Ask Lemmy

Suppose reincarnation was real. But no one has any memory or awareness of a past life. So then what connection does said past life even have to you? How can any supposed past 'you's really be considered the same you?

Not in the traditional sense, but I have a pet theory about the continuation of consciousness.

You can only experience being, not not-being, so even if your consciousness went dark for a million years before being “reincarnated,” there would be no gap from the perspective of your subjective experience. You can only go from having one experience to having another. Nothingness can’t be experienced.

Yeeeeah, all due respect to believers, but we're squishy wet computers riding squishy wet stilts and when we get turned off we just sort of fizzle out.

There's some poetry to only having one go at it, but I'm not gonna stand here and say a sense of humanism makes your hardcoded fear of death subside. I get why humans come up with coping mechanisms where they get to live forever in some form that isn't having their atoms repurposed as fertilizer and space dust.

Nope. I have never seen any evidence of reincarnation, so have no reason to believe in it.

I hope not.

Well, no, consciousness is not independent on brain. It's not magic or stored anywhere. Pretty simple proof: people with brain damage very often have a huge personality shift.

Anyway, even if you forget stuff, the pathways between neurons have already been made. And sometimes you remember things randomly after many, many years.

It's hard to say exactly. I wouldn't put it past the dev(s) to have potentially put something like "The Egg" in, so potentially yes, though we'd have no way of testing for it.

Story by Andy Weir here: https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI

No but I wonder if hell is being made an insect over and over.

I do believe in reincarnation, in that we are all physical manifestations of what you could call "God". That means that everyone you meet, every dog you pet, every ant you accidentally squish, is synonymous with the divine. We are all constantly reincarnating throughout the universe, and this should be looked at no more acutely than the cells in your body constantly dying and being reborn.

I guess you could call it pantheism, though I tend to follow philosophies like Zen Buddhism and the Tao and it still seems to work.

Looking at existence in this way can form a new understanding, nay, a new reverence towards your life and the universe. Then you will understand who you really are and why you're here. The real power of God is in manifesting everywhere, all the time, all at once. After all...

And that is, of course, why the images of the Hindu gods are shown with many arms or many faces: because it is saying that all arms are the arms of the divinity, all faces are its masks.

-Alan Watts, Out Of Your Mind

I'm going to make a guess that majority of people looking at this question have grown up in countries with Christian cultural background. Meaning even if they aren't religious, their more or less subconscious believes about the nature of reality may involve some vague ideas about souls, absolute good and evil and so on. Separate entities in a hierarchical world. From that perspective, reincarnation is never going to sound anything but magical.

But if you drop your belief in you as a separate entity, literally everything is a "reincarnation" of you, if you want to use that word. But it's not the "you" that you think you are. Reality is prior to your thought about it, as thoughts are just imperfect reflections of reality.

You get a disconnect when you try to take a concept like reincarnation from a thought-framework such as Buddhism, without being REALLY FUCKING INTIMATELY STEEPED IN IT, and then try to fit it into whatever dualistic worldview you're likely holding in this largely Chisto-capitalistic world that is hell bent on making sure you always feel separate, alone and not enough.

It really is like taking a power plug from the EU and then being surprised it doesn't fit in the socket in the USA. And then going off about what a stupid design EU has while not ever even considering if the socket is even meant to receive that kind of a plug (because in YOUR opinion, your socket must be perfect in every way and could never ever be questioned).

Get Waking Up by Sam Harris... Or read Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, Loch Kelly, Jayasara, Kiran Trace, Christopher Wallis, Bernardo Kastrup, many more. It's all available out there but unfortunately a lot gets dismissed because "nooo muh materialistic worldview that is required for the current capitalistic hellscape that's slowly destroying our world can't possibly be wrong". So many people are pushing the collective cart towards doom, complain about the doom and the cart but never question what they so deeply believe that they won't just stop pushing.

No

Eh... No, but its nice to think about it.

As stated by many others, evidence is required to prove something. However, the stories we tell ourselves are comforting, so I wont fault anyone who does. Up until the point where people start going "My sky-dad could totally beat up your sky-dad", that can Belgium right off...

Nope. When I die, there is no longer a me of any sort; just any media and memory that captures some moment of when I still was until those too fade.

Want there to be evidence reincarnation exists . Want there to be research teams dedicated to finding it

I like the idea in Buddhism, that you are precious/valuable from the moment you are born. You already achieved plenty in your past life, which is why you were born as a human. Therefore, there is no need for self-hatred or for pressure to perform.

Sort of, not in a religious way.

Like I don't think there will be anything special that you get to keep with you, the "soul" is just a vessel to experience things, nothing special about it. As in: There aren't any hero stories, no "dragon reborn"s, no Karma. Just randomness. This moment, you are a human, when you die, your next moments could be a bug crawling next to you when you died, or newborn kitten to a pregnant cat in your backyard, or a cockroach about to get stepped on. Then some time again, you will be another human. Or perhaps proximity doesn't matter and you could be born on some alien planet far away. There is no concious god, its just pure randomness.

As if you are an immortal camera and your body is the microSD card adaptor, your memories are the microSD card, your experiences are just what the camera sees.

Sorry if my beliefs are silly, but I think there is some part of living beings that current level of technology cant quite measure yet. I think it has something to do with mass energy equivalence, maybe when we die, we become some energy that just bounces around until we become something else.

Its like people used to think the Earth orbited the sun. People used to not be able to see germs, or atoms, then we went from seeing atoms, to protons, electrons, then we say those even smaller parts.

Perhaps there is something that can't be measured yet. Perhaps it may never be able to be measured.

The way I see it:

It's either:

[1] Nonexistence --> I exist --> Nonexistence (and never exist again)

Or

[2] Nonexistence --> I exist --> Nonexistence --> I exist again (repeat for a long time, possibly forever)

Option one breaks my brain, so I just choose to go with option 2 to keep my sanity.

Maybe is just my monkey brain being silly, idk, but our minds have to invent these little stories to keep ourself sane. We as non-omniscient beings cannot objectively observe the universe, is all just biased subjective interpretations that are unique to us.

But regardless, this is the only chance I get to experience "this" life, "next" time I might be the bug the gets crushed by a neighbor that "this" life used to live with. So um... yea, thanks for coming to my ted talk

Take it sleezy 🤷‍♂️

🌌 (Your next life will be on a planet in a solar system with 3 suns, good luck with the chaotic eras lol)

(I must sound so stupid right? Given that this is Lemmy and eveyone here is an Atheist. Its fine, just leave my monkey brain believe its weird theories 😅)

You say forgetting memories is proof or indicative that memory depends on the physical body. But isn't that true for conscious as well?

Our conscious is inherently bound to our physical being. We see, we feel, we taste, we identify with our body. Our brain allows us to think, and experience, to conceptualize our body, our being, us as an entity.

We cut off fingernails and discard them as no longer part of ourselves. We drive a car and internalize movement as if it were us moving, while not seeing the vehicle as part of ourselves.

Without experiencing and without a body to conceptualize, what would our consciousness be? Without a body and mind where consciousness can arise from experience and thoughts, how could consciousness arise?

I don’t believe in reincarnation, but one thing that isn’t mentioned enough is that there aren’t enough “souls” for everyone to have a reincarnation. If you rewind the clock back, once the original (for the sake of this exercise) 100 people died, the next generation would have 200-300 people already alive due to multiple children, which means they would halve mostly new souls. Fast forward to today, I’d imagine a lot of people would have baby souls.

We live in an infinite universe. As such, it seems hubristic to me to believe that we have, more or less, nature figured out.

I don't feel compelled to believe in the soul as some strange sort of object that is continuously reincarnated towards a great purpose. But if we consider consciousness as an energy of its own kind, then it should hold true that it cannot be created or destroyed, only change form. This could mean that the consciousness that resides in the body could move between different life forms like a fluid, freely mixing and melding with others, filling a new vessel as necessary.