Personally, I mostly study reincarnation cases; they’re the only evidence I really find to meet a scientific standard. Let’s just say that without them, I wouldn’t be a dualist on any confident epistemic ground. That said, 99 percent of what you’ll encounter in a casual search on the matter is absolute nonsense. When skeptics cry “Here be dragons!” to dissuade curious folks from messing around in such territory, I honestly can’t say I blame them one bit, given how much dedication it takes to separate the signal from the deafening noise. If you want to dip your feet in the water without getting bit by a shark, I’d stick to looking at cases that, A, only involve very young children, and B, have been very thoroughly investigated and come up categorically verified by all accounts. It will probably take time to encounter something that feels really satisfying, but at the top end, they really do get next-level spectacular. It’s incredibly fascinating and I love it to bits, but I’d never call it a pursuit to be taken casually. I actually think a population like LessWrong would probably be much better equipped than most to engage with such subject matter, though, because they’re already practiced at the sort of Bayesian reasoning that’s necessary to keep an honest assessment of the data, for what it is and nothing more.
Restricting the query to true top-level, sweep-me-off-my-feet material, I’d say I’ve personally read about at least a few dozen that hit me that hard. If we expand to any case that researchers consider “solved”—that is, the deceased person whose life the child remembers has been confidently identified—I would estimate on the order of 2000 to 2500 worldwide, possibly more at this point.
Good on you doing your DD. His official count (counting all cases known to him, not only ones he investigated) is around 1700, which probably means that my collective estimate is on the way low side—there’s just a lot of unpublished material to try to account for (file drawer effect) - but I would definitely say that a great deal of the advancement in the field after Stevenson has been of a conceptual and theoretical nature rather than collecting large amounts of additional data. In general, researchers have pivoted to allowing cases to come to their attention organically (the internet has helped) rather than seeking out as many as possible. On the other hand, Stevenson hardly knew anything about what he was really studying until late in his career (and admitted as much), while his successors have been able to form much more cohesive models of what is going on. I would say that Stevenson is a role model to me as Eliezer is to a great deal of LW, but on the other hand, I find appeal to authority counterproductive, because the fact of the matter is that we today have access to better resources than he had and are able to do stronger and more confident work as a result. He, of course, supplied us with many of those resources, so respect is absolutely in order, but if we don’t move forward at a reasonable pace from just gathering the same stuff over and over, the whole endeavor is no better than an NFL quarterback compiling 5000 passing yards for a 4-12 team.
In general, researchers have pivoted to allowing cases to come to their attention organically (the internet has helped) rather than seeking out as many as possible.
How do you go about validating a case that comes to your attention via the internet? It seems to me like it’s very hard to have access to information that the person in question has no way of knowing for cases that reach you via the internet.
Disclaimer, I’m not someone who personally investigates cases. What you’ve raised has actually been a massive problem for researchers since the beginning, and has little to do with the internet—Stevenson himself often learned of his cases many years after they were in their strongest phase, and sometimes after connections had already been made to a possible previous identity. In general, the earlier a researcher can get on a case and in contact with the subject, the better. As a result, cases in which important statements given by the subject are documented, and corroborated by a researcher, before any attempt at verification has been made are considered some of the best. In that regard, the internet has actually helped researchers get informed of cases earlier, when subjects are typically still giving a lot of information and no independent searches have been conducted. Pertaining to problems specifically presented by online communication, whenever a potebtially important case comes to their attention, I would say that researchers try to take the process offline as soon as the situation allows.
As a result, cases in which important statements given by the subject are documented, and corroborated by a researcher, before any attempt at verification has been made are considered some of the best.
Where do you think the most convincing information about those cases is published?
Unfortunate to say I haven’t kept a neat record of where exactly each case is published, so I asked my industry connections and was directed to the following article. Having reviewed it, it would of course be presumptuous of me to say I endorse everything stated therein, since I have not read the primary source for every case described. But those sources are referenced at bottom, many with links. It should suffice as a compilation of information pertaining to your question, and you can judge what meets your standards.
Epoch Times in 2015 said Stevenson’s successor Jim Tucker has brought the total up to “about 2000 cases”.
Anyway, I will come out and say I don’t believe it. Reincarnation may be logically possible—many things are logically possible—but the ascertainable facts don’t provide sufficient reason to think it’s actually happening. Adults consistently underestimate the imagination and intuition of children, and scientists regularly convince themselves of things that are false (and then there’s the level of discussion present e.g. in cable TV documentaries, which is far more characteristic of ordinary thinking on the subject, and which cannot be counted on to have any respect for truth at all).
Also, our current understanding of neural networks, suggests that individual brains develop idiosyncratic representations for anything complex, a problem for the idea that memories of other lives, formed in other brains, get downloaded into them. This is not a decisive objection, but it’s definitely an issue for anyone seeking a mechanism.
It means very little evidentially, but I will report one thing that happened when I looked into this. In the opinion of some, Stevenson’s most convincing case was a boy from Lebanon. I thought: Lebanon is a Muslim country, and one doesn’t associate Islam with belief in reincarnation. Then I remembered the Druze sect—and indeed, on further study by myself, the boy turned out to be from a Druze family.
Reincarnation studies may be of interest from the perspective of “anomalistic psychology”—belief in reincarnation, after all, is part of some of the world’s major belief systems; and understanding why people believe in it, and how that belief is reinforced in new generations, may shed light on how those cultures work.
That’s definitely the proper naïve reaction to assume in my opinion. I would say with extremely high confidence that this is one of those things that takes dozens of hours of reading to overcome one’s priors toward, if your priors are well-defined. It took every bit of that for me. The reason for this is that there’s always a solid-sounding objection to any one case—it takes knowing tons of them by heart to see how the common challenges fail to hold up. So, in my experience and that of many I know, the degree which one is inclined to buy into it is a direct correlation of how determined one is to get to the bottom of it. Otherwise, I have to agree with you that there’s no really compelling reason to be convinced based on what a casual search will show you. That, as well, seems to be the experience of most. Those who really care tend to get it, but it is inherently time-and-effort prohibitive. I really don’t feel like asking anyone to undertake that unless they’re heavily motivated.
Stevenson’s greatest flaw as a researcher was that he didn’t look terribly hard for American and otherwise Western cases, and the few he stumbled into were often mediocre at best. Therefore, he was repeatedly subjected to justified criticism of the nature “you can’t isolate your data from the cultural environment it develops in”. However, this issue has been entirely dissolved by successors who have rectidfied his error and found that they’re just as common in non-believer Western families as anywhere, including arguably stronger ones than anything he found. This is definitely the most important data-collection development in the field during the 21st century.
I must say I’m not at all interested in belief systems as an object of study, though—my goal is more or less to eradicate them. They’re nothing but epistemic pollution.
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.
Personally, I mostly study reincarnation cases; they’re the only evidence I really find to meet a scientific standard. Let’s just say that without them, I wouldn’t be a dualist on any confident epistemic ground. That said, 99 percent of what you’ll encounter in a casual search on the matter is absolute nonsense. When skeptics cry “Here be dragons!” to dissuade curious folks from messing around in such territory, I honestly can’t say I blame them one bit, given how much dedication it takes to separate the signal from the deafening noise. If you want to dip your feet in the water without getting bit by a shark, I’d stick to looking at cases that, A, only involve very young children, and B, have been very thoroughly investigated and come up categorically verified by all accounts. It will probably take time to encounter something that feels really satisfying, but at the top end, they really do get next-level spectacular. It’s incredibly fascinating and I love it to bits, but I’d never call it a pursuit to be taken casually. I actually think a population like LessWrong would probably be much better equipped than most to engage with such subject matter, though, because they’re already practiced at the sort of Bayesian reasoning that’s necessary to keep an honest assessment of the data, for what it is and nothing more.
How many such cases are known to you?
Restricting the query to true top-level, sweep-me-off-my-feet material, I’d say I’ve personally read about at least a few dozen that hit me that hard. If we expand to any case that researchers consider “solved”—that is, the deceased person whose life the child remembers has been confidently identified—I would estimate on the order of 2000 to 2500 worldwide, possibly more at this point.
Any idea how many of those would have been collected by Ian Stevenson specifically?
Good on you doing your DD. His official count (counting all cases known to him, not only ones he investigated) is around 1700, which probably means that my collective estimate is on the way low side—there’s just a lot of unpublished material to try to account for (file drawer effect) - but I would definitely say that a great deal of the advancement in the field after Stevenson has been of a conceptual and theoretical nature rather than collecting large amounts of additional data. In general, researchers have pivoted to allowing cases to come to their attention organically (the internet has helped) rather than seeking out as many as possible. On the other hand, Stevenson hardly knew anything about what he was really studying until late in his career (and admitted as much), while his successors have been able to form much more cohesive models of what is going on. I would say that Stevenson is a role model to me as Eliezer is to a great deal of LW, but on the other hand, I find appeal to authority counterproductive, because the fact of the matter is that we today have access to better resources than he had and are able to do stronger and more confident work as a result. He, of course, supplied us with many of those resources, so respect is absolutely in order, but if we don’t move forward at a reasonable pace from just gathering the same stuff over and over, the whole endeavor is no better than an NFL quarterback compiling 5000 passing yards for a 4-12 team.
How do you go about validating a case that comes to your attention via the internet? It seems to me like it’s very hard to have access to information that the person in question has no way of knowing for cases that reach you via the internet.
Disclaimer, I’m not someone who personally investigates cases. What you’ve raised has actually been a massive problem for researchers since the beginning, and has little to do with the internet—Stevenson himself often learned of his cases many years after they were in their strongest phase, and sometimes after connections had already been made to a possible previous identity. In general, the earlier a researcher can get on a case and in contact with the subject, the better. As a result, cases in which important statements given by the subject are documented, and corroborated by a researcher, before any attempt at verification has been made are considered some of the best. In that regard, the internet has actually helped researchers get informed of cases earlier, when subjects are typically still giving a lot of information and no independent searches have been conducted. Pertaining to problems specifically presented by online communication, whenever a potebtially important case comes to their attention, I would say that researchers try to take the process offline as soon as the situation allows.
Where do you think the most convincing information about those cases is published?
Unfortunate to say I haven’t kept a neat record of where exactly each case is published, so I asked my industry connections and was directed to the following article. Having reviewed it, it would of course be presumptuous of me to say I endorse everything stated therein, since I have not read the primary source for every case described. But those sources are referenced at bottom, many with links. It should suffice as a compilation of information pertaining to your question, and you can judge what meets your standards.
https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/reincarnation-cases-records-made-verifications
Epoch Times in 2015 said Stevenson’s successor Jim Tucker has brought the total up to “about 2000 cases”.
Anyway, I will come out and say I don’t believe it. Reincarnation may be logically possible—many things are logically possible—but the ascertainable facts don’t provide sufficient reason to think it’s actually happening. Adults consistently underestimate the imagination and intuition of children, and scientists regularly convince themselves of things that are false (and then there’s the level of discussion present e.g. in cable TV documentaries, which is far more characteristic of ordinary thinking on the subject, and which cannot be counted on to have any respect for truth at all).
Also, our current understanding of neural networks, suggests that individual brains develop idiosyncratic representations for anything complex, a problem for the idea that memories of other lives, formed in other brains, get downloaded into them. This is not a decisive objection, but it’s definitely an issue for anyone seeking a mechanism.
It means very little evidentially, but I will report one thing that happened when I looked into this. In the opinion of some, Stevenson’s most convincing case was a boy from Lebanon. I thought: Lebanon is a Muslim country, and one doesn’t associate Islam with belief in reincarnation. Then I remembered the Druze sect—and indeed, on further study by myself, the boy turned out to be from a Druze family.
Reincarnation studies may be of interest from the perspective of “anomalistic psychology”—belief in reincarnation, after all, is part of some of the world’s major belief systems; and understanding why people believe in it, and how that belief is reinforced in new generations, may shed light on how those cultures work.
That’s definitely the proper naïve reaction to assume in my opinion. I would say with extremely high confidence that this is one of those things that takes dozens of hours of reading to overcome one’s priors toward, if your priors are well-defined. It took every bit of that for me. The reason for this is that there’s always a solid-sounding objection to any one case—it takes knowing tons of them by heart to see how the common challenges fail to hold up. So, in my experience and that of many I know, the degree which one is inclined to buy into it is a direct correlation of how determined one is to get to the bottom of it. Otherwise, I have to agree with you that there’s no really compelling reason to be convinced based on what a casual search will show you. That, as well, seems to be the experience of most. Those who really care tend to get it, but it is inherently time-and-effort prohibitive. I really don’t feel like asking anyone to undertake that unless they’re heavily motivated.
Stevenson’s greatest flaw as a researcher was that he didn’t look terribly hard for American and otherwise Western cases, and the few he stumbled into were often mediocre at best. Therefore, he was repeatedly subjected to justified criticism of the nature “you can’t isolate your data from the cultural environment it develops in”. However, this issue has been entirely dissolved by successors who have rectidfied his error and found that they’re just as common in non-believer Western families as anywhere, including arguably stronger ones than anything he found. This is definitely the most important data-collection development in the field during the 21st century.
I must say I’m not at all interested in belief systems as an object of study, though—my goal is more or less to eradicate them. They’re nothing but epistemic pollution.
Do animals also get this? Does an embryo’s brain contain biological means to receive foreign data?
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.