What IS really amazing about life?

[Fire Fly]

What is amazing about life? Well, consider this. The sperm/egg divides by meiosis and through independent assortment, the chromosomes of a sperm or egg can recombine 2^n number of times, where n=number of chromosomes or the haploid number (23 in humans). When the sperm and egg combine to form a zygote, the number of possible combinations the chromosomes can rearrange themselves is (2^n)^2 possible ways. That's ~7x10^13 possible combinations (70,000,000,000,000 or 70 trillion possible ways). So, in order for your parents to reproduce even a genetic clone of you, apart from having a twin, is to have 70 trillion babies just to get the same genetic you. That's how unique you are and rest assured, there will never, ever be another you. Even cloning can't recreate you.

Then of course, there's also the viewpoint that there probably is no afterlife and this is your only chance at having any joy, any love, any sorrows and sadness, for all eternity.

[daniel_gudman]

At Darth Wong:

It's not "blind rejection" when no compelling evidence is provided in the first place. Automatic rejection of unfounded claims is in fact perfectly logical.

Granted. Yeah... but don't reject something before someone provides the evidence to back up their claim, is what I was getting at.

Who the fuck needs a big conspiracy theory to explain this tripe? The kid saw some name in the paper of somebody who died of a shotgun blast to the chest, and decided consciously or unconsciously that this was his previous life. Oooooh.

Newspapers? In rural India in the 60s? For something that happened before this kid was born? I'm not saying it's impossible, but....

Anyway, good job with keeping the thread at a high level of civility.

At Mayabird:

It has been tried. I forget who the scientist was who figured that if souls exist, they must weigh something, and so you could weigh a living creature and then kill it and then see how much the soul weighed.

He worked this experiment, very carefully, with mice. There wasn't the slightest bit of difference in weight between a mouse when alive and the same mouse dead a moment later.

This experiment doesn't get widely advertised because it didn't say what people want to hear. You'd better believe that this study would be whipped out every ten seconds if he'd actually found a difference.

Actually I've never heard of this one. It's a pretty cool idea, but it's not what I would have done... it sounds kinda like weighing a battery to see if it's charged or not. Kirellian photography might be a better starting point.

Anyway it's not like a soul would be made out of anything special. If it's just some kind of electrical field, it would probably be scrambled into nothingness by a cell phone, or a radio or something.

At Surlethe:
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/in ... sonres.cfm
Here's a link that lists some good resources.

I've read that first book, "Twenty cases suggestive of reincarnation." The campus library had it, so I checked it out.

Anyway, the thing of it is there really aren't a lot of other explanations. the "why" of birthmarks isn't fully understood, I'm given to understand. It's certainly possible that there is something else going on.

At The Vortex Empire:

Oh, but a mouse is an animal! It doesn't have a soul, only humans do! Rolling Eyes

Actually... if we assume that the "soul" of an animal is in ratio to it's size or mass, we'd probably have more luck with monkeys than mice. Human experimentation would probably be hard to get funded, unless you took money from somebody that also told you what your results were going to be.

I don't think they think these things through that far.

Who's "they"? If I'm "they", well of course I haven't thought it through that far, I've only just heard of the study....

At Darth Wong again:

Indeed. To continue this train of thought, why don't we see more people with birthmarks, if physical damage from a previous life manifests itself in birthmark form? Shouldn't there be all sorts of people running around with various birthmarks to indicate the manner of their deaths?

"Soul" is kindof a poor word to use, because that implies that it's indestructible. It's not like somebody's guaranteeing you'll reincarnate, apparently it just happens occasionally.

What about people that died of heart attacks; what would the birthmark from a heart attack be?

Are we talking about the birthmarks that fade with time?

The Birthmark business is mostly associated with people who died violently; shotgun to chest, cleaver to head, ax to the back, that sort of thing. IF the reincarnate they MIGHT have a birthmark.

I just thought it was surprising. It's not like it matters what we "believe:" if it happens, it happens, if it doesn't, it doesn't. Kinda like evolution: whether or not we "believe" in evolution doesn't much change whether life forms evolve or not.

Although now that I've said that I have to add a disclaimer: most of these cases are in the Indochina region, and the northern circumpolar region, where reincarnation is involved in the religion or culture.

[Darth Wong]

Granted. Yeah... but don't reject something before someone provides the evidence to back up their claim, is what I was getting at.

Actually, you should reject claims before someone provides evidence. Otherwise, any idiot can make arbitrary claims and simply stall on the evidence, and you have to take them seriously.

Who the fuck needs a big conspiracy theory to explain this tripe? The kid saw some name in the paper of somebody who died of a shotgun blast to the chest, and decided consciously or unconsciously that this was his previous life. Oooooh.

Newspapers? In rural India in the 60s? For something that happened before this kid was born? I'm not saying it's impossible, but....

It's far more reasonable than a genetic coding of the means of violent death from a past life. Seriously, what kind of drugs do you have to be on to think that "he saw the name before somewhere" is less plausible than magical survival after death, transference of injuries, and retention of memory?

Anyway, good job with keeping the thread at a high level of civility.

In my experience, people who harp on "civility" do so because they can't come up with real rebuttals.

"Soul" is kindof a poor word to use, because that implies that it's indestructible. It's not like somebody's guaranteeing you'll reincarnate, apparently it just happens occasionally.

More worthless evidence-free speculation on your part. Where is the proposed mechanism for this bizarre transfer of violent injuries to the body of the next life? How do you propose to test for it? What evidence do you have that this mechanism exists at all?

I just thought it was surprising. It's not like it matters what we "believe:" if it happens, it happens, if it doesn't, it doesn't. Kinda like evolution: whether or not we "believe" in evolution doesn't much change whether life forms evolve or not.

The impact of our conclusions is a red herring to their validity.

[Surlethe]

At Surlethe:
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/in ... sonres.cfm
Here's a link that lists some good resources.

Sorry; I'm not going to do your homework for you. It's your job to read, synthesize, and re-argue his positions; it's also your job to gather data to present to me, not simply point me at a study and say, "Read it."

I've read that first book, "Twenty cases suggestive of reincarnation." The campus library had it, so I checked it out.

Do you have any data? Or arguments from his book? And just twenty cases, out of 300 million in the US alone -- why couldn't these be coincidences?

Anyway, the thing of it is there really aren't a lot of other explanations. the "why" of birthmarks isn't fully understood, I'm given to understand. It's certainly possible that there is something else going on.

This is a phenomenon not even remotely suggested by current understanding of science. Please pardon my skepticism.

[daniel_gudman]

Actually, you should reject claims before someone provides evidence. Otherwise, any idiot can make arbitrary claims and simply stall on the evidence, and you have to take them seriously.

Yeah, but stalling for evidence can be construed as a lack of evidence, right? Basically, I'm saying, "well, here's some evidence, please look at this and challenge me on those grounds."

In my experience, people who harp on "civility" do so because they can't come up with real rebuttals.

What's your experience with people who intermix personal attacks with challenging the person's position?

More worthless evidence-free speculation on your part. Where is the proposed mechanism for this bizarre transfer of violent injuries to the body of the next life? How do you propose to test for it? What evidence do you have that this mechanism exists at all?

Well, since I'm not a scientist investigating reincarnation, I'd say "I don't have any propositions for any of that." But that's a tremendous cop-out, so I'll try to address your, uh, concerns.

So: "evidence-free speculation on [my] part." 1) I'm assuming that there's some kind of "soul" that exists as the vehicle for people to reincarnate sometimes. 2) I'm assuming it's destructible because everything that we know of in the universe is destructible. That's really it for speculation by me....

The mechanism is unknown. So's the mechanism for gravity. I'm not trying to steal credulance from Newton, but it is acceptable to say "something happens but we don't know how."

I honestly don't know how you'd go about measuring a soul. It's kinda beating a dead horse (was that a pun?), but I'd start with Kirellian photography.

What evidence do I have that this mechanism exists? Well... IF you accept that reincarnation happens, THEN we have to look for a mechanism. So I'm just taking the soul as the mechanism of reincarnation. I'm not trying to imply that religions who describe some kind of soul got it right.

If it makes you feel better, maybe souls don't exist and these kids are just taking up psychic imprints. It's really a crap-shoot in terms of believability once we get to this point.

[Darth Wong]

Actually, you should reject claims before
someone provides evidence. Otherwise, any idiot can make arbitrary claims and simply stall on the evidence, and you have to take them seriously.

Yeah, but stalling for evidence can be construed as a lack of evidence, right? Basically, I'm saying, "well, here's some evidence, please look at this and challenge me on those grounds."

No you're not, because you presented no evidence. "Explain this curiosity" is not a form of evidence, and you clearly haven't the faintest idea how a proper theory is supposed to be constructed.

In my experience, people who harp on "civility" do so because they can't come up with real rebuttals.

What's your experience with people who intermix personal attacks with challenging the person's position?

Like Einstein, who once characterized the Judeo-Christian idea of God as something that was "accessible to the most undeveloped mind"? Insults have no bearing on the quality of one's argument. Anyone who thinks they do is an idiot who values style over substance.

More worthless evidence-free speculation on your part. Where is the proposed mechanism for this bizarre transfer of violent injuries to the body of the next life? How do you propose to test for it? What evidence do you have that this mechanism exists at all?

Well, since I'm not a scientist investigating reincarnation, I'd say "I don't have any propositions for any of that." But that's a tremendous cop-out, so I'll try to address your, uh, concerns.

So: "evidence-free speculation on [my] part." 1) I'm assuming that there's some kind of "soul" that exists as the vehicle for people to reincarnate sometimes. 2) I'm assuming it's destructible because everything that we know of in the universe is destructible. That's really it for speculation by me....

And the reason to take these completely made-up propositions seriously is ...?

The mechanism is unknown. So's the mechanism for gravity. I'm not trying to steal credulance from Newton, but it is acceptable to say "something happens but we don't know how."

Gravity is a mechanism. Asking for a mechanism to explain gravity is nothing more than infinite regression trick. The fact is that you have no proposed mechanism whatsoever to explain why this should happen, and you don't have any empirical evidence that it does happen, so what do you have? Nothing.

I honestly don't know how you'd go about measuring a soul. It's kinda beating a dead horse (was that a pun?), but I'd start with Kirellian photography.

What evidence do I have that this mechanism exists? Well... IF you accept that reincarnation happens, THEN we have to look for a mechanism. So I'm just taking the soul as the mechanism of reincarnation. I'm not trying to imply that religions who describe some kind of soul got it right.

If it makes you feel better, maybe souls don't exist and these kids are just taking up psychic imprints. It's really a crap-shoot in terms of believability once we get to this point.

No, it's not believable at all. It's pure nonsense, without a shred of supporting evidence or credibility. The only "crapshoot" comes when you don't understand logic.

[Rye]

Hmm, having just watched an interesting documentary on memory, a few ideas crop up when dealing with reincarnation supporters. What happens when you get the soul or psychic imprint of a person with alzheimers? Hell, why is alzheimers so devastating if things like souls or psychic imprints exist?

[daniel_gudman]

To Surlethe:

Sorry; I'm not going to do your homework for you. It's your job to read, synthesize, and re-argue his positions; it's also your job to gather data to present to me, not simply point me at a study and say, "Read it."

Hm... a valid point. What I was trying to do was establish credibility by linking to a reputable website (a state university). Additionally, I wanted to establish that the study exists, and give you the sources I'm working from, instead of waving my hands and saying "it's on teh internets."

Of course I have to defend my position....

Do you have any data? Or arguments from his book? And just twenty cases, out of 300 million in the US alone -- why couldn't these be coincidences?

These are 20 interesting cases - there are a series of empirical studies that the book was drawn from.

I'm not saying everybody reincarnates. It's certainly possible that they are coincidences.

I guess I can dig up some raw numbers, but it'll take me a little bit, I'll bring back some figures in a day or two for you folks to tear on.

This is a phenomenon not even remotely suggested by current understanding of science. Please pardon my skepticism.

It's cool. I'm not trying to convince anybody... well, that's a lie. But yeah, it's pretty out there in terms of the hard sciences.

[Darth Wong]

Hm... a valid point. What I was trying to do was establish credibility by linking to a reputable website (a state university).

The psychiatry department. That is not a reputable source for such a fantastic claim as survival after death. They specialize in identifying neuroses and charging you $100/hr to talk about them, not examining pseudoscientific nonsense about mysterious energy fields.