I had a hard time understanding a good bit of what you’re trying to say here, but I’ll try to address what I think I picked up clearly:
While reincarnation cases do involve memories from people within the same family at a rate higher than mere chance would predict, subjects also very often turn out to have been describing lives of people completely unknown to their “new” families. The child would have absolutely no other means of access to that information. Also, without exception, they never, ever invoke memories belonging to still-living people.
On that note, you’ll be pleased to hear that your third paragraph is underinformed; there are in fact copious verifications of that nature in the relevant literature. If there weren’t, you wouldn’t hear me talking about any of this; I’m simply too clingy to my reductionist priors to demand anything less to qualify as real evidence for off-the-wall metaphysics.
Whether there are people who reincarnate often is really hard to determine at present; subjects who concretely remember more than one verified previous life are incredibly rare. However, I suppose that is my cue to spill the remaining beans: my entire utility function and a huge basis of my rationality practice is predicated on the object of “reincarnating well”, particularly fixating on the matter of psychological continuity, which you allude to directly; this is my personal “paperclips” to be maximized unconditionally. In familiar Eliezer-ese diction, I feel a massive sense that more is possible in this area, and you can bet your last dollar that I have something to protect. Moreover, as a scientist working with ideas many consider impossible, I believe in holding myself to equally impossible standards and making them possible, thereby forcing the theoretical foundations into the acknowledged realm of possibility. In other words, if the phenomena I’m studying are legitimate, I’ll be able to do truly outrageous things with them; if I can’t, the doubters deserve to claim victory.
Frankly, I’m pleasantly surprised to be seeing concepts like these discussed this charitably on LW; none of this is anything close to Sequence-canon. I certainly don’t want to jinx it, but from what I’m seeing so far, I’m extremely impressed with how practically the community applies its ideological commitment to pure Bayesian analysis. If nothing more, I hope to at least make myself one of LW’s very best contrarians. But I’m curious now, is there a fairly sizable contingent of academic/evidential dualists in the rationalist community?
I mean I actually think you are catastrophically wrong about there being any “hidden variable” knowledge-passing, but I’m going to talk to you to figure out why you believe it, not just dismiss it a priori! I simply expect the evidence for dualist violations of known physics to turn out to be very weak.
could you cite somewhere I can look to find more of this? after looking briefly at wikipedia, I find what I expected to find—careful analysis of a plausibly astounding phenomenon, carefully catalogued and currently expected to be found to not be blatantly violating thermodynamics about what the kids knew when. If the kids can recite passwords they could not possibly have had access to, then it would start to seem plausible—but it takes an awful lot of evidence to overcome “it was just the kid forgetting they’d seen the stuff before”, and it looks like the evidence probably isn’t there. certainly no causally isolated studies.
Critics of Stevenson’s claims include the philospher Paul Edwards, who criticized Ian Stevenson’s accounts of reincarnation as being purely anecdotal and cherry-picked.[275] Edwards attributed the stories to selective thinking, suggestion, and false memories that result from the family’s or researcher’s belief systems and thus cannot be counted as empirical evidence.[276] The philosopher Keith Augustine wrote in critique that the fact that “the vast majority of Stevenson’s cases come from countries where a religious belief in reincarnation is strong, and rarely elsewhere, seems to indicate that cultural conditioning (rather than reincarnation) generates claims of spontaneous past-life memories.”[277] Further, Ian Wilson pointed out that a large number of Stevenson’s cases consisted of poor children remembering wealthy lives or belonging to a higher caste. In these societies, claims of reincarnation are sometimes used as schemes to obtain money from the richer families of alleged former incarnations.[278] Stevenson later published a book of cases from a cultural area where belief in reincarnation is not mainstream, European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. Even still, Robert Baker asserted that all the past-life experiences investigated by Stevenson and other parapsychologists are understandable in terms of known psychological factors including a mixture of cryptomnesia and confabulation.[279] Edwards also objected that reincarnation invokes assumptions that are inconsistent with modern science.[280] As the vast majority of people do not remember previous lives and there is no empirically documented mechanism known that allows personality to survive death and travel to another body, positing the existence of reincarnation is subject to the principle that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Researchers such as Stevenson acknowledged these limitations.[268]
Stevenson also claimed there were a handful of cases that suggested evidence of xenoglossy, including two where a subject under hypnosis allegedly conversed with people speaking the foreign language, instead of merely being able to recite foreign words. Sarah Thomason, a linguist (and skeptical researcher) at the University of Michigan, reanalyzed these cases, concluding that “the linguistic evidence is too weak to provide support for the claims of xenoglossy.”[281]
There is a case on record that involved a recalled phone number. A password is a completely plausible next step forward.
For a very approachable and modernized take on the subject matter, I’d check out the book Before by Jim Tucker, a current leading researcher.
As a disclaimer, it’s perfectly rational and Bayesian to be extremely doubtful of such “modest” proposals at first blush—I was for a good length of time, until I did the depth of investigation that was necessary to form an expert opinion. Don’t take my word for things!
But I’m curious now, is there a fairly sizable contingent of academic/evidential dualists in the rationalist community?
It’s more empirical than ideological for me. There are these pockets of “something’s not clear here”, where similar things keep being observed, don’t line up with any current scientific explanation, and even people who don’t seem obviously biased start going “hey, something’s off here”. There’s the recent US Navy UFO sightings thing that nobody seems to know what to make of, there’s Darryl Bem’s 2011 ESP study that follows stuff by people like Dean Radin who seem to keep claiming the existence of a very specific sort of PSI effect. Damien Broderick’s Outside the Gates of Science was an interesting overview of this stuff.
I don’t think I’ve heard much of reincarnation research recently, but it was one of the three things Carl Sagan listed as having enough plausible-looking evidence for them that people should look a lot more carefully into them in The Demon-Haunted World in 1996, when the book was otherwise all about claims of the paranormal and religious miracles being bunk. I guess the annoying thing with reincarnation is that it’s very hard to study rigorously if brains are basically black boxes. The research is postulating whole new physics, so things should be established with the same sort of mechanical rigor and elimination of degrees of freedom as existing physics is, and “you ask people to tell you stories and try to figure out if the story checks out but it’s completely implausible for the person telling it to you to know it” is beyond terrible degrees-of-freedom-wise if you think of it like a physicist.
When you keep hearing about the same sort of weird stuff happening and don’t seem to have a satisfying explanation for what’s causing it, that makes it sound like there’s maybe some things that ought to be poked with a stick there.
On the other hand, there’s some outside view concerns. Whatever weird thing is going on seems to be either not really there after all, or significantly weirder than any resolved scientific phenomenon so far. Scientists took reports of PSI seriously in the early 20th century and got started trying to study them (Alan Turing was still going “yeah, human telepathy is totally a thing” in his Turing Test paper). What followed was a lot of smart people looking into the shiny new thing and accomplishing very little. Susan Blackmore spent decades studying parapsychology and ended up vocally disillusioned. Dean Radin seems to think that the PSI effect is verified, but it’s so slight that “so go win the Randi Prize” doesn’t make sense because the budget for a statistically conclusive experiment would be bigger than the prize money. And now we’re in the middle of the replication crisis (which Radin mentions zero times in a book he published in 2018), and psychology experiments that report some very improbable phenomenon look a lot less plausible than they did 15 years ago.
The UFO stuff also seems to lead people into strange directions of thinking that something seems to be going on, but it doesn’t seem to be possible for it to be physical spacecraft. Jacques Vallée ended up going hard on this path and pissed off the science-minded UFOlogists. More recently, Greg Cochran and Lesswrong’s own James Miller talked about the Navy UFO reports and how the reported behavior doesn’t seem to make sense for any physically real object on Miller’s podcast (part 1, part 2).
So there’s a problem with the poke things with a stick idea. A lot of smart people have tried, and have had very little progress in the 70 years since the consensus as reported by Alan Turing was that yeah this looks like it’s totally a thing.
One of the best, approachable overviews of all this I’ve ever read. I’ve dabbled in some, but not all of the topics you’ve raised here, and I certainly know about the difficulties they’ve all faced with increasing to a scientific level of rigor. What I’ve always said is that parapsychology needs Doctor Strange to become real, and he’s not here yet and probably never will be. Otherwise, every attempt at “proof” is going to be dealing with some combination of unfalsifiability, minuscule effect sizes, or severe replication issues. The only related phenomenon that has anything close to a Doctor Strange is, well, reincarnation—it’s had a good few power players who’d convince anyone mildly sympathetic. And it lacks the above unholy trinity of bad science; lack of verification would mean falsification, and it’s passed that with flying colors, the effect sizes and significance get massive quick even within individual cases, and they sure do keep on coming with exactly the same thing. But it certainly needs to do a lot better, and that’s why it has to move beyond Stevenson’s methodology to start creating its own evidence. So my progressive approach holds that, if it is to stand on its own merit, then it is time to unleash its full capacity and conduct a wholesale destruction of normalcy with it; if such an operation fails, then it has proven too epistemically weak to be worthy of major attention if it is genuine at all.
I had a hard time understanding a good bit of what you’re trying to say here, but I’ll try to address what I think I picked up clearly:
While reincarnation cases do involve memories from people within the same family at a rate higher than mere chance would predict, subjects also very often turn out to have been describing lives of people completely unknown to their “new” families. The child would have absolutely no other means of access to that information. Also, without exception, they never, ever invoke memories belonging to still-living people.
On that note, you’ll be pleased to hear that your third paragraph is underinformed; there are in fact copious verifications of that nature in the relevant literature. If there weren’t, you wouldn’t hear me talking about any of this; I’m simply too clingy to my reductionist priors to demand anything less to qualify as real evidence for off-the-wall metaphysics.
Whether there are people who reincarnate often is really hard to determine at present; subjects who concretely remember more than one verified previous life are incredibly rare. However, I suppose that is my cue to spill the remaining beans: my entire utility function and a huge basis of my rationality practice is predicated on the object of “reincarnating well”, particularly fixating on the matter of psychological continuity, which you allude to directly; this is my personal “paperclips” to be maximized unconditionally. In familiar Eliezer-ese diction, I feel a massive sense that more is possible in this area, and you can bet your last dollar that I have something to protect. Moreover, as a scientist working with ideas many consider impossible, I believe in holding myself to equally impossible standards and making them possible, thereby forcing the theoretical foundations into the acknowledged realm of possibility. In other words, if the phenomena I’m studying are legitimate, I’ll be able to do truly outrageous things with them; if I can’t, the doubters deserve to claim victory.
Frankly, I’m pleasantly surprised to be seeing concepts like these discussed this charitably on LW; none of this is anything close to Sequence-canon. I certainly don’t want to jinx it, but from what I’m seeing so far, I’m extremely impressed with how practically the community applies its ideological commitment to pure Bayesian analysis. If nothing more, I hope to at least make myself one of LW’s very best contrarians. But I’m curious now, is there a fairly sizable contingent of academic/evidential dualists in the rationalist community?
I mean I actually think you are catastrophically wrong about there being any “hidden variable” knowledge-passing, but I’m going to talk to you to figure out why you believe it, not just dismiss it a priori! I simply expect the evidence for dualist violations of known physics to turn out to be very weak.
could you cite somewhere I can look to find more of this? after looking briefly at wikipedia, I find what I expected to find—careful analysis of a plausibly astounding phenomenon, carefully catalogued and currently expected to be found to not be blatantly violating thermodynamics about what the kids knew when. If the kids can recite passwords they could not possibly have had access to, then it would start to seem plausible—but it takes an awful lot of evidence to overcome “it was just the kid forgetting they’d seen the stuff before”, and it looks like the evidence probably isn’t there. certainly no causally isolated studies.
There is a case on record that involved a recalled phone number. A password is a completely plausible next step forward.
For a very approachable and modernized take on the subject matter, I’d check out the book Before by Jim Tucker, a current leading researcher.
As a disclaimer, it’s perfectly rational and Bayesian to be extremely doubtful of such “modest” proposals at first blush—I was for a good length of time, until I did the depth of investigation that was necessary to form an expert opinion. Don’t take my word for things!
It’s more empirical than ideological for me. There are these pockets of “something’s not clear here”, where similar things keep being observed, don’t line up with any current scientific explanation, and even people who don’t seem obviously biased start going “hey, something’s off here”. There’s the recent US Navy UFO sightings thing that nobody seems to know what to make of, there’s Darryl Bem’s 2011 ESP study that follows stuff by people like Dean Radin who seem to keep claiming the existence of a very specific sort of PSI effect. Damien Broderick’s Outside the Gates of Science was an interesting overview of this stuff.
I don’t think I’ve heard much of reincarnation research recently, but it was one of the three things Carl Sagan listed as having enough plausible-looking evidence for them that people should look a lot more carefully into them in The Demon-Haunted World in 1996, when the book was otherwise all about claims of the paranormal and religious miracles being bunk. I guess the annoying thing with reincarnation is that it’s very hard to study rigorously if brains are basically black boxes. The research is postulating whole new physics, so things should be established with the same sort of mechanical rigor and elimination of degrees of freedom as existing physics is, and “you ask people to tell you stories and try to figure out if the story checks out but it’s completely implausible for the person telling it to you to know it” is beyond terrible degrees-of-freedom-wise if you think of it like a physicist.
When you keep hearing about the same sort of weird stuff happening and don’t seem to have a satisfying explanation for what’s causing it, that makes it sound like there’s maybe some things that ought to be poked with a stick there.
On the other hand, there’s some outside view concerns. Whatever weird thing is going on seems to be either not really there after all, or significantly weirder than any resolved scientific phenomenon so far. Scientists took reports of PSI seriously in the early 20th century and got started trying to study them (Alan Turing was still going “yeah, human telepathy is totally a thing” in his Turing Test paper). What followed was a lot of smart people looking into the shiny new thing and accomplishing very little. Susan Blackmore spent decades studying parapsychology and ended up vocally disillusioned. Dean Radin seems to think that the PSI effect is verified, but it’s so slight that “so go win the Randi Prize” doesn’t make sense because the budget for a statistically conclusive experiment would be bigger than the prize money. And now we’re in the middle of the replication crisis (which Radin mentions zero times in a book he published in 2018), and psychology experiments that report some very improbable phenomenon look a lot less plausible than they did 15 years ago.
The UFO stuff also seems to lead people into strange directions of thinking that something seems to be going on, but it doesn’t seem to be possible for it to be physical spacecraft. Jacques Vallée ended up going hard on this path and pissed off the science-minded UFOlogists. More recently, Greg Cochran and Lesswrong’s own James Miller talked about the Navy UFO reports and how the reported behavior doesn’t seem to make sense for any physically real object on Miller’s podcast (part 1, part 2).
So there’s a problem with the poke things with a stick idea. A lot of smart people have tried, and have had very little progress in the 70 years since the consensus as reported by Alan Turing was that yeah this looks like it’s totally a thing.
One of the best, approachable overviews of all this I’ve ever read. I’ve dabbled in some, but not all of the topics you’ve raised here, and I certainly know about the difficulties they’ve all faced with increasing to a scientific level of rigor. What I’ve always said is that parapsychology needs Doctor Strange to become real, and he’s not here yet and probably never will be. Otherwise, every attempt at “proof” is going to be dealing with some combination of unfalsifiability, minuscule effect sizes, or severe replication issues. The only related phenomenon that has anything close to a Doctor Strange is, well, reincarnation—it’s had a good few power players who’d convince anyone mildly sympathetic. And it lacks the above unholy trinity of bad science; lack of verification would mean falsification, and it’s passed that with flying colors, the effect sizes and significance get massive quick even within individual cases, and they sure do keep on coming with exactly the same thing. But it certainly needs to do a lot better, and that’s why it has to move beyond Stevenson’s methodology to start creating its own evidence. So my progressive approach holds that, if it is to stand on its own merit, then it is time to unleash its full capacity and conduct a wholesale destruction of normalcy with it; if such an operation fails, then it has proven too epistemically weak to be worthy of major attention if it is genuine at all.