exactly what you don't know. The OP is about how believers in reincarnation justify it in philosophical/rational terms as opposed to purely religious/faith-based arguments. It doesn't ask non-believers to "disprove" it.
Essentially by this view, the first-person subject is static and exists only "in a manner of speaking", with the concept of change applying only to presently observed things.
Of course, if one says that he just believes in reincarnation, then it is problem of faith, and doesn't need justification.
But I was saying that, the OP is rather a religious and faith topic, which lies out of the boundaries of objective theoretical and logical verification.
Another highly doubtful and debatable statement. Problem of Self is a big topic of its own. It has many arguments and theories on the issues.
Nobody disputes that. But that's not what the thread is about.
You are the one who brought it into the thread.
It's been discussed because others questioned the existence of soul or self.
In that case, you shouldn't have said, "But that's not what the thread is about".
Everything and anything can be related to each other, and I was just commenting on your statement, because you uttered it.
Great
You are welcome.
*sigh*
You do realize that I'm not religious, have said so, and am fiercely critical of religion, which I have also made clear, extensively (to the point that I alienated some people right when I got here)?
What the fuck do I need to do to get your head out of your ass and stop talking to me and about me as if I were religious?
God fucking damn it, there's no room for a lady here.
You just can't win, can you? Atheists have their own religion and superstitions, it seems. But, should Buddhists not try and be a bit more relaxed about attacks from their detractors?
Something is only understandable to someone, to a person, not somehow per se.
People differ vastly in what they are able and willing to engage in and what they can understand.
Quoting 180 Proof
Ie. you were explaining it to someone who has a preexisting knowledge and an interest (or at least an obligation) in the topic. Not to a total outsider.
Of course, we don't know if she understood what you were saying nor is it clear what she could do with what she learned from you there.
What of them? Sure, people have attempted to translate/transfer discourses from one into another.
But such translations/transfers don't say anything about the translated/transferred discourse. They say nothing about its relevance, veracity, value. They are simply testaments to people's love of translation and mediation, and love of cognition.
If only you'd apply this to yourself, sir.
Quoting baker
My question still stands.
I thought I had already answered that. But anyway, (1) to exercise our gray cells or mind and (2) to show believers in reincarnation that their belief isn't irrational.
Additional answers may emerge as the discussion proceeds at its own pace.
Given any assumed set of identity relations, science only has the power to decide whether or not a given observable process conforms to those relations. For example, if a caterpillar is defined as being identical to the resulting butterfly, then scientific experiments have the potential to confirm whether or not a given caterpillar is identical to a given butterfly. But the result can neither confirm nor deny the reality of the assumed identity relation.
There a multiple cultural and practical factors as to why western culture has converged onto an assumed set of identity relations that makes rebirth not merely physically impossible but logically impossible. I think part of the reason is that scientific theories are initially easier to understand relative to an atomic ontology, such as periodic tables and subatomic particles, than holistic process ontologies. This is also reflected in logic and mathematics, where most students find set theory with elements easier to understand than category theory without elements.
The distinction between faith and believe does not just apply to religious faith. You've posited this notion of reincarnation while being unable to explain what it is that is reincarnated. That strikes me as pretty fundamental.
Quoting baker
That looks like a description of faith.
I just want to come back to this. The soul could be explained any which way. It's a blob of idea-stuff, whatever.
A language community uses the word correctly. "The soul reincarnates" is true IFF the soul reincarnates. All is well.
You've got no basis for calling it false.
...and no basis for calling it true. Reincarnation becomes a form of life that does not make contact with truth or falsehood. It's use - meaning - can only be in its social function.
I don't know what you mean by this.
Quoting Banno
So?
Yes, Frank.
:up:
That's a good interpretation. But the problem is, I think, the obvious fact of the karma that we're born with. Even if it's a metaphor, in effect it's indistinguishable from the consequences of a previous life (which we will often say in a jocular way, 'in my last life I was a....'). So it might be a metaphor, but it's not only a metaphor, or rather, even if it is a metaphor, the message is bracing - whatever unfinished business you leave at the end of this life, will have to be picked up by another, it will play out in 'some other life'.
Scientifically speaking, I agree, but of course, your argument also applies to the "you only live once" position, so it's a moot point.
But i don't agree that scientific truth and metaphysical truth are synonymous, due to the fact the latter directly concerns the logic of first-person experience, whereas the former is precluded from coming into contact with first-person experience due to the public semantics of scientific discourse , where identity relations are decided by public agreement with respect to propositions stateable in the third-person. Hence it is possible, imo, to accept the public meaningless of the scientific question, whilst accepting the private question to be metaphysically meaningful, and even potentially answerable in some philosophically critical sense.
To give a related example, if i awaken from a coma then I am said to have been "previously unconscious" by definition of the circumstances i am presently in, which includes such things as medical opinions i hear from loved ones around me, a brain-scan i am presented with showing an absence of critical neurological activity, and my self-observed tendency to abstain from memory recalling behavior (amnesia). As with the question of reincarnation, it is logical for me to ask "But was I really unconscious previously", or only in the tautological sense decided by public convention, where my "previous unconsciousness" is ironically decided by present observations that make no actual reference to a non-existence of first-person experience per-se?
I baulk at having a different sort of truth for science than for religion. Truth is truth. The you that awakes forma coma has the very same body as the you that entered the coma. There is a publicly available way to asses the meaning of "I" in "But was I really unconscious previously". It's missing from reincarnation.
And you really think they care about such help?
The fundamental mistake you've been making all along is assuming that I'm speaking in favor of religion. When in fact, all along, I've been making the case for why there cannot be a philosophical justification for reincarnation/rebirth. Philosophically, the matter can only be addressed on a metalevel, metaethically and metaepistemically (like I did, in the crude terms you cite above). It's how I finally learned to stop worrying about religion and love the bomb!
You owe me an apology for insisting in this mistake.
Something about the appriopriate time and place for discussing Dhamma comes to mind.
And then that about the Dhamma being likened to a water snake.
It's jargon. Why concern yourself or even just think about the jargon terms of a social group of which you're not part?
You probably don't concern yourself with souffles, bob haircuts, or some fancy engineering term that is hard to spell correctly, so why concern yourself with reincarnation? What's so appealing about it? Can you tell?
I've merely been responding to what you wrote. Whether you are in favour or against religion is of no relevance. was your supposed answer to my "What is it that is reincarnated", but is nothing beyond a recitation of dogma - indeed, two dogmas, Buddhist and Hindu. It is you who frames the discussion in religious terms, not I.
Quoting baker
This is not about jargon, it's about how one is to make use of talk of reincarnation. If it has no truth value, it cannot be about what happens. Instead its role is myth or ideology.
Are caterpillars identical to butterflies?
"Theology as grammar" - Wittgenstein.
So by analogy, is personal identity over time an illusion? How should persons being counted?
Well, these are the unaddressed questions in this thread.
I'll go with Wittgenstein's rope; we treat it as a single rope, despite no single thread running through the whole. The "I" is memory, body, intent, narrative...
None of which survive death.
Yeah but don't ever drain your life out of magic totally
It's OK to say "I don't know"; more, doing so is better than making shit up.
But are these things even persistent during the course of a single lifespan?
I cannot for instance remember my childhood before the age of 5. So does this childhood belong to somebody other than I?
Quoting Banno
presumably in that case we can treat any consecutive processes as being a single rope, in which case we have arrived at the Buddhist position of rebirth
What is the ontological justification for us treating an individual as being the same person throughout the course of single lifespan?
I think the central question concerns the elasticity of the rope. For liberally minded persons who only believe in "death by definition", the rope is infinitely elastic. For conservatively minded persons however, the rope is very taut.
And operated on several assumptions of your own.
It is of relevance when you talk to me as if I was religious.
Standard question, standard reply. What did you expect? A non-religious/areligious answer to a religious question??
Asking "What is it that is reincarnated?" and then refusing the standard religious replies, is like asking "How much is 2 + 2?" and stipulating "But you may not say 4."
Of course it's jargon.
An outsider to religion has no meaningful context for talk of reincarnation. Similarly as someone who has no knowledge of chemistry or physics has no meaningful context for talk of molecular bonds. Etc.
And yet chemistry makes use of mathematics. It's really only religion you would segregate from critique. You are apparently indulging in special pleading. I don't buy it.
Except for this body, you presume to know what you don't; the definition of a dogmatist.
More detail here.
...as we return from whence we came, the circle of discussion is complete.
I just posted the last section of my commentary on the Phaedo. Socrates was unable to demonstrate through argument the existence of the soul separate from the body or its continued existence in death.
The counterpart to argument is myth. Throughout the dialogue Socrates has referred to myth as a means of self-persuasion. He did not end with an argument but with a myth he made up. After telling the myth he immediately says:
“No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief—for the risk is a noble one—that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places …”
Here again, as he said near the beginning, one should “sing incantations to himself, over and over again” in order to persuade himself. (114d)
As to recollection, he says:
"Well now, you know what happens to lovers, whenever they see a lyre or cloak or anything else their loves are accustomed to use: they recognize the lyre, and they get in their mind, don't they, the form of the boy whose lyre it is? And that is recollection. Likewise, someone seeing Simmias is often reminded of Cebes, and there'd surely be countless other such cases.'" (73b-d)
One does not need to have previously died to be reminded of lyres or lovers or friends.
Socrates uses the terms recollection, remember, and remind without distinction. Amusingly enough, his friend cannot remember the argument for recollection and asks to be reminded.
Socrates sees the myths as beneficial, at least for some, even if they are not true. It may seem odd that he does not put the truth above all else, but in the absence of truth the philosopher must be guided by what seems best.
Of course. Religion and science are NOMAs.
Sure, there are some generalities that many of the scientific disciplines have in common (there used to be just one science which was later broken down into disciplines). Still, the point is that each scientific discipline has areas or modes of interest that do not overlap with those of other scientific disciplines. That's why there are different scientific disciplines, ie. biology, chemistry, physics, etc.
I wouldn't "segregate it from critique" -- implying that it's "too good to be criticized" or some such.
It's just not clear how one could meaningfully go about criticizing it, or for what purpose.
It's beyond me how religious concepts can be the subject of philosophical inquiry. Indeed, it's a philosophical tradition to do so, I just don't understand how or why. When religious people claim that their doctrines are special, that they require special initiation to be understood, and such, I see no reason not to take their words at face value. However, this doesn't mean I believe those doctrines. That would be strange.
See how cites physical phenomena in support of reincarnation. If religious views have consequences for what one does in the world, then those views are subject to criticism on that basis.
Really? You think you understand reincarnation or dependent co-arising? On whose terms of understanding? Yours or the Hindus'/Buddhists'?
But in that case, you'd actually have to prove the causal link between religious view X and action A.
This is impossible because we can't see into people's minds. You also need to account for the possibility of people being cunning; ie. allow for the possibility that they aren't speaking truthfully to a questioner who is not a member of their religion (some religions have a specific clause that it's not wrong to lie to outsiders).
"The Holy Spirit told me to set my neighbor's house on fire (he is a Muslim)". Really? That's the sort of thing you want to investigate??
Nonsense. You're using a fake translation.
Socrates says:
“… when death attacks the human being, the mortal part of him dies, it seems, whereas the immortal part departs intact and undestroyed, and is gone, having retreated from death […] And so, more surely than anything, Cebes, soul is immortal and imperishable, and all our souls really will exist in Hades” 106e -107a
Cebes replies :
“For my part, Socrates, I’ve nothing else to say against this, nor can I doubt the arguments in any way”. 107a
Simmias agrees, but still has some doubts:
“… I’m compelled still to keep some doubt in my mind about what has been said” 107b
Socrates has the final word:
“As it is, however, since the soul is evidently immortal, it could have no means of safety or of escaping evils, other than becoming both as good and as wise as possible”
Concerning the myth he tells of Hades, Socrates says:
“… since the soul turns out to be immortal, I think that for someone who believes this to be so it is both fitting and worth the risk – for fair is the risk – to insist that either what I have said or something like it is true concerning our souls and their dwelling places” 114d
Conclusion: Socrates does not doubt the immortality of the soul or its journey to Hades.
Now,life after death is a totally different thing.
The Soul is your etheric body with all its memory,skills and growth detaching from the outer material body at death.
No need for this what reincarnates and such like.
You posted the same thing elsewhere, but did not accuse me of using a "fake translation".
You have accused me before of making things up but when I cited sources you just moved on to something else. That demonstrates a lack of honesty and integrity, both intellectual and emotional.
It is from the Grube translation:http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2010-09-15.2713280635/file
There you cited another translation. My comments:
You neglect to include the following from this translation:
and he ought to repeat such things to himself as if they were magic charms
Whether or not the soul has been shown to be immortal is a basic question of my essay. I show how and why each of the arguments fail. It is because the arguments fail that he used myths to persuade, charms and incantations.
Note how many of the translations you cite include the idea that it is worth the risk to believe. If something has been proven to be true there is no reason to risk believing it is true.
So, why are you using the Grube translation that is obviously faulty?
The Greek original is VERY CLEAR:
??? ??? ????? ?????????????? ????? ????? ?? ??? ?????????, ?? ?????? ???? ?????? ?????: ??? ?????? ? ????? ????? ? ??????? ???? ???? ??? ????? ???? ??? ??? ????????, ??????? ???????? ?? ? ???? ???????? ????, ????? ??? ??????? ??? ????? ??? ????? ??????????? ??????? ????? ?????—????? ??? ? ????????—??? ??? ?? ??????? ????? ??????? ?????, ??? ?? ????? ??? ????? ?????? ??? ?????. ???? ?????? ?? ????? ??????? ??? ???? ?? ?????? ????
The Sedley & Long translation which I am using and other translations have the correct version. Why are you choosing the incorrect one if you are so "objective" as you claim to be?
You are confused. On the one hand you fault the translation and on the other my omitted part of the translation. Regarding the former, I linked the translation. See for yourself and tell me where it is obviously faulty. As to my choice of omission, see the other thread.
The Grube translation is highly regarded by scholars. Brann's translation says much the same thing.
There is no such thing as the "correct version". Each translator has to make choices. If there were a correct version there would be no need for new translations.
And speaking of transating, why don't you translate the Greek above in your own words? After all, it is, as you say "very clear". Why bother with Sedley and Long or any other translation?
Why should I give you my translation - which you will obviously reject - when Sedley & Long's and other translations serve the purpose?
I provided the Greek original with the missing words:
??????? ???????? ?? ? ????, "since the soul is immortal".
You are providing nothing apart from an incomplete translation. And, again, why did you choose this particular translation when in other translations the passage is more complete, more faithful to the Greek original and more balanced?
Why should you copy and paste the Greek?
Once again, there are no missing words. I left the words out and I explained why. Instead of addressing that you keep returning to the same uninformed claim.
If there are no missing words, how did you leave them out?
The words are in the Greek original and in proper translations like Sedley & Long.
How can you possibly ignore both the Greek original and other translations if you're serious about an objective analysis?
My first reaction is different audience. With Christianity there was by the time the Tractatus was written more than enough myth.
In the Introduction, Sedley & Long say:
“… in this concluding moment Socrates and his companions are in no doubt as to what it amounts to: soul must leave the body and go to Hades. Thus, at the very close of the defence of immortality, at the point where argument reaches its limit, and is about to give way to eschatological myth, Socrates is seen yet again reaffirming the Hades mythology” p. xxxiii
It looks like you have deliberately chosen another, incomplete translation because it suits your agenda. Sedley & Long’s translation and commentary would have demolished your theory.
I used the translation I have and online translations I found. If I had used Sedley and Long I would have skipped the introduction.
Sedley and Long aren't nobodies, they are highly regarded scholars.
David Neil Sedley is a British philosopher and historian of philosophy. He was the seventh Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University.
David Sedley – Wikipedia
Alex Long, of St Andrews is the editor of Immortality in Ancient Philosophy, which brings together original research on immortality from early Greek philosophy, such as the Pythagoreans and Empedocles, to Augustine. The contributors consider not only arguments concerning the soul’s immortality, but also the diverse and often subtle accounts of what immortality is, both in Plato and in less familiar philosophers, such as the early Stoics and Philo of Alexandria.
So, Sedley & Long would have been highly relevant to your “essay” IMHO.
Quoting Fooloso4
A few more thoughts:
Wittgenstein's concept of language is far more restrictive than Plato's.
Plato addresses the psychology or character of the individual.
Plato and Wittgenstein have different temperments
Quoting Banno
Okay, let's try this again, here with a Hindu style version of reincarnation that you should be familiar with (you ate their curry, but forgot the theology that came with it?):
What is reincarnated is the soul. You true self, the who you really are is a soul, and as such you're an eternal servant of the Lord. But because you rebelled against this servitude and wanted to be independent, you fell into maya (illusion), and now you have the wrong understanding of who you are. This wrong understanding of self is called false ego. People who think they are their bodies, or their thoughts, their emotions, their experiences, or their possessions, are said to identify with the false ego; ie. they have the wrong understanding of who they really are.
Indeed, the things that go together to make the false self do not survive death. This is why someone who doesn't understand who they really are doesn't see the process of reincarnation.
- - -
It's been a while since I last discussed ISKCON theology, so I'm a bit rusty, but I think I mostly remembered it correctly. The core point in Dharmic religions for Westerners to understand, I think, is that "that which is typically called the self" is not considered the self at all in those religions. Any attempt to understand reincarnation (or rebirth) needs to take this into account.
I think those accounts are at best merely weak evidence of karma.
There is nothing new here. The self as described by psychology and the soul described here are distinct. Who I am - critic, carer, teacher, father - are all to do with this life, not any previous one.
The weasel word "true" in "true self" serves only to disguise the fact that the soul is not the self.