crocodile deathroll

I find all those past life anecdotes as evidence for reincarnation highly implausible; at best I find them boring scripts for a Hollywood movies. At worst they are just a load a Eastern inspired new age gobbledegook.

Personally I have not found any empirical evidence for reincarnation to the best of my knowledge, but I have stumbled across an interesting arguments through Anthropic Reasoning or the Self Sampling Assumption, not that reincarnation is directly mentioned.

It goes like this:

#1 Either we live in a universe where you can only have one possible existence,

#2 Or we live in a universe with millions of possible existences.


You are more likely to exist in a universe with lots of alternative lifetimes then in a universe with just one
so your existence favors a realization of the universe with lots of possible incarnations.
Because if you were contingent on only one possible incarnation then only the very slightest fudging of history will thwart your existence in the first place. But in a universe which favors the realization of more than one possible existence then your chances of existing would be infinitely better.

I will try a modified coat size analogy that is been use by the astronomer royal Sir Martin Rees

20 Coat Sizes

1Shop A is a clothing shop with only the one coat size.

2Shop B is a clothing shop with 19 coat sizes except the coat size shop A sells.

You are not sure which is shop A and which is shop B
So you see Betty standing in the center of the street and she is undecided which shop to shop at and it is right near closing time and she will only have a chance to inspect one. All she knows is that only one of the 20 coat sizes will fit her, so she tosses a coin, and if it's heads it's shop A, tails its shop B. So she tosses it and enters one of the shops. Finally, you see Betty come out with her new coat in the bag, and what does that tell you?

You still cannot be absolutely certain that she shopped at shop "B" but the realization of her wearing the coat favors shop B
Just like the realization of you existing favors universe #2

Cheers All
crocodile deathroll

tronvillain

If that argument were taken all the way, one would have to conclude that there is only one soul in existence. After all, if everyone who ever has, does, or will exist is you, then the probability that you exist given that someone exists is one.

Of course, I don't think the argument is a good one. First, the statements are not mutually exclusive and so are not either or propositions:

#1 We live in a universe where you can only have one possible existence.

#2 We live in a universe where you can only have two possible existences.

#3 We live in a universe where you can only have two possible existences.

... and so on. Then there are the wide variety of other options, such as "We live in a universe where most people only have one possible existence but some have millions." Still, this fault is easily answered by making number two more general, so we move onto the second problem....

Now, what is the probability of you observing that you exist in a universe where you only have one existence? Well, the probability of you observing that you exist given that you exist is one, so it depends entirely on what the probability of your existence is. If we assume determinism then the probability of you existing now is one, but if we divide the time you do exist by the time you don't we get am extremely small probability. So, what is the probability of you observing that you exist in a universe where you have many existences? Again, it depends entirely on what the probability of your existence is and since with many existences you likely exist for more time than with one, we get a larger probability.

Having established that the probability that you observe that you exist in a universe where you have many existences is larger than in a universe where you have a single existence what can we determine about our universe? We cannot simply leap to the conclusion that our universe is of "many existence" variety. We must first ask what the prior probabilities of each type of universe are! Looking at our universe, I judge the prior probability of "one existence" to be relatively high and the prior probability of "many existences" to be relatively low - virtually all of the evidence we are aware of points to one existence.

The difference between P(h1) and P(h2) more than make up for the difference betwee P(e/h1) and P(e/h2). To use your "20 Coat Sizes" analogy, if there are nine hundred ninety-nine Type A shops and only one Type B shop, if Betty walks into a random shop and comes out with a coat it is more likely that it was a Type A shop and she happened to be Type A size than it is that it was a Type B shops and she didn't happen to be Type A size.

crocodile deathroll

#3 We live in a universe where you can only have two possible existences. This proposition was identical to you stated in proposition #2 With this I am sure you meant at least more than two possible existences or probably some exponential number or even a number too large to be saved on every hard drive on earth
However I think you may of hit on it, there may well be only one soul in existence, and that soul happens to be yours. Everyone that you observe is just another expression of yourself. So that when you die and all your memories of that life are totally obliterated and will be subjectively identical to never been born at all in the first place. With the absence of life's memories you will have no more affinity to that cadaver you leave behind than a road kill squashed on the highway.
So with all your life memories erased it is really impossible to observe the aftermath of your own death and make some kind of philosophical judgement of it. You will never even know that you have ever lived at all, you will be back to square one
In a universe like proposition #3 you may find yourself instead being teleported to the thought processes of another brain in a kind a cosmic gestalt switch mechanism brought upon by the quantum entanglement of matter. This will happen infinitum until you have experienced the life and observed the universe though the eyes everybody that has ever lived and ever will live.
Some Occamic principle in the universe may well ust reduce down to only one soul and one self.....who knows

I wonder if there is a way of noticing that you would not exist if both your parents had never met? Because if you can you are far more likely to feel yourself in that state, and there are billions of ways of not been born that been born. I think you do exist as those hypothetical non existent children like the hypothetical children of celebrant Catholic priests, but it is only the existences that reach certain a level of realization that you can notice.
I have set the parameters there for only one Type A shop, but if it was near closing time as I stated then it make no difference if there were a thousand type A shops as there would be still be only one chance in 20 of Betty walking out with a coat in the bag. <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

tronvillain

crocodile deathtroll:
Yes, I meant to say "We live in a universe where you can only have three possible existences" which would obviously be followed by "We live in a universe where you can only have three possible existences" and so on.

Such a universe would be a universe where you only have one possible existence, though your soul may have many. Reincarnation of that type is completely useless.

Now something like that would be an improvement, though the mechanism is a little ridiculous.

It is trivially easy to notice that if your parents had never me you would not exist, but there is no way to feel the state of nonexistence. If you can experience the state, it is not nonexistence!

You specified that there was only one Type A shop, but I felt the analogy could be improved. While it is true that there would only be a 1/20 chance of Betty walking out of a Type A shop with a coat, there would only be a 19/20000 chance of her walking of a Type B shop with a coat. In other words, if Betty walks out of a store with a coat in a bag, odds are that she happened to be Type A size.

[ July 14, 2002: Message edited by: tronvillain ]</p>

ishalon

i think you meant "...followed by "we live... four..."

tronvillain

*chuckle* Twice in a row.

crocodile deathroll

Yes I agree it would be useless, future and past incarnations useless to this life that is, because you cannot retrieve the memories of that preexisting life, and perhaps we both may even argue that reincarnation without memories could scarcely be called reincarnation at all, and closer to oblivion. For any memories you may of asked about it in this life will just go on unanswered in the next. It will be just another one life continuum with your future death perceived as something just as much feared and dreaded as it is in this one. It's a pretty bleak outlook for most religions, but I could not care less. All that matters is, I want to survive in this life as long as I possibly can until all those memories go into oblivion, which I am sure they will.
Certainly reincarnation without memory would be useless as far as family history and geological research is concerned, you can forget that.
If you tried to persuade any well educated physicist back in the 19th century about quantum non-locality or wave particle duality, he would I'm sure no doubt dismissed it as being not just a little, but extremely ridiculous. Not so ridiculous this day and age, because without it you would not have the exclusion principle and then entire universe would of collapsed into an infinitesimal singularity before it even got started. Like electrons on the central nuclei alone would of collapsed into a super massive black hole.
Before you were born there was just pure dumb matter and you would of had absolutely no awareness of your place and time in the universe, you could potentially exist anywhere, because on a sub level matter duplicates the same physical processes. So you could conceivably appear anywhere physical conditions make brains possible to exist.
Yes that's exactly my point as soon as you can experience some state, then that defaults non-existence into existence

Cheers
crocodile deathroll