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.
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.