To the first question, there’s just no way to know at the current stage of research. It’s perfectly possible, just as it’s possible that there’s life in the Andromeda galaxy. To the second, know that taking ideas like this seriously involves entertaining some hard dualism; the brain essentially has to be regarded as analogous to a personal computer (at least I find such a comparison useful). Granting that premise, there’s no reason a user couldn’t “download” data into it.
I would guess memories from past lives to work like other parts of reality: no time travel (else we would be eaten by time travellers), minds need brains (else we wouldn’t spend 20% of the body’s oxygen in the brain), everything about biology has an evolutionary explanation.
It sure would be useful to an embryo to receive foreign data, but there’s little point to broadcasting such. I’d therefore suspect the ability to broadcast to be incidental—perhaps a byproduct of the ability to receive, like every radio receiver can function as a transmitter. That we, given the ability, would broadcast is straightforward: If you copy software, you’re more likely to copy from those who broadcast more. The practice would spread like a virus.
Dead brains generally stop doing things, and if the transmitter could work quickly we should see the same hardware used for telepathy. Therefore I suspect the transmission to be ongoing over the course of a life, that memories would very rarely be ones of death, that childhood memories are more common than elderly memories because they’ve been broadcasted for longer. Does this match the evidence?
No time travel: You are 100% correct. All cases ever recorded involve memories belonging to previously deceased individuals.
Minds need brains: To inhabit matter, they absolutely do. You won’t see anyone incarnating into a rock, LMAO.
Everything about biology has an evolutionary explanation: Also 100% correct. Just adding dualism changes nothing about natural selection. And, once again granting the premise, the ability to retain previous-life memories is sure as hell adaptive.
By “broadcast”, I assume you mean “speak about previous-life experiences”. To that, I’d just say that humans tend to talk about things that matter to them. Therefore, having such memories would naturally lead to them being communicated.
I don’t see how the mechanism for this connects to telepathy; that’s an entirely different issue, and one I’m not personally convinced of the evidence for, but there are some who are.
Pertaining to the evidence you predict: Communication of past-life memory often tends to be centered in early childhood, and some subjects lose them as they grow up, but others retain it. Memories of death are in fact very prevalent in such cases, because they, naturally, carry extreme emotional salience. To your final prediction, the lives remembered actually involve early and violent deaths far more often than not, but beyond that, the age distribution of what is recalled seems to follow roughly the same relative histogram as normal long-term autobiographical memory does, with things like recency and primacy effects operative.
Any thoughts on Rupert Sheldrake? Complex memories showing up with no plausible causal path sounds a lot like his morphic resonance stuff.
Also, old thing from Ben Goertzel that might be relevant to your interests, Morphic Pilot Theory hypothesizes some sort of compression artifacts in quantum physics that can pop up as inexplicable paranormal knowledge.
I haven’t read Sheldrake in depth, but I’m familiar with some of his novel concepts. The issue with positing anything so circumstantial being the mechanism for these phenomena is that the cases follow such narrow, exceptionless patterns that would not be so utterly predictable in the event of a non-directed etiology. The subjects never exhibit memories of people who are still alive, there are never two different subjects claiming to have been the same person, one subject never claims memories of two separate people who lived simultaneously… all these things one would expect to be frequent if the information being communicated was essentiaĺly random. It’s honestly downright bonkers how perfectly the dataset aligns to a more or less “dualist the exact way humans have imagined it since prehistory” cosmology.
there are never two different subjects claiming to have been the same person
sounds like a case of the Birthday paradox. Assume there’s order of magnitude 10^11 dead people since 8000 BCE. So if you have a test group of, say, 10 000 reincarnation claimants and all of them can have memories of any dead person, already claimed or not, what’s the probability of you actually observing two of them claiming the same dead person?
The bit about the memories always being from dead people is a bit more plausible. We seem to have like 10 % of all people who ever lived alive right now, so assuming the memories are random and you can actually verify where they came from, you should see living people memories pretty fast.
Assume there’s order of magnitude 10^11 dead people since 8000 BCE. So if you have a test group of, say, 10 000 reincarnation claimants and all of them can have memories of any dead person, already claimed or not, what’s the probability of you actually observing two of them claiming the same dead person?
About 0.01. Calculated using this logfactorial function in Matlab:
p = 1 - exp( logfactorial( N ) - logfactorial( N-n ) - n * log( N ) )
You would need about 400000 reincarnation claimants to have a 50% chance of any collisions.
I assume you mean to say the odds of two subjects remembering the same life by chance would be infinitesimal, which, fair. The odds of one subject remembering two concurrent lives would be much, much higher. Still doesn’t happen. In fact, we don’t see much in the way of multiple-cases at all, but when we do, it’s always separate time periods.
To the first question, there’s just no way to know at the current stage of research. It’s perfectly possible, just as it’s possible that there’s life in the Andromeda galaxy. To the second, know that taking ideas like this seriously involves entertaining some hard dualism; the brain essentially has to be regarded as analogous to a personal computer (at least I find such a comparison useful). Granting that premise, there’s no reason a user couldn’t “download” data into it.
I would guess memories from past lives to work like other parts of reality: no time travel (else we would be eaten by time travellers), minds need brains (else we wouldn’t spend 20% of the body’s oxygen in the brain), everything about biology has an evolutionary explanation.
It sure would be useful to an embryo to receive foreign data, but there’s little point to broadcasting such. I’d therefore suspect the ability to broadcast to be incidental—perhaps a byproduct of the ability to receive, like every radio receiver can function as a transmitter. That we, given the ability, would broadcast is straightforward: If you copy software, you’re more likely to copy from those who broadcast more. The practice would spread like a virus.
Dead brains generally stop doing things, and if the transmitter could work quickly we should see the same hardware used for telepathy. Therefore I suspect the transmission to be ongoing over the course of a life, that memories would very rarely be ones of death, that childhood memories are more common than elderly memories because they’ve been broadcasted for longer. Does this match the evidence?
No time travel: You are 100% correct. All cases ever recorded involve memories belonging to previously deceased individuals.
Minds need brains: To inhabit matter, they absolutely do. You won’t see anyone incarnating into a rock, LMAO.
Everything about biology has an evolutionary explanation: Also 100% correct. Just adding dualism changes nothing about natural selection. And, once again granting the premise, the ability to retain previous-life memories is sure as hell adaptive.
By “broadcast”, I assume you mean “speak about previous-life experiences”. To that, I’d just say that humans tend to talk about things that matter to them. Therefore, having such memories would naturally lead to them being communicated.
I don’t see how the mechanism for this connects to telepathy; that’s an entirely different issue, and one I’m not personally convinced of the evidence for, but there are some who are.
Pertaining to the evidence you predict: Communication of past-life memory often tends to be centered in early childhood, and some subjects lose them as they grow up, but others retain it. Memories of death are in fact very prevalent in such cases, because they, naturally, carry extreme emotional salience. To your final prediction, the lives remembered actually involve early and violent deaths far more often than not, but beyond that, the age distribution of what is recalled seems to follow roughly the same relative histogram as normal long-term autobiographical memory does, with things like recency and primacy effects operative.
Thanks for all the excellent questions!
Any thoughts on Rupert Sheldrake? Complex memories showing up with no plausible causal path sounds a lot like his morphic resonance stuff.
Also, old thing from Ben Goertzel that might be relevant to your interests, Morphic Pilot Theory hypothesizes some sort of compression artifacts in quantum physics that can pop up as inexplicable paranormal knowledge.
I haven’t read Sheldrake in depth, but I’m familiar with some of his novel concepts. The issue with positing anything so circumstantial being the mechanism for these phenomena is that the cases follow such narrow, exceptionless patterns that would not be so utterly predictable in the event of a non-directed etiology. The subjects never exhibit memories of people who are still alive, there are never two different subjects claiming to have been the same person, one subject never claims memories of two separate people who lived simultaneously… all these things one would expect to be frequent if the information being communicated was essentiaĺly random. It’s honestly downright bonkers how perfectly the dataset aligns to a more or less “dualist the exact way humans have imagined it since prehistory” cosmology.
Have you run the numbers on these? For example
sounds like a case of the Birthday paradox. Assume there’s order of magnitude 10^11 dead people since 8000 BCE. So if you have a test group of, say, 10 000 reincarnation claimants and all of them can have memories of any dead person, already claimed or not, what’s the probability of you actually observing two of them claiming the same dead person?
The bit about the memories always being from dead people is a bit more plausible. We seem to have like 10 % of all people who ever lived alive right now, so assuming the memories are random and you can actually verify where they came from, you should see living people memories pretty fast.
About 0.01. Calculated using this logfactorial function in Matlab:
p = 1 - exp( logfactorial( N ) - logfactorial( N-n ) - n * log( N ) )You would need about 400000 reincarnation claimants to have a 50% chance of any collisions.
I assume you mean to say the odds of two subjects remembering the same life by chance would be infinitesimal, which, fair. The odds of one subject remembering two concurrent lives would be much, much higher. Still doesn’t happen. In fact, we don’t see much in the way of multiple-cases at all, but when we do, it’s always separate time periods.