Proof of reincarnation.

[lordoflight]

The proof of reincarnation is that life sucks. Since life sucks it is a negative state. It is better to have never been born.

Therefore, since one is born, it implies an inherent inescapable gravity towards being alive. The desired state is to not exist, but is not attainable. Being alive is inescapable.

Thus, the only sane and rational philosophy is to create utopia of this earth. If one is not aimed towards a utopia, one is not an ally of the Light.

[barbarianhorde]

I'm gonna make a poll.
I agree strangely with your conclusion but not with the premise?

[Silhouette]

Isn't entropy the default state? The "inherent inescapable gravity" is towards being dead. I would say life is more incidental: the expected outcome of the entropy within the relatively closed system of the earth's atmosphere being lower than the usual level in the vast majority of space that is outside it.

As to whether this exceptional case of life on earth "sucks", never having been born is a "null" state - there is no better or worse in pre-life or death: value judgments are restricted to the realm of life. Life is positive and negative and not even mutually exclusively, nor uniformly depending on what values are used to determine whether it is positive and/or negative.

The desired state is to live positively and not negatively in whichever ways you see them to be, but being alive is perfectly (albeit not easily) escapable due to entropy. Life is dying all the time. Utopia is thus sane in order to delay this, but optional, and the better/worse ways to do this depend.
When it comes down to who is an ally of the Light, most people see themselves as being such a way - but light comes in so many different colours. The whitest light is what emerges when all of these colours interact.

[surreptitious75]

It is better to have never been born

Eternal non existence is a state free from all suffering so it is therefore infinitely preferable to existence
As life is but an infinitesimal blip between two infinite states maybe it is better never to have been born

[Silhouette]

Eternal non existence is a state free from all suffering so it is therefore infinitely preferable to existence

It's also a state free from all pleasure/enjoyment/satisfaction/contentment, so it's equally not preferable to existence. Eternal non existence is a null state.

As life is but an infinitesimal blip between two infinite states maybe it is better never to have been born

Or the two infinite states are part of an infinite present that is life imagining them, in which case not being born is not really part of this infinity and not a relevant concern (or even possible to imagine).

[surreptitious75]

There are two states : the state of existence which has consciousness and suffering and the state of non existence which has neither
You cannot have consciousness without suffering so the choice is binary and I choose non existence because it has no suffering at all

[Silhouette]

There are two states : the state of existence which has consciousness and suffering and the state of non existence which has neither
You cannot have consciousness without suffering so the choice is binary and I choose non existence because it has no suffering at all

Yeah but it's not just suffering.... is my point.

[Jakob]

Abstract said love is the gravity of the soul.

[Silhouette]

Abstract said love is the gravity of the soul.

Nice. RIP.

A poetic depiction, with fidelity to the literal experience also.

[Karpel Tunnel]

There are two states : the state of existence which has consciousness and suffering and the state of non existence which has neither
You cannot have consciousness without suffering so the choice is binary and I choose non existence because it has no suffering at all

You seem not to be choosing non-existence.

[Jakob]

Yes, I found it quite clarifying in this context. He is missed.

I think, also considering that Abstract took his own life, that it can go either way.

I'd say, we suffer ourselves, and pleasure is a segment of this self-suffering, the segment we suffer voluntarily. I think the "key" to life is to know how to enjoy the greater part of the self-suffering.

It's comically trivial but in my case it was Arnold Schwarzenegger who drove this home to me long ago. His Pumping Iron video taught me to seek out pain and love it in my workouts, I proceeded to always push for ten more pushups after I was out of strength, and within a week this had completely washed away my long lingering depression. Depression is perhaps fear of pain that won't even be that bad, refusal of pain that is actually good.

Psychological pain is the same, to learn to endure it with joy makes the character very strong, and the only real joy is in strength.

[Jakob]

By the same machinery, pitying a young person and pampering someone in that pity is an absolutely sure way of causing helplessness, depletion, and from there on, depression.

It is a matter of embracing or fleeing from the suffering that is necessarily always going to be. Embracing that suffering, hard for someone with a strong imagination and a dark side, i.e. for interesting people, is what Nietzsche's philosophy pivots toward, but he couldn't avoid inventing an eternal joy as compensation. The ultimate freedom is not to require compensation.

[Ierrellus]

Reincarnation is a more ethical outcome for human lives than are oblivion or afterlives of reward or punishment.

[Jakob]

Reincarnation is a more ethical outcome for human lives than are oblivion or afterlives of reward or punishment.

Yes I agree.
It focusses the psyche on building.

It evokes the idea of the dharma, or Orlog, as the slowly pulsating and even slower changing fabric woven of the individual strains of karma, the paths that we walk, wyrd.
I find it easy to conceive how a valuing-tendency, which is what I see as the essential character of a being, can preserve its structural integrity in an electromagnetic cipher. After all our consciousness is just an electromagnetic affair. Our body is what we are conscious of.

[Jakob]

The body is thus a temple for the consciousness to be conscious of itself through a world of others causing development of bliss with the circumference of tragedy. It would have all emerged from the ground up though, like Darwin said, this complex EM soul thing that could for all I can fathom well survive in the storms of Jupiter or the Hexagon atop Saturn or in the venomous clouds on Venus, or in the Suns magnetic nodes, but it can't have emerged there and decided or been designated to inhabit life - for where would life have come from? Life isn't some kind of golem, precreated for spirit to inhabit it. But when we began to walk erect, the chemistry of our brain disconnected from the instincts and hooked into the EM patterns causes by the churning stomach in which we form, from our perspective, the pit. Thats how Id imagine it working, if.

[Jakob]

Of course as soon as this happened, the species would have changed completely.
(It may explain our loss of our animal hide, to better be able to receive and transmit the EM. The hearts field is of course especially strong, given its physical function.)

And in this sense birds, especially flock birds, would seem to live in a state almost beyond life and death, as it would be experienced by a human.

[Jakob]

Inconveniently this belief also leads to greater keenness vs past civilization and their religions. A lot of curious souls become lost in this daemonic darkness.

[Silhouette]

Reincarnation poses significant problems with the notion of identity.

Seeing as all you really need for a sense of identity is a story of memories with sufficient congruence in key areas, such as in what other people say about you relative to your memories and explanations of your current state relative to your memories.

How then, seeing as only a very small number of people claim to have knowledge of past lives and even then there's no good evidence beyond coincidence, and either actively or passively picking up information about the person you claimed to be, is there any ground to claim that the person "reincarnated" is in fact the same person as they were in "their" past life? Even more impossible, then, is learning/growing across lives since not only can this not transfer when there's no verifiable memory of the past life to learn/grow from, but it's not even the same "you" between which lessons are transferred.

This isn't to say you can't believe in it even though it makes no sense, and this might motivate you to try for a reward even though you'll never get it...

[gib]

Identity is based on a bit more than just memories. Ones ability to recognize themselves in the mirror or recognize their name need not depend on the memory of when they learned to recognize their reflection or their name. Of course, recognition IS a kind of memory, but not the kind I gather you're talking about (I.e. recollection of past events).

The idea of reincarnation revolves around the idea of a soul, the core "you" that survives death. It depends on the idea of some persisting thing with a continuous identity--one end connected with your death in one life, the other with your birth in the next. This identity need not be your own self-identity, so you don't need to recognize yourself in that persisting thing.

[Silhouette]

Identity is based on a bit more than just memories. Ones ability to recognize themselves in the mirror or recognize their name need not depend on the memory of when they learned to recognize their reflection or their name. Of course, recognition IS a kind of memory, but not the kind I gather you're talking about (I.e. recollection of past events).

Then I shouldn't have said "all you really need for a sense of identity is", but instead spoken of a necessary element to identity (amongst other elements) that by itself poses significant problems with the notion of identity persisting between a life and its reincarnation. How does my point fare now?

The idea of reincarnation revolves around the idea of a soul, the core "you" that survives death. It depends on the idea of some persisting thing with a continuous identity--one end connected with your death in one life, the other with your birth in the next. This identity need not be your own self-identity, so you don't need to recognize yourself in that persisting thing.

What is the significance of "some persisting thing" when nobody recognises/experiences it, not even yourself? It's just supposed to be this kind of "secret present you get in a subsequent life that nobody would ever know but believe me it's there and you should respect and be grateful before it based on faith"? You could believe this is the case even if no such thing existed, for sure, and you'd have this wonderfully entirely fabricated reason to be grateful and respectful even though it's based on a "useful" lie... The capacity to make up "unfalsifiable stuff that if believed is useful" is no doubt a human capability - but just because we can do it, does that justify it? There's plenty of things that humans can do that aren't justifiable.

It's already true that the same atoms will probably persist between one entity that dies and then in another that is born, in just the same way that they're exchanged between living and dead things all the time while you're alive, and even entirely replaced by different atoms over the course of the same lifetime - never mind between lives, "reincarnated" or not.
My point is that if atoms can do the same thing as "the soul" and have no bearing on identity whatsoever, why does the soul? You could just define the soul as they only thing(s) that persist "within" a person (identifiable to continue to be the same person) that do have a bearing on identity, but then obviously you immediately run into problems with what this actually is. Otherwise it's just a myth. In computer programming it would be an uninitialised pointer - the pointer would exist, it would point to "something" fairly random in memory but it would be gibberish unless by coincidence, and even if it wasn't gibberish by accident and the software let the program compile anyway, you'd just run into an error.

[gib]

Then I shouldn't have said "all you really need for a sense of identity is", but instead spoken of a necessary element to identity (amongst other elements) that by itself poses significant problems with the notion of identity persisting between a life and its reincarnation. How does my point fare now?

You get my official stamp of approval.

What is the significance of "some persisting thing" when nobody recognises/experiences it, not even yourself?

It depends on the nature of reincarnation. Most cases I've heard of involve people being linked to passed lives without even knowing it, and once they learn who this person was (by Madam Cloe or whatever), they still see no meaningful relation between themselves and that person. This implies that the link is based on something outside their conscious experience of themselves or what they recognize as themselves.

It's just supposed to be this kind of "secret present you get in a subsequent life that nobody would ever know but believe me it's there and you should respect and be grateful before it based on faith"? You could believe this is the case even if no such thing existed, for sure, and you'd have this wonderfully entirely fabricated reason to be grateful and respectful even though it's based on a "useful" lie... The capacity to make up "unfalsifiable stuff that if believed is useful" is no doubt a human capability - but just because we can do it, does that justify it? There's plenty of things that humans can do that aren't justifiable.

I completely agree. I'm not defending the reality of reincarnation, just trying to flesh out what the idea means. What I gather from the cases I've heard of, it doesn't depend on one recognizing themselves in another past person, which tells me the idea of reincarnation hinges on the existence of a persistent soul that needn't carry with it memories or personal identity.

It's already true that the same atoms will probably persist between one entity that dies and then in another that is born, in just the same way that they're exchanged between living and dead things all the time while you're alive, and even entirely replaced by different atoms over the course of the same lifetime - never mind between lives, "reincarnated" or not.

If it's anything like the teleportation technology from Star Trek, then you might have a case for a physicalist's version of reincarnation, but I think it would have to be all or nothing. The transfer of a few atoms from one person after they die into the foods eaten by a mother or father to be (which subsequently go to the gametes), does not count as reincarnation (unless you want to say you are a reincarnation of a million different things and that you will reincarnate as a million different things). But take the bulk of atoms in your body and reassemble them as someone else (whether as a replication of your body notwithstanding), and you might have a case.

My point is that if atoms can do the same thing as "the soul" and have no bearing on identity whatsoever, why does the soul? You could just define the soul as they only thing(s) that persist "within" a person (identifiable to continue to be the same person) that do have a bearing on identity, but then obviously you immediately run into problems with what this actually is. Otherwise it's just a myth. In computer programming it would be an uninitialised pointer - the pointer would exist, it would point to "something" fairly random in memory but it would be gibberish unless by coincidence, and even if it wasn't gibberish by accident and the software let the program compile anyway, you'd just run into an error.

Good analogy.

It all depends on how you want to define "you". If "you" is the thing pointed to, then there is very little sense that the previous thing pointed to is the same as the next thing pointed to. But if "you" just is the pointer, then you are the same thing before and after. Either way, however, there is a way of linking the current life to a past life.

And yes, this all hinges on the reality of the "soul".

[Karpel Tunnel]

Proof would be hard to come by, but Stevenson has evidence and I think his studies are being continued after his death. If someone had amnesia, but still had the same personality, tastes, skills - which can be the case - I think it would not be off to consider them the same person, in the main. And then if one could remember, which is what some claim in various spiritual disciplines. I don't think we can rule the idea out as not making any sense from the identity side of things.

[Silhouette]

Proof would be hard to come by, but Stevenson has evidence and I think his studies are being continued after his death. If someone had amnesia, but still had the same personality, tastes, skills - which can be the case - I think it would not be off to consider them the same person, in the main. And then if one could remember, which is what some claim in various spiritual disciplines. I don't think we can rule the idea out as not making any sense from the identity side of things.

But do they consider themselves the same person? Conditions of memory loss seem to primarily affect the short term memory, so these unfortunate people at least seem to have this to root themselves with, while suffering the confusion of recent events making no sense and therefore often being scary. What about without even long term memory though? Of course other people still recognise the same person, but this is why I included what other people say about you as an essential component of identity. I think it's interesting, though, that when personality "changes" - like when people start acting completely differently, or if they have a degenerative illness of a certain kind, it is often said that they don't seem themselves, or people claim they don't know that person anymore.

A reincarnation lacks all these components of identity, and many more - I would say all reliably detectable and measurable ones. What evidence does this Stevenson guy have?

If it's anything like the teleportation technology from Star Trek, then you might have a case for a physicalist's version of reincarnation, but I think it would have to be all or nothing. The transfer of a few atoms from one person after they die into the foods eaten by a mother or father to be (which subsequently go to the gametes), does not count as reincarnation (unless you want to say you are a reincarnation of a million different things and that you will reincarnate as a million different things). But take the bulk of atoms in your body and reassemble them as someone else (whether as a replication of your body notwithstanding), and you might have a case.

Without much knowledge of the series, I would assume the Star Trek teleportation would require a combination of harnessing quantum entanglement and reconstituting the chemical composition of the area where you re-spawn. Physically you would be constituted of completely different components, but components of the same type - physically being a different person, but recognisable to others and yourself as the same person according to memories. This would be a kind of plausible reincarnation in my mind, but then I would argue so would falling asleep and waking up.

It all depends on how you want to define "you". If "you" is the thing pointed to, then there is very little sense that the previous thing pointed to is the same as the next thing pointed to. But if "you" just is the pointer, then you are the same thing before and after. Either way, however, there is a way of linking the current life to a past life.

And yes, this all hinges on the reality of the "soul".

The pointer is "named" soul and it points to something that is defined to be a specific type, however it doesn't (can't in this case) point to anything. I guess therefore "you" is the pointer, and it points to gibberish. You can create the variable of this type, no problem, but can you meaningfully use it? No. Does the soul exist? Only insofar as you can use your imagination and call it something like Santa/Tooth fairy/God. Yes, I do think identity is highly dubious as a concept. I understand it to be a useful lie. Call me a hippie, but everything is one, and only artificially divided for utilitarian purposes.

[Karpel Tunnel]

But do they consider themselves the same person? Conditions of memory loss seem to primarily affect the short term memory, so these unfortunate people at least seem to have this to root themselves with, while suffering the confusion of recent events making no sense and therefore often being scary. What about without even long term memory though? Of course other people still recognise the same person, but this is why I included what other people say about you as an essential component of identity. I think it's interesting, though, that when personality "changes" - like when people start acting completely differently, or if they have a degenerative illness of a certain kind, it is often said that they don't seem themselves, or people claim they don't know that person anymore

That's anteretrograde amnesia. I was talking about the long of long term memories.

A reincarnation lacks all these components of identity, and many more - I would say all reliably detectable and measurable ones. What evidence does this Stevenson guy have?

He would investigate children who seemed to have past life memories. He would not down everything they said about their past life, and then try to find the previous family. Often the kids had died young in the past life. He would then interview the family about everything the kid had said about their habits, personalites, possessions, how the kid died, etc. Then compare notes. Often the kids would have birthmarks where, for example, they were stabbed in a past life.

[Pandora]

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