Does rebirth exist ?

We're scientists here. You're going to have to do a better job of defining what you mean by "rebirth," for starters.

The currently fashionable foolishness about "past lives" is just that: foolishness. The essence of death is the irreversible loss of organization of the brain; until that happens revival is still theoretically possible and that's the rationale behind cryogenics. Your thoughts, memories, attitudes, your entire personality is in your synapses and when they're gone you're gone. There is no mechanism for restoring them, not into a computer and not into another brain.

However, memories of people who have died can indeed be carried forward, using a truly marvelous technology called "language." It really annoys me that religious people are so caught up in their fantasies that they can't appreciate the astounding and wonderful capabilities that human beings have created for themselves without the help of supernatural fairy-tale beings. I know things, in great detail, that people knew who died hundreds of years ago. No other species of animal is capable of that.

The older concept of a "spirit" that passes from one person (or other species) into another is just as impossible to reconcile with our rather vast understanding of how life works. A human being is not the matter that comprises his body, or even the chemical reactions or electrical currents that take place within it. He is the organization of all those things. When that organization ceases to exist, so does the human, even if all the molecules are still there.

It's like a house. When the wrecking ball knocks it down to make way for a shopping center, the bricks and wood and everything else are still there, but the house does not exist any more because it was the organization of the bricks and wood. Houses are simpler objects than people, so you might be able to carefully gather up all the pieces together with the original blueprints and put them back together in Mongolia, and you could say you've got the same house. But you can't say that if somebody builds a house in Mongolia that looks just like it, that it's the same house, or that it contains some "spirit" of the original house except in the most utterly woo-woo sort of way.

No dude. See above. After death "you" don't exist. End of story. During sleep your brain and all of its synapses are still intact. Your memories, thoughts, personality, etc. are still there. Some of them remain active during your dreams, but all the rest are ready to be reactivated upon awakening. When you die, by definition the synapses that in aggregate contain those memories, thoughts and personality decompose and their contents are irretrievable--just as when an old book turns to dust or a tape recording is wiped by a magnet. Your body is still there but YOU are not there any more.

Death is not merely a slightly advanced state of sleep. And no matter how badly we wish that were true, wishing doesn't make it so.

What the frell is "perfect logic"? This logic is so imperfect I expect to see the letters falling off of my screen. Whoever came up with this piece of hokum needs to repeat the Logic course most universities teach as part of Philosophy 101. This syllogism is invalid.

It's difficult to say exactly when you "started existing." It was a very gradual process without a clear beginning. Brain cells started differentiating within your fetus at some point, but when exactly were there enough of them to reach critical mass so we can say that your personality, spirit, or whatever you call it, was in existence? On the other hand it's easier to say when you "stop existing," although even then we can't pinpoint it. They can revive you when your brain has been deprived of oxygen for a few minutes and you might remember who you are but not how to operate a computer, or perhaps not even how to speak. After a few more minutes all of your memories are gone.

This is a scientific forum and anti-science is not welcome here. We provide a place for this kind of discussion in the religion subforum. Please take it there.

So what's so hard about realizing that he was wrong? They hardly had the science in those days to understand the mechanisms of life and death. It was all just bloody magic to those folks.

If you believe in magic, that's your right in a free country. But this is the General Science and Technology subforum. Please take your magic over to the subforum with telepathy, alien abductions, and the other non-science.

 

No there aren't. Only non-scientists think that way. This is the "General Science & Technology" subforum and it is for SCIENCE ONLY.

PLEASE TAKE YOUR WOO-WOO, YOUR PSEUDOSCIENCE, AND YOUR FAITH-BASED BELIEF SYSTEMS ELSEWHERE. There is a subforum for this kind of stuff right here on SciForums and it was put there for your benefit. Please use it. Okay?

 

How are they going to perfectly duplicate your synapses, which is where the part of you that is most important resides?

The literature of science fiction abounds with stories based on this premise. If you are so interested in it, surely you must have read some of them? Have you not visited our SciFi subforum, where this discussion would be far more appropriate and get a lot more action?

It's an interesting moral dilemma. Suppose we develop the technology to "back up" your mind onto a storage medium, to be used in event of your physical death, to revive you in a more-or-less duplicate body. So far so good, right? Okay, but what if there's a bureaucratic error and it turns out that you didn't actually die? You were just vacationing in another galaxy and the travel agency lost your itinerary. Now there are two of you! Which one is real? What do you do with the extra one? As soon as it comes to life it begins to have experiences that are different from the "original" you.

Why do you say that??? There is nothing illogical about something existing at one moment in time but not another. Even individual particles cease to exist and change into other types of particles during nuclear reactions, and in some cases they cease to exist as matter at all and are converted into energy. The total contents of the universe are constant in terms of the sheer number of ergs or grams, depending on whether you measure them as energy or their equivalent in matter, but the particular items that make up those contents keep changing. Ditto for humans. Our basic matter and energy remains in existence--barring a nuclear reaction our atoms won't even be converted into different elements--but the "human being" which was a special arrangement of that matter and energy only exists for a relatively brief period of time, just like a tree or a river or a rock or a planet.

Because I am ephemeral, just like the trees, rivers, rocks and planets. Nothing is forever. Duh.

To suppose that human beings simply have to be subject to a different fate than everything else in the universe is--to repeat myself--human hubris.

Well now you're getting into existential philosophy. Once again this does not belong in the subforum on General Science and Technology, but at least it is respectable scholarship and has a place on SciForums, rather than the woo-woo we relegate to the ghetto of parapsychology and past-life regression to avoid telling those people to simply get lost.

I encourage you to discuss this with the other philosophers. This is not a scientific discussion and should not be in a scientific subforum.

You fall into the trap of human hubris. You want so much to be able to believe that because you are human and you feel so special, that there is something special about humans. You want to be able to believe that these hunks of protoplasm have some mystical property that nothing else in the universe has. That they are exempt from some of the basic principles of physics such as entropy.

There is no reason to believe that except IRRATIONAL FAITH. Everything that we have discovered about the universe and our place in it so far--by actual scientific observations and the rational analysis of them--consistently indicates that human beings are just a particular species of animals, that animals are just a particular type of living thing, and that living things are just a particular type of all things.

We are made up of atoms just like every other form of matter, and those atoms are acted upon by the four elementary forces of the universe just like all atoms. Our structure is complex enough that our atoms develop some complicated electrical patterns. We give names to those patterns such as "instinct," "consciousness," "personality," "memory," "thought," "awareness," and "volition." But they are still nothing more than the universe at work.

To suggest that we have something called a "soul," "spirit," or several other names, which exists quasi-independently of our brain activity, and continues to exist after that brain ceases to function, or which existed before that brain was grown in a uterus, is merely wishful thinking.

Some of the world's "great" religions regard pride as a sin. Yet to believe that we are fundamentally different from everything else in the universe--that we are special and can somehow "exist" without our physical forms--is the worst form of pride.

In any case, it is absolutely not science and it does not belong in this subforum.

Before my house was built, it didn't exist, yet somehow it started existing. Well duh, that was because a bunch of guys with hammers and saws brought over some materials and put it together. So if my house becomes non-existent when it crumbles due to age or is torn down to be replaced by a high-rise, the Perfect Logic says that it has to start existing again.

If this is Perfect Logic it must apply in all cases, i.e. to both houses and humans. Right? Or is there something special about humans that exempts us from the logic that applies to everything else? In which case you are guilty of human hubris because there is nothing special about us in terms of the laws of physics. We're just the most advanced form of animal life but we're still animal life.

Matter and energy. The four basic forces. That's the universe and we are just an infinitesimal part of it.

 

Please cite a reference in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Problems are there to be solved. But it is not science to presume in advance that a solution to a problem will be found that just happens to support what one hopes to find. Two of the fundamental principles of science are:

• The simplest explanation is more likely to be the correct one. ("Occam's Razor).

While we can never rule out even the most outlandish possibility, the most effective way to make scientific progress in the long term is to examine and eliminate the simpler ones first. To begin a line of research by hypothesizing that all of the rigorous discoveries made since science was formalized as part of the Enlightenment are woefully wrong, instead of searching for an enhancement to one of them, is an easy way to waste a promising career. Check for the easy solutions first and leave anti-science biases like religious fundamentalism at the door.

• Extraordinary claims require extraordinary substantiation.

A theory that claims to disprove a number of theories that have withstood the test of scientific observation for decades or centuries has a lot to answer for. Just how does it account for the alleged inconsistencies in the old theories? How does it explain phenomena whose existing explanations are alleged to be incorrect? How does it integrate with everything that we have learned to date, like relativity, entropy, and the four fundamental forces of the universe?

This theory must be peer reviewed like any other. No scientist can be assumed to be perfect and all research must be checked by others. It's a popular fallacy to assume that all "establishment" scientists are atheists who are automatically biased against research that supports religionist propaganda. The halls of science teem with devout Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and others of unshakeable faith. Religious universities have some of the finest science departments.

Nonetheless this website is not run by a religious university and we do not give religious arguments a very long leash when they are posted in the science subforums. If you have something substantive and scientific to report, please do so.

 

Well excuse me for misquoting William of Ockham, since I don't speak Latin. At your behest I've tracked down his original statement, Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, a satisfactory translation of which is apparently, "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." In other words, shave off (ergo the "razor" metaphor) as much complexity as possible before trying to solve a problem. So his point is not that the simplest explanation is the most likely, but rather that the simplest explanation is the easiest to test and discard before moving on to the more complicated one. If you re-read my post you'll find that I said almost exactly the same thing as my own rationale for teaching this methodology, without even realizing I was unknowingly translating Friar William more accurately than all of my own teachers. So forgive me but I think I'm entitled to half credit.

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The point is still valid that one should start with the simplest explanation for a phenomenon and not immediately build a hypothesis that contradicts the first two years of university physics, just because it is consistent with one's favorite fairy tale.

I suppose so. But did you notice how easy it was to correct me? Did you notice that I didn't tie you to a stake and light a bonfire around you? Did you notice that more than forty years after my scientific education I barely qualify as an amateur scientist, yet somewhere in my memories I actually knew what Ockham had said? And I repeated it unknowingly, as an adjunct to my misquotation of a statement I am well aware that I could never have read in its original language? And did you notice that misquoting Ockham does not destroy the validity of his methodology? The correction is certainly worth performing, but its impact on the average scientific research is negligible. Scientists, even amateurs, welcome corrections. And five centuries of applying the scientific method has done a fabulous job of producing a body of science that is accurate and robust enough to withstand the occasional correction without falling to pieces. Even major corrections like relativity or quantum theory.

It's an error in memory or judgment, and scientists are no more immune to them than anyone else. The reason we're superior to the woo-woo clan in rationality is that when we discover our error we say, "Whoo boy, I'm glad we got that straightened out. The rest of this project should go much more smoothly now." We don't slaughter people, burn down their libraries, and destroy their entire civilizations because they have the temerity to tell us we're wrong. Even if we're convinced that they're idiots--even if they truly are idiots like the Evolution Denialists--all we do is toss them out of the Academy and let them try to make their way in the world outside.

Yes everyone has a right to be disappointed if they've made a blunder and can be forgiven if they don't always respond with the utmost grace to having it pointed out. But if you're concerned with so-called "scientists" not backing down in the face of evidence that they're wrong, I submit that the fault is not with science, but with the corporations and government agencies that have been slowly co-opting science in this country. As I pointed out in an earlier post, they hire people with scientific educations who can be bent to their will and weed out the ones who are too feisty to bend. They end up being as nefarious as the Holy Roman Church, suppressing ideas that don't further their own goals. This is yet another reason to start cutting away the powers of government and its new aristocracy, the megacorporation, but I've written at great length on that subject in a different subforum.

Umm... There's quite a difference between rogue waves--a phenomenon that fit existing models but with a much lower probability--and reincarnation--a phenomenon that would be more revolutionary than relativity and DNA combined. The "extraordinary assertions require extraordinary substantiation" covers that difference.

You have not yet made that point.

Hey, this isn't my bailiwick. I moderate Linguistics where the discussions are dry and the worst thing that happens is people cussing at each other incorrectly in foreign languages. I turned down an opportunity to be moderator of one of the other subforums that routinely gets heated controversies like this one. I would like to see people who are into woo-woo stay in the woo-woo ghetto and not clutter up the science subforums with it, but it's not my call. I don't think this thread has degenerated to the point that it should be moved, since I'm not the only one who keeps steering it back into science, and that's not my call either. I can give infractions here--which are easily reversed--but I can't do any actual "moderating."