Have all people been born before?

@ Rhaedas,
pointing out that opinion on this cannot be proven either way. You point at ack of evidence as the evidence. A million years ago there was no evidence of Sciforums. Go figure.

 

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you are forgetting entirely about consciousness and its many faucets.

 

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Never seen anything to even suggest reincarnation (or any other form of after life) - so why should anyone bother to try and disprove something of which there is no evidence?

And, by the way, a million years ago, there was no SciForums... Go figure.

 

Because the concept is seen everywhere in our universe, Recycling of parts. Have you not understood by now that all things in the universe come from parts of something else? Theories even exist that say that our universe will collapse again into a point of singularity, only to expand in big bang once-more and create yet another universe in another spacetime. Consciousness is not something that can be explained in our material world, why do you think that is so? Because consciousness is intangible, we cannot define the most important part of us that make us exist! Your children, if you have them...are your reincarnations. They share not just your memories you pass to them, your feelings, but also your DNA which you passed to them...and this is just in our material world. Microsoft, the holy grail of all computers, is a software...an intangible set of rules that only physical manifestation is electrons passing in particular manner through circuit.

 

@ Gmilam,

I have seen evidence I believe is conducive to an afterlife. My explanation is in a lengthy post here...
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?133784-A-science-view-of-god-Easier-to-believe

@ James R,

I think it is your belief that is extraordinary. I see my view as perfectly natural. I think your stance is natural for you as you (skeptics) lack the perception to see life as it is.

My views and reasoning on religion are known, however I did explain it again in the above link. I also believe that miracles and Synchronicity (Jung's term for miracles), are only possible if our past is alterable either
a) through a timeless global consciousness that correlates our plans.
b) we are all living in superposition such as a giant Schrodinger's box, where even Wigners friend is in juxtaposition. I argue that "EXPECTATION AFFECTS COLLAPSE" which is further into a woo direction than the idea that consciousness causes collapse. Nevertheless the past does need to alter for some "Synchronicity" to occur.
Just as the cat does not know it's fate we live based on expectation from ourselves mostly, but also we are influenced by expectation of those around us. We are never fully collapsed as matter because there is always another Wigner's friend around the corner collapsing the whole a bit more.

Here is synchronicity according to Carl Jung,
[video=youtube;BX_nMwYa-nw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX_nMwYa-nw[/video]

For Synchronicity to be true then A or B from above is correct. Sigmund Freud shared many views on Synchronicity, Telepathy, etc, and Sigmund Freud would communicate telepathically with his sister. He later distanced himself from psi topics to keep the seriousness and respectability of psychoanalysis intact.

So...

I realize my opinion is not widely accepted as fact (YET), and my Nobel Prize for quantum Mechanics may need to wait a few years. I believe it is EXPECTATION that causes collapse. If you were to look inside Schrodingers cat box you will find what you are expecting. If you are expecting a live cat the cat will be alive. If you are expecting a dead cat the cat will be dead. This is my idea. It would explain synchronicity and miracles.

If you believed in miracles then this would make more sense to you. Imagine you are drowning in the ocean and pray for a boat to come along and save you. All of a sudden a boat shows up and you are rescued, however that boat altered course the day before to avoid a storm. If this is a miracle then past has changed. This is not the best example, but look at any synchronicity and you will see past must change.

The Scarab had to time it just right to enter the window at that time. History altering to suit present expectation.

This thread belongs in Religion.

I know how it sounds if you are a skeptic, but you are entitled to an opinion as well.

 

Sure, things get recycled all the time... we are stardust.
I can buy recycled paper, that doesn't mean any of the info that was originally printed on that paper is still accessible. For that matter, paper used to be wood. Doesn't mean I can build a tree house from it.

I have no kids. But even if I did, that's a long way from reincarnation. While I came from my parents, I am not them. They are different people.

Yeah, I know what software is, I write the stuff for a living.

 

Dr Quantum? Seriously? As PT Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute.

 

@ gmilam,
Dr. Quantum is all you took rom that post. <Sigh>

Actually my own view is a lot more controversial than Consciousness causing collapse, as I bring it further into "Expectation causes collapse".

However, the Dr quantum videos do an excellent job of showing the experiments importance. The fact that people do not accept the results as strange or scary usually implies lack of understanding as to what has transpired.

I would think that it is you that is the sucker, and you have been sucked into a narrow skeptic stance and are possibly incapable of perceiving beyond that. It is you who should be pitied. If you want to start in on me, I can safely say I wholeheartedly believe my stance(s) " A or B " as listed in my last post. I honestly feel sorry for skeptics for their lack of belief, and think they are silly for not attempting to explore their psychic nature.

 

As gmilan pointed out, atomically it's all recycled. But when you talk about reincarnation, that's not recycling, but reusing, as much of the previous life is maintained in some aspect. And that we don't find as much in the natural world, whereas decay and entropy we do.

Granted you admit your example is not the best, but what if you hadn't prayed and the boat showed up anyway, or if you prayed and the boat never came? You attribute the connection with meaning something more than it is, as well as saying that one person's act can influence the effect of a greater number of other entities from a distance and even completely change the flow of time. Seems to me that the much simpler explanation is a lot easier to accept> As I said earlier, we make connections all the time that may or may not be there, because that's how evolution has hardwired us.

It's a huge stretch to say that it's not that mistaken conclusion, but that prayers can influence the very fabric of space-time. How does the universe weight out conflicting prayers? Best of three?

 

You mentioned him - not me.

How do you propose that we test this silly idea?

Or maybe they see that it is a totally untestable idea. Seriously, think about it. How can one possibly test or examine anything without observing it?

And I feel sorry for the gullible and their willingness to buy into any hokey BS that comes along.

 

But that is not entirely true. Expectation (a state of anticipation, waiting ) cannot be not causal to a physical action. Prayers are personal processes and have no influence on the macroworld, which requires "energy" for action.
Moreover, it ascribes omnipotence to humans, but not to animals. I find that highly unlikely and somewhat hubristic.

I can, however agree with you that we can act in anticipation of an event and thereby influence the event itself. IMO, that is the small portion of Free Will allowed us. But that is not the same as "wishing something to happen". That's BIGGGGGGG stuff there.....

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No, I don't think so.

The basic underlying question here might be: what kind of thing do we think that a "person" is.

 

It's true that life doesn't originate anew each time a new "person" is conceived. Life is continuous through time, extending back through our parents to the original one-celled ancestors of all of today's life. Seen four-dimensionally, with time imagined as if it was another spatial dimension, life would kind of resemble a tree. So yeah, in that sense, all living things that have ever lived on Earth seem to be related to one another in a literal familial sense, parts of the same larger life-phenomenon.

But having said that, I don't think that kind of observation is really all that relevant to questions of our own personal identity.

 

No, I mentioned the mind, which is a product of the brain, programmed by culture. I don't consider it to be a real thing with any existence separate from the brain, since it is a description of what the brain does.

 

It may seem like it sometimes, but I don't think so.

I'm retired and I've travelled many places and seen many things. Add to that all the places I've dreamt about or imagined every time I have read a book or seen a film, and the number of places in my mind is enormous. I've even read science fiction, and as I've read the books I've imagined the places and pictured them in my mind.

The older I get, the more likely I am likely to think I've been somewhere before, but that feeling has no evidential value whatsoever.

 

Because very often it is. If you hand me a box and tell me that there's a gold coin inside, lack of a gold coin in the box(i.e. a lack of evidence) is evidence of the absence of that gold coin. Similarly, if I shake the box an absence of noise would be evidence that the gold coin is, in fact, absent from the box. You can argue that this analogy fails because "looking for god/the soul/[insert supernatural phenomenon here] isn't the same thing as looking for a coin in a box", but it is. The only real difference is that the box we have to search is much larger.

Because it didn't exist a million years ago. Thanks for providing me with yet another example of absence of evidence equalling an absence of evidence.

 

Maybe and this is a big maybe, we think we have lived before because of our ancestral DNA memory.