No, something may well be impossible even thought we could never prove that. So, it doesn't necessarily follow that if we cannot prove it is impossible, then it must be possible — Janus

My dude, think of it in the context of Schrödinger's cat.
Until you open the box and see, it's all on the table.

That said, if something was impossible, it would be so obviously impossible that it would be inconceivable to thought and at the very least no one would argue otherwise.

Yes, and that sort of approach has wider implications in philosophy. It is deeply immoral, is it not? Intellectual honesty is right up there as a fundamental value. — S

I agree. It's not only dishonest to us (and a waste of our time), but to themselves. They think they're getting away with something, but in reality they're just undermining their whole theory by trying to base it on such fake argumentation.

Sure, things are relative. We should all spend more time thinking about how extraordinary it is that we exist in this vast, cold, amazing universe.

And yet, it's just blatantly ridiculous to claim you can't tell the difference between claims of eating cornflakes and of eating dragon eggs. That's just being disingenuous on your part. Don't pretend things cause you want to make your argument stick. — NKBJ

Your example is flawed because dragon eggs do exist. Komodo dragons lay eggs.

Trying to make something sound implausible is a silly tactic in my opinion. Reality is stranger than fiction. The internet, telephones and helicopters would have seemed implausible in the past.

The problem with trying to make something sound implausible is that you have to use words based on phenomena that do exist.

Nevertheless like I said not all afterlife claims are fantastical they can be quite mundane. You are begging the questioning by already assuming afterlife claims are going to be absurd.

You do realize that if rebirth doesn't extend beyond my personal belief in it, then it's not real? — NKBJ

That doesn't follow. Science itself is usually based on theories some of which turn out to be true. You can have an accurate belief that can be later validated by public or personal evidence.

You can have private mental states that are just in your mind like a headache that no one else has access to. You don't have to prove to someone one else that your mental states exist or are valid.

I am talking about private experiences and not personal beliefs anyway.

However we do have the phenomena of memory. We remember tons of things that happened in the past and no longer exist except in our memories and beliefs.

There is evidence of children recalling previous lives. See this article. — Wayfarer

For one, Stevenson used a translator, and Stevenson's publisher at first backed out because of accusations that the translator was dishonest. Stevenson admitted that the translator was dishonest in some matters.

Your example is flawed because dragon eggs do exist. Komodo dragons lay eggs. — Andrew4Handel

So that's just a purposeful fallacy of equivocation. And frankly, committing fallacies on purpose is is just as immoral and a waste of everyone's time as being disingenuous about what you believe.

You are begging the questioning by already assume afterlife claims are going to be absurd. — Andrew4Handel

Please don't put words in my mouth. I didn't say they are absurd, I said they are extraordinary, because ordinarily people don't make such claims. Furthermore, the absurdity of such claims stems from the lack of a single shred of corroborating evidence.

I didn't say they are absurd, I said they are extraordinary, because ordinarily people don't make such claims — NKBJ

So what was your inaccurate diversion on Dragon eggs about?

You can have an accurate belief that can be later validated by public or personal evidence. — Andrew4Handel

In which case it would, and always would have, extended beyond just your belief.

You don't have to prove to someone one else that your mental states exist or are valid. — Andrew4Handel

Ideas exist. The idea of an afterlife or previous lives exist. So does the idea of a unicorn. That is different from the thing in itself existing.

I mean, is that all you're out to prove? That there are people who believe in an afterlife? Yes, that's true. So what? Doesn't mean or follow that an afterlife exists.

So what was your inaccurate diversion on Dragon eggs about? — Andrew4Handel

It's also intellectual dishonesty to insist I repeat myself when I was perfectly clear and you chose to reply with a fallacy. Go back and reread it and then present me with a valid response.

So that's just a purposeful fallacy of equivocation — NKBJ

It is your problem that you were ambiguous. If you want to give an example of something absurd you probably should check that it doesn't exist.

You illustrated the problem of trying to think of something absurd when such a rich variety of strange phenomena already exist.

You and S seem to be making the assumption that we all agree on what is absurd.

In which case it would, and always would have, extended beyond just your belief. — NKBJ

I have been talking about mental states and whether they have to extend into the external world.

Whether or not a mental state is accurate or an illusion or just a false belief is a classical philosophical problem.

I don't think you can just assume mental states have a relationship to some kind of metaphysically secure external reality. We are not obliged to make metaphysical commitments about the nature of our mental states.

It is your problem that you were ambiguous. If you want to give an example of something absurd you probably should check that it doesn't exist. — Andrew4Handel

Nope. If I say "leprechaun" and you interpret "person afflicted with dwarfism," or I say "ghost" and you interpret "semblance or trace" then you're just purposefully misreading me, which is simply not my problem.

I mean, I could play that silly game too and interpret:

rich variety of strange phenomena — Andrew4Handel

as
rich: having great monetary value
variety: a kind or sort, like chocolate is a variety of ice cream
strange: alienated or bizarre
phenomena: a remarkable or exceptional person.

I really hope you see how that would be absurd, dishonest, and just entirely unphilosophical.

I don't think you can just assume mental states have a relationship to some kind of metaphysically secure external reality. We are not obliged to make metaphysical commitments about the nature of our mental states. — Andrew4Handel

Well, in that case, anyone's belief about the afterlife is not evidence for the afterlife.

I mean, I could play that silly game too and interpret: — NKBJ

It is not my fault that you gave a poor example to make a claim.

Why can't you come up with something that we can all agree is implausible?

I don't see why mythical dragons are implausible anyway. They are only a dinosaur/reptile like creature that lays eggs. Even given the principle of charity I don't find your example compelling.

Well, in that case, anyone's belief about the afterlife is not evidence for the afterlife. — NKBJ

That is not a claim I have made. We are clearly not going to agree on what constitutes good evidence.

Nope. If I say "leprechaun" and you interpret "person afflicted with dwarfism," or I say "ghost" and you interpret "semblance or trace" then you're just purposefully misreading me, which is simply not my problem. — NKBJ

Yes, that's clearly a problem he has. It's most obvious in how he has replied to you, but he did it with me also, asking me irrelevant questions as though I had a burden to answer them, as though they're representative of claims that I've made, when they were actually just straw men he decided to attack in place of my actual claims. It is quite annoying to have someone twist your words, especially when it is almost certainly deliberate, as in his replies to you. That dragon egg response was just embarrassing.

I'm not sure of the extent that he's doing this deliberately or whether it's more of an unconscious psychological thing, where he just can't let go, and feels a need to keep pushing on with this ridiculous attempt at a defence, but it doesn't do him any favours.

I'm not sure of the extent that he's doing this deliberately or whether it's more of a unconscious psychological thing, but it doesn't do him any favours — S

I'm not quite sure either, but I do know it's sucked all the interest out of this thread for now.

Caveat: the matter is subject to strong cultural taboos in Western society, for obvious reasons - such beliefs having been declared anathema in the early Christian church and also challenging current scientific understanding of the nature of mind. — Wayfarer

There just aren't enough reports with enough accuracy to make past life memories plausible over unspecified random mechanisms associating categories with grammatical english strings. I've read a few of these reports, and I've never seen anything in them that can't be explained by either the Barnum effect or random chance. You also have huge priming effects in a lot of them; kids have their memories 'jogged' by context in the studies (as Stevenson notes), but the 'jogging' is a priming effect which can trigger other priming effects. The reports develop over conversations, usually, and are not sufficiently controlled to establish the presence of any causal mechanism. Nevermind, y'know, literally remembering things from before the formation of the subject's brain.

Kids' memories about things besides past lives, about mundane events, are a lot stronger. Of course, one can always say past lives have a mystical quality of being remembered from beyond the veil, which reduces their information specificity and scope, but really that reduction of specificity and scope is precisely what one expects when this is randomness in huge, filtered for effect size (in the sense of only 'strong' reports of past lives are present and attributed causal mechanism, such conditioning invalidates actual scientific papers all the time) observational studies having non-specified causal structures during inference for hypothesis support.

Edit: and before you rejoinder with 'mind!=brain', I'm not saying that. I'm saying 'mind => brain' and using the Moorean shift.

How dare you ruin his narrative like that? It's not that it fails under the scientific method, it's that it's a strong cultural taboo which poses a challenge to Western society. And this Ian Stevenson guy is not a discredited charlatan, he's a much maligned hero. Oh, and despite appearances, this isn't spin, it's a matter of fact.

Got it?

There just aren't enough reports with enough accuracy to make past life memories plausible over unspecified random mechanisms associating categories with grammatical english strings. I've read a few of these reports, and I've never seen anything in them that can't be explained by either the Barnum effect or random chance. — fdrake

If it were as simple as you suggest, there would be no data.

If it were as simple as you suggest, there would be no data. — Wayfarer

Seriously? The existence of data on a topic gives validity to conclusions made from the data? It doesn't.

You are still failing to recognize the distinction between something being possible as far as we know, and something being actually possible.

For example as far as we know it is possible that there is a planet where all the cartoon characters ever created on Earth reside, and that they are psychic beings who projected images of themselves into the minds of their "creators' on Earth. But given the nature of nature such a thing might not be physically possible at all.

Janus
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You are still failing to recognize the distinction between something being possible as far as we know, and something being actually possible.

For example as far as we know it is possible that there is a planet where all the cartoon characters ever created on Earth reside, and that they are psychic beings who projected images of themselves into the minds of their "creators' on Earth. But given the nature of nature such a thing might not be physically possible at all. — Janus

Janus...

...until a thing is established as impossible...it is possible.

That is what the language means with those two words.

Anything that has not been established as IMPOSSIBLE...until established as impossible...

...IS POSSIBLE.

Seriously? — fdrake

Stevenson accumulated case information from the early 1980's until his death in 2007. Ultimately he collated around 2,700 cases where children were interviewed, and then the claims they made about their purported previous lives were cross-checked against documentary evidence, place-names, family histories and every other source of available data. During this period, Stevenson also rejected very many cases where he felt he was being gamed or that relatives were putting words in the child's mouth and so on.

One of his books on the research was called 'Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect' which mainly concerned apparent links between previous-death causes of mortality, and birthmarks and deformities in the child.

A Turkish boy whose face was congenitally underdeveloped on the right side said he remembered the life of a man who died from a shotgun blast at point-blank range. A Burmese girl born without her lower right leg had talked about the life of a girl run over by a train. On the back of the head of a little boy in Thailand was a small, round puckered birthmark, and at the front was a larger, irregular birthmark, resembling the entry and exit wounds of a bullet; Stevenson had already confirmed the details of the boy’s statements about the life of a man who’d been shot in the head from behind with a rifle, so that seemed to fit. And a child in India who said he remembered the life of boy who’d lost the fingers of his right hand in a fodder-chopping machine mishap was born with boneless stubs for fingers on his right hand only. This type of “unilateral brachydactyly” is so rare, Stevenson pointed out, that he couldn’t find a single medical publication of another case. — Jesse Bering

I think there's too much data presented in these cases to all be written off as coincidence or conspiracy. Also it should be noted that Stevenson never said that these cases amounted to proof of the veracity of past-life memories, only that it was suggestive of it.

If I had a "near-death experience" it might change my views, but someone else's experience cannot be good evidence for me to believe anything. Even the great Gautama stressed that we should believe nothing that is not based on our own experience; yet how many of his followers follow him in this?

I think there's too much data presented in these cases to all be written off as coincidence or conspiracy. Also it should be noted that Stevenson never said that these cases amounted to proof of the veracity of past-life memories, only that it was suggestive of it. — Wayfarer

You could interpret it that way, being 'suggestive' of it. But notice that being suggestive does not mean that belief in what is suggested is warranted! The data may be consistent with remembering past lives, but it is also consistent with chance. Also notice no causal mechanism is ascribed to 'remembering past lives', one blurs their eyes and thinks that such a scientific hypothesis has been suggested, but there are plenty of ways that it could happen, and the data provides evidence for none of them because it is consistent with all of them.

A Turkish boy whose face was congenitally underdeveloped on the right side said he remembered the life of a man who died from a shotgun blast at point-blank range. A Burmese girl born without her lower right leg had talked about the life of a girl run over by a train. On the back of the head of a little boy in Thailand was a small, round puckered birthmark, and at the front was a larger, irregular birthmark, resembling the entry and exit wounds of a bullet; Stevenson had already confirmed the details of the boy’s statements about the life of a man who’d been shot in the head from behind with a rifle, so that seemed to fit. And a child in India who said he remembered the life of boy who’d lost the fingers of his right hand in a fodder-chopping machine mishap was born with boneless stubs for fingers on his right hand only. This type of “unilateral brachydactyly” is so rare, Stevenson pointed out, that he couldn’t find a single medical publication of another case. — Jesse Bering

It's very easy to fit this to a narrative, but the narrative does not need a specified causal mechanism to make sense. It only requires us to understand the flow of ideas in the narrative. Such an understanding is not a scientific hypothesis, it's not any scientific hypothesis, it's a gigantic disjunction which rules out nothing and thereby supports nothing.

In order for those details in the story to provide information about the past life, the coincidence of events is not sufficient. One event has to be more likely given the other, and that minimal criterion for informativeness has never been established. Even this does not establish any causal mechanism, only correlation (or more precisely a reduction in relative entropy/increased specificity).

One concludes, say, obesity is a risk factor for heart disease because having any heart disease is more likely given being obese. Such reasoning is completely absent here, in this apparently knock-down example (as you have presented it) demonstrating that past lives are indeed remembered.

But apparently, you seek to collapse the distance between possibility/consistency and justification/causality, all the while paying lip service to the virtue of epistemological humility.

If Stevenson spent most of his life studying these reports and could only conclude the strongest examples are merely suggestive of his thesis, I wonder how this counts as evidence for typical 'past-life remembrance' candidates not being due to more mundane causes. Obviously, it does not, and even for Stevenson the absence of effect dominates.

You're paying lipservice to scientific thought when it suits you, it's an old game of snake oil and equivocation. I hope you're not buying.

Well said mr Drake.

If Stevenson spent most of his life studying these reports and could only conclude the strongest examples are merely suggestive of his thesis, I wonder how this counts as evidence for typical 'past-life remembrance' candidates not being due to more mundane causes. Obviously, it does not, and even for Stevenson the absence of effect dominates.

You're paying lipservice to scientific thought when it suits you, it's an old game of snake oil and equivocation. I hope you're not buying. — fdrake

I think that's a very disappointing and rather prejudiced response on your part, although I do understand the prejudices that invariably attend this topic. But Stevenson went to great lengths to observe scientific protocols in the same way he would have done had been studying epidemiology or genetics. Furthermore, the cases comprise many ascertainable facts which can't simply be explained away as coincidence.

In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground. Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out.

This was the procedure for literally thousands of cases. So I don't think chance or coincidence amounts to an explanation. But I do understand how controversial this research is; I discussed this very article with a self-appointed 'Zen master' on another forum, and he said 'all a coincidence'. (Significant that he was American, not Asian, I thought at the time. ;-)

So, do I believe Stevenson's research? I don't think you can explain away the convergence of facts but then I'm not pre-disposed against the idea, like most people are. Perhaps these children aren't actually 'the same person' as the so-called previous life at all; perhaps there's some psychic or extra-somatic medium, like Jung's collective unconscious, through which memories and experiences can be transmitted, and the newborn child somehow acquires them in which case no person is literally 'reincarnated'. But I think just writing it off as chance or coincidence doesn't come to terms with the data.

Even the great Gautama stressed that we should believe nothing that is not based on our own experience; — Janus

I think that is based on a common misinterpretation of the Kalama Sutta:

Although this discourse is often cited as the Buddha's carte blanche for following one's own sense of right and wrong, it actually says something much more rigorous than that. Traditions are not to be followed simply because they are traditions. Reports (such as historical accounts or news) are not to be followed simply because the source seems reliable. One's own preferences are not to be followed simply because they seem logical or resonate with one's feelings. Instead, any view or belief must be tested by the results it yields when put into practice; and — to guard against the possibility of any bias or limitations in one's understanding of those results — they must further be checked against the experience of people who are wise. The ability to question and test one's beliefs in an appropriate way is called appropriate attention. The ability to recognize and choose wise people as mentors is called having admirable friends. According to Iti 16-17, these are, respectively, the most important internal and external factors for attaining the goal of the practice. — Thanissaro Bhikhu

So, experience plays a part, but also, the goal of the path is not generally within our experience (otherwise there'd be no need of a path!)

any view or belief must be tested by the results it yields when put into practice — Thanissaro Bhikhu

So, any view or belief must be tested against your experience?

and — to guard against the possibility of any bias or limitations in one's understanding of those results — they must further be checked against the experience of people who are wise."

So, how do you test your view or belief as to who is wise if not against your own experience?

Why do you keep repeating the same nonsense over and over instead of at least attempting to tender some reason for why I should believe you are right and I am wrong?

So, regarding the cartoon example I gave: are you saying that we can prove such a thing is impossible, or are you saying that it is actually, as opposed to merely logically, possible that such a planet exists? If the latter, then how could you know that?

Note that I am not saying that we know that such a planet is actually impossible; the point is that we don't know that such a planet is actually possible either. So, it is only so far as we know that such a thing might be possible.