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

Yes, but bear in mind (and this is getting way off topic), the 'philosophy of experience' in Buddhism (which is the subject of the texts known as abhidharma) is different in Buddhism than in modern empirical or analytic philosophy. This is because it addresses the first-person nature of experience and close analysis and insight into the factors that condition experience. In Buddhism, it is assumed that the experience of the ordinary person ('uninstructed worldling') is conditioned by the 'three poisons' of craving, hatred and delusion; whereas 'the Buddha' and the 'aryas' (noble disciples) are by definition no longer subject to those - accordingly, they provide a standard of wisdom and conduct to aspire to.

whereas 'the Buddha' and the 'aryas' (noble disciples) are by definition no longer subject to those - accordingly, they provide a standard of wisdom and conduct to aspire to. — Wayfarer

I would say they are not that "by definition" at all, but by report. How do you know those reports are accurate?

I have met people I would count as highly intelligent who believed that Osho was the greatest spiritual figure of the 20th century. I have also met such people who believed Bubba Free John was the greatest spiritual figure. Osho belittled Bubba Free John and the latter belittled Osho in return. No doubt similar things went on in the time of Gautama with other contenders who are now lost to history. Now his "enlightenment" is romantically shrouded in the mists of history, and it does not seem so outrageous to claim that he was enlightened as it would to claim that of a contemporary.

I know you won't be swayed by rational considerations because your faith, or your emotional need to believe, is too strong. Hopefully it is the former and your faith is based solidly on your own experience, in which case you don't need to rationally justify it to anyone, because that would be mistake. It would be a mistake based on a kind of category error because your faith is (ideally) a vital, practiced interpretation of your own experience, is relevant only to that experience and no other, and is thus not something that can be inter-subjectively corroborated, such that any unbiased person must agree with you. That is the nature of religious faith: it is a purely personal matter for which no corroboration is possible, or necessary.

I think when you finally get this you will become much more relaxed about your faith, you will come to realize that it is for you and you alone, and you will cease to feel the futile need to proselytize.

Also, I don't think this is "off-topic" at all. Belief in rebirth should be on account of one's own experience, not on any account from others. If I vividly remembered my past 5,000 incarnations (as Gautama is reputed to have done) then I would perhaps believe in rebirth myself. But I have absolutely no sense whatsoever that I have ever lived another life. I have had many experiences I would consider "numinous" and profoundly ecstatic. Three of the most intensely beautiful came when I was meditating, not when I was tripping. The tripping experiences actually pale by comparison. But from all that I draw no conclusions. Christian mystics typically don't believe in past lives; they believe the soul is "one-off", immortal and unique.

I know you won't be swayed by rational considerations because your faith, or your emotional need to believe, is too strong. — Janus

Cuts both ways, you know.

you will cease to feel the futile need to proselytize. — Janus

I'm not proselytizing although I don't share the same distrust of anything religious that you habitually exhibit.

Christian mystics typically don't believe in past lives; they believe the soul is "one-off", immortal and unique. — Janus

Actually, there is an undercurrent of such beliefs in Christian culture. Origen considered something called 'metempsychosis' and the pre-existence of souls, influenced by neoPlatonism. But his ideas on the matter were declared anathema by the early Church - that is one of the reasons that reincarnation is a cultural taboo.

Cuts both ways, you know. — Wayfarer

What does that mean? I have provisional,(that is 'subject to change in light of further experience') faith in what I have experienced, but I don't expect others to count that as evidence for anything.

I'm not proselytizing although I don't share the same distrust of anything religious that you habitually exhibit. — Wayfarer

I don't distrust what might be called religious experience (my own experience that is); I distrust human institutions, where the reputed experiences, as well as the presumed implications of those experiences, of someone believed to be enlightened is inevitably fossilized into dogma. Your view of what I say does not seem at all balanced or accurate, and you don't seem to have attempted to provide any argument for the relevance or soundness of your view.

Actually, there is an undercurrent of such beliefs in Christian culture. Origen considered something called 'metempsychosis' and the pre-existence of souls, influenced by neoPlatonism. But his ideas on the matter were declared anathema by the early Church - that is one of the reasons that reincarnation is a cultural taboo. — Wayfarer

I have read fairly extensively in Christian mystical literature, and I cannot think of any example of any of the authors talking about rebirth or reincarnation. The Platonic notion of rebirth probably came from Indian influence. There is certainly some documentary evidence of intercultural influence. The fact that this idea hung around in the underground of Western thought is not surprising, the West has always had its sub-cultures it seems. The irony is that I agree with you that rebirth may be a taboo largely because of Christian dogma, (it also becomes a good candidate, in view of its being a taboo notion, to become a central article of belief of some dissident sub-culture), and yet you criticize me for distrusting organized religion. I don't believe any idea should be taboo, but the mere fact that some ideas may be taboo does not provide any argument in favour of them, or indeed against them.

Edit: I predict you won't respond to this post.

.

I'll be as clear as I can.

If a thing was clearly impossible, it wouldn't be debated - you couldn't think of it as possible, as it would be clearly and obviously impossible.
If you can conceive of it being possible, that alone shows it is possible.

Which is why Schrödinger's cat is equally dead and alive until examined.

You're missing the point. Being dead or alive are obviously two possibilities the cat instantiates. But being purple with pink polka dots, or being turnip-headed, or having a dozen legs, or purring like a chainsaw are probably not possible physical characteristics for the cat. They are all logically possible, but what is logically possible is not necessarily physically possible. So, it really has nothing at all to do with Schrödinger's cat.

Janus
7.1k
↪Frank Apisa
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? — Janus

If I said 2 + 2 = 4 in base ten...and you said..."Oh, no it doesn't"...do you actually think I would do more than just repeat it?

Either a thing is ESTABLISHED as impossible...or (until it is established as impossible) IT IS POSSIBLE.

That is what the what the wording means.

All I can do is repeat it.

But, if you insist on something more: Open your goddam mind and see the truth.

Okay?

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? — Janus

YES, Janus...I am saying that until you actually establish that it is impossible (which I doubt anyone could actually do)...IT IS POSSIBLE.

That is a given.

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.

Well...until you do establish that it is impossible...

...IT IS POSSIBLE.

That is what the word means.

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. — Wayfarer

Just to prove to you that my rejection of these reports 'suggesting' that remembrance from past lives is not based on blind prejudice, or scientific orthodoxy, or whatever irrelevant standard you're trying to portray me as holding, let's go through the above report.

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.

Great, already that the memory began with an elicitation from an external source. Moreover, it was part of a conversation which was recorded afterwards. This immediately means you can't distinguish conversational priming effects from those which arise from remembrance of past lives.

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.

Did the girl believe that her brother was 'mentally challenged' or that he was just 'stupid'? The '(mentally challenged)' bit is obviously some post processing of the report, we don't know if the girl actually remembered the brother as being an idiot or being mentally challenged or disabled in some non-specified way. This lack of specification allows the collator of the reports to substitute in 'mentally challenged' for 'dumb' in a just-so story. More formally, this is spending many 'researcher degrees of freedom' to tailor the post-processed (not original!) account to other things. On your standard, you would interpret low IQ, clumsiness, dyspraxia, any developmental disability effecting the mind, as equally being vindicated by the child saying she had a 'dumb' family member. But these details really matter. They matter because someone who had these specific memories with specified relationships in them would be having a typical event of memory; a young girl will probably know in what sense someone is 'dumb', but all we have here is that dumb was mapped to 'mentally challenged' during the post-processing of the report, with a vague status on precisely how much elicitation the mother treated the daughter too. You can only 'weasel out' of this with the stipulation that past life memories are qualitatively different from memories... IE they are not actually memories in the usual sense of the term.

This matters. A lot. You can give 'psychic readings' to people where you say Barnum statements and elicit specified responses, often people will remember you saying the elicited response rather than the Barnum statement. The report will say that 'The psychic predicted so many specific things about me!' and the person given the reading will have that memory, but the causal mechanism was one of elicitation rather than memory in a vacuum.

Herath is a unisex name, given that we do not know the degree of elicitation here, we cannot associate 'Herath' with 'bald father' accurately (also 'bald father', in a town with a Buddhist history, how specific!). We should have the same response to 'bald father called Herath' to 'mother with long brown hair called Herath', and it does not matter for the truthiness of the story which is which. But it absolutely does matter for the purposes of ascribing cause; the two are exchangeable for the purposes of the narrative validity, but are not exchangeable in terms of connection to a memory. You'd be saying the same thing for both, but they're different reports which would have been fit to the facts differently.

A marketplace near a stupa makes a lot of sense, they're going to be central features of a town.

For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were)

Yes, surely the memory averaged over the contents of male relatives, rather than being rather specific upon elicitation like usual memories. This is a retrojection of memory validity which just wasn't there, and has no causal mechanism associated with it. If you could tell me why it makes sense for 'ancestral memories' to sometimes average over male heritage lines and sometimes not I'd love to know.

The same goes for having dogs in the backyard being fed meat, this is common. The same goes for coconuts on the ground in marketplaces...

Anyway, the minimal criterion for one thing X being an indicator of another Y is that X is more probable (or less probable) given Y. One needs to assume that the relationship between the events in the town and the events the girl came up with are one of memory in order to assign that one is more probable given the hypothesis of memory. This goes in completely the wrong direction, what you should do when reviewing such reports is to ask the question "How likely is the scenario envisaged given how likely the scenario is to happen?'.

And when we ask 'how likely is the scenario to happen', the scenario needs to be highly specified, and not fit to the facts on an interpretive basis (which is what was done during the 'search' for the events of the memory).

Moreover, you also need to look over all possible remembrance events, if most are filtered out due to evidential standards, but some are left in without a pre-specified standard of validity (not which 'seem hardest to explain), you still have the problem of why are there so few reports which meet a higher evidential standard. Is the mechanism for generating the reports with a lower evidential standard substantially different for the mechanism generating the reports with a higher evidential standard? Or are they post selected for demonstrative purposes (which is what is being done here!)

If I took all the obese people in the world and looked at their chance of heart disease, I would vastly over-estimate the chance of heart disease in the general population if I did not take into account the fact that I have filtered the population. The same thing happens here, the reports of higher evidential standard say nothing about those which have a typical evidential standard; IE, most reports of such things are so easy to recognise as incredibly flawed that they are immediately removed from the study. To put it in plain words, the fact of the matter is that even if you grant that the memories considered in the higher evidential standard group are more likely to be remembrance of past lives than the ones in the lower evidential standard group, most reports of past lives are still too flawed to use as evidence.

And what is the standard for the ones in the higher evidential standard group? Not just the quality of elicitation, surely, one also wishes to check if they are true. Now, when they are true, we have a tiny subset of reports which purportedly describe real events. We now need to ask the question: does the probability of the real event increase when the event is described or elicited? But of course, since this pre-selection by coincidence of report with real events has happened, one can never ask this question of the data. The very criterion with which you would establish a mechanism of past life remembrance is excluded through the filtration of the study to the ones with a 'higher evidential standard'; which apparently is literally just the events elicited/described by the remember happened somewhere at some time under some interpretation (researcher degrees of freedom).

You might say that they happened in place X in way Y, but one needs to aggregate over the reports to get the real picture of what is going on. The relevance here is that things which happened in place X in way Y and were described as happening in some way related to X and some way related to Y is not the same criterion of validity as events X happening in way Y in the report (also note the priming/elicitation memory confusion here, it interacts!). The 'in some way' matters, as this is an inherent part of the filtration procedure; it has so many 'researcher degrees of freedom' that some fit is bound to happen for some reports. It is a mismatch inherent in the selection procedure for validity, you spend all the information you have on establishing the coincidence of real event with described event, not the conditional report validity (which is the minimal criterion for informativeness of X on Y... which is required for X to be memories of Y)

You might say I'm being too cautious, I would not hold up my beliefs in every-day life to this standard. And you're right, but the every-day is every-day, we need to have higher standards of evidential validity when considering questions as big as 'can we remember past lives?'.

Sure - ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. But what makes such cases 'extraordinary'? It's because, as I said, they go against the grain. I get that it's controversial, but his research is out there.

OK, I tried to open your mind to a more nuanced way of thinking about it, but you have proved to be the most locked-in interlocutor I have ever encountered, so much so that you feel the need to capitalize your words of insistence, so I'll leave you to it.

↪fdrake Sure - ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. But what makes such cases 'extraordinary'? It's because, as I said, they go against the grain. I get that it's controversial, but his research is out there. — Wayfarer

So despite me going through all that effort to show you why the report is not particularly strong support for remembering past lives, you don't care, and supplant your own prejudice that I'm just having an auto-immune response to woo.

I am having an auto-immune response to woo, but this comes from a place of considered analysis rather than revulsion. Which I'm sure you'd realise if you were interested in actually being open minded on the issue.

So despite me going through all that effort to show you why the report is not particularly strong support for remembering past lives, you don't care, and supplant your own prejudice that I'm just having an auto-immune response to woo. — fdrake

I had composed a very long response to your post, but I thought better of it. There's strong resistance to his claims, because, as I said, it's culturally taboo on two grounds - cultural and scientific - and I don't want to become the PSI advocate here. PSI research generally is highly fraught and pretty spiteful.

But Stevenson's magnum opus is almost 3,000 pages, it's full of tabular data about carefully-researched claims such as the one you dissected above. A three-year-old boy in Lebanon recalled having been killed in battle in his former life. He accurately reported how much money the person he had been had in his pockets at the time of his death and identified various personal articles when taken to that person’s home. A two-year-old boy in Turkey claimed he had frozen to death after an airplane crash in his previous life. The person’s family believed the man had died instantly in the crash, but when consulted, a Turkish Airlines official confirmed the man had indeed died from freezing. A two-year-old girl in Thailand remembered living in a monastery in her previous life. When taken there, she knew her way around, recognized a number of monastics, and even detailed what had changed about the buildings in the time since she had lived there. In many such cases, the location of a birthmark on the child’s body is said to correlate with an injury sustained at the time of death in a prior life.


2,700 cases, right? So we could go through all of these and show how every one of them was just coincidence and confabulation and wishful thinking, but I just don't think so. If you read the Wikipedia entry on Stevenson you will come away satisfied that he's a gullible fraud. So I'm not saying that *you* are prejudiced - it's simply the nature of the topic, it's a taboo subject. Ought not to be talking about it all. Over and out.

Janus
7.1k
↪Frank Apisa
OK, I tried to open your mind to a more nuanced way of thinking about it, but you have proved to be the most locked-in interlocutor I have ever encountered, so much so that you feel the need to capitalize your words of insistence, so I'll leave you to it. — Janus

Sounds like a plan.

By "rebirth", I mean something along the lines of "getting caught up in consciousness/life/world again."...
The idea here is of getting 'caught up' in life in some way again. It already happened once. If the pre-birth and post-death condition are the same, then why would life not again come forth? — Inyenzi

I don't see how any of this makes sense unless you assume there is some "essence" of a person.
i.e. that which makes you YOU, as a unique individual - and this essence cannot be physical, not even partly physical.

But it seems to me that many of the things that make me ME, are physical: memories and conditioned responses seem to be neural patterns. My sex (male) is related to my y-chromosome, and the testosterone that influenced my physical and emotional development. These made me what I am and continue to influence how I evolve.

Can some part of me live on (or again)? Sure- the molecules of my decaying body can fertilize a cornfield, but that isn't what I consider ME.

2,700 cases, right? So we could go through all of these and show how every one of them was just coincidence and confabulation and wishful thinking, but I just don't think so — Wayfarer

On what basis? Cause it seems like a large number?

Apparently 1.1% of the world's population is estimated to have schizophrenia. Over half are thought to hear voices.

1.1% of at least 7 billion is 77,000,000, and half of that is 38,500,000.

Am I supposed to think that all those people who hear voices are hearing real voices, just because it's such a large number of people?

Good point, not to mention that the number people hearing voices greatly surpasses the numbers of this research. That should be a red flag right there.

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. — Janus

It is not as far as we know, but regardless if we know.
Our knowledge as to the aforementioned example, neither gives or takes away from its possibility.

Such a planet may not be, but that does not make it impossible, that makes it currently unavailable.
Like I told you, the impossible is inconceivable, it is void. If you can think of it as possible, it is possible, and exists - somehow, somewhere.

Here's a quaint little example: You are dead right now. And by your standard, that is as far we know.
But consider, that reaching death is like reaching the end of the movie - it's already there, before you reach it. And your death being already established, not only makes it possible that you are already dead - but more or less true.

You're dead and you're alive at the same time.
Something that should be possible only as far as we know, yet would appear to be possible regardless.
Now on the off chance, that it is not so - then everything is only possible as far as we know.
And either, the world is impossible but we think it is possible because we dwell in it, or what we know and think holds verity and what we know and think of as possible - is actually possible.

Your choice.

It should indeed be a red flag, but if you're willfully blind, then you just won't see the red flag, or you'll see it momentarily, but then explain it away. Wayfarer is adept at this sort of thing. He is intelligent and knowledgeable, but he misapplies his skills. He does not approach matters like this objectively.

But Stevenson's magnum opus is almost 3,000 pages, it's full of tabular data about carefully-researched claims such as the one you dissected above. A three-year-old boy in Lebanon recalled having been killed in battle in his former life. He accurately reported how much money the person he had been had in his pockets at the time of his death and identified various personal articles when taken to that person’s home. A two-year-old boy in Turkey claimed he had frozen to death after an airplane crash in his previous life. The person’s family believed the man had died instantly in the crash, but when consulted, a Turkish Airlines official confirmed the man had indeed died from freezing. A two-year-old girl in Thailand remembered living in a monastery in her previous life. When taken there, she knew her way around, recognized a number of monastics, and even detailed what had changed about the buildings in the time since she had lived there. In many such cases, the location of a birthmark on the child’s body is said to correlate with an injury sustained at the time of death in a prior life. — Wayfarer

Show me any reasoning why the elicited description is more likely given the actual occurrence, or vice versa, without having to use memory of past lives as an explanatory assumption. You are supposed to establish that it is a memory of a past life, and to do that you need to show that the description was caused by the event or influenced it (or was influenced by it) in a manner which provides information. Not just having similar content to it after post processing for similarity.

I think it's safe to say that these shameless claims about "memories" of "past lives" have been debunked. What we have here is a discredited false authority, a misleading narrative, and faulty reasoning. And an enthusiastic salesman.

What we have here is a discredited false authority — S

I wouldn't quite go that far, he's surely looked at lots of reports. It's just that the design for their collation and verification will never allow you to establish the effect they're supposed to establish. If you want to argue this point, you probably need to look at the epistemology issues surrounding the interpretation of testimonial data for confirming hypotheses as @Sam26 does in his Near Death Experience threads.

i guess ill find out when i die. why think about it till then?

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. — Janus

It is not as far as we know, but regardless if we know.
Our knowledge as to the aforementioned example, neither gives or takes away from its possibility. — Shamshir

You're ignoring the fact that something might be, just on account of the way things are, impossible even though we could never know that with absolute certainty. Rebirth, to use the example of this thread, might be impossible due to the nature of the Cosmos. But take careful note, I am not saying that rebirth is logically impossible, it obviously is not since it involves no contradiction; I am saying that what is logically possible may have absolutely no bearing on what is actually possible. I am also not saying that rebirth is impossible just that it might be.

That something might be impossible does not imply that it must be possible, but rather that, just as it might be impossible, it also might be possible. The "might be" refers only epistemologically, not ontologically. Ontologically speaking something is either possible or it is not, just as is the case with logical possibility and impossibility. but the domains of logical possibility and impossibility and ontological possibility and impossibility do not necessarily coincide; they may or they may not, we simply cannot know.

Rebirth, to use the example of this thread, might be impossible due to the nature of the Cosmos. — Janus

That depends on how you define rebirth. If it is memories, then yes. but if it is 'attitude' then it is reasonable to think that someone else is born, somewhere in the continuum of time, with the same precepts as a person when they die, and so the latter could be considered a continuation of the same spirit. I dont see any necessary requirement for that to be after the first persons death, or before, or even in fact in a human body. It's a just a different way at looking at the progression that people make in their lives across the six main factors of reaction: fight/flight, freeze/fawn, and love/hate. Also there is a good model from MIT:



This kind of construct is obviously a simplificaiton, but it illustrates the kind of 'attitudes' that Im talking about.

The point is as to whether a causal connection could be established between the one who dies and the one who is born; is the latter a genuine continuance, in some way, of the former? Again, I'm saying that such a thing cannot be known to be impossible, but it cannot be known to be possible either; it could only be known to be possible if it were known to be actual.

You are supposed to establish that it is a memory of a past life, and to do that you need to show that the description was caused by the event or influenced it (or was influenced by it) in a manner which provides information. — fdrake

You're addressing me as if I did this research or am responsible for it, which I obviously wasn't. I'm simply presenting information about the research conducted by this individual.

Again, to reiterate: his method was to locate children who claimed to have memories of a previous life. This typically appeared as a child asserting that they were a different person or belonged to a different family, often with great insistence. Such subjects would be interviewed by the researcher who would attempt to ascertain as many facts as possible from the child's account of what he or she purportedly remembered - what their occupation was, where they lived, the names of their relatives, and the manner of their death. Then the researcher would attempt to establish the identity of the purported previous life, and attempt to validate the facts in the account against other sources. These would include eyewitness testimony, newspaper reports, death certificates, and the like. As mentioned in previous posts, in many of these cases the individuals concerned appeared to possess specific knowledge for which there was no apparent other explanation than their direct memory of it; that forms the basis of the research.

According to Stevenson, he trained his team to observe the same kinds of protocols and procedures that would be followed in any other of the social sciences. (He had previously been a psychiatrist.)

It's just that the design for their collation and verification will never allow you to establish the effect they're supposed to establish. — fdrake

Which is why Stevenson's literature always said the studies suggested the possibility of reincarnation. He didn't claim to have proven it. But, as he presented a large amount of data, then in a thread on the subject the existence of that information ought to be acknowledged. As I said at the outset, this was in response to the typical (and eye-rolling) claims that there could never be 'any evidence' of such claims, when there is. Sure, Stevenson might have been a dupe, as the sceptics say, but in light of the amount of evidence he assembled I for one am not persuaded that this is the case.

The other point that ought to be noticed is the number of responses which assume that this research could not be true, and that there must be something wrong with the methodology or the researcher. From a philosophical perspective, that is the point: simply as a hypothetical, what would it say if such things were found to be true?

I don't see how any of this makes sense unless you assume there is some "essence" of a person. i.e. that which makes you YOU, as a unique individual - and this essence cannot be physical, not even partly physical. — Relativist

If you were a process philosopher, then you might analogise the possibility of rebirth as being more like a coherent stream of consciousness, than an essence. In fact that's close to the Buddhist attitude, which is that there is no person or singular self-existent entity which transmigrates from one life to another. Instead it's conceptualised in terms of the terminology of the 'citta-santana' (sometimes translated as 'mind-stream') which is the moment-to-moment continuum (Sanskrit: saṃtāna) of sense impressions and mental phenomena, which is also described as continuing from one life to another .

It was on this basis that Buddhist philosophers developed the concept of the ālāyavijñāna, or 'storehouse consciousness', which has been compared to Jung's concept of the collective unconscious (details here.)

I don't see how any of this makes sense unless you assume there is some "essence" of a person. i.e. that which makes you YOU, as a unique individual - and this essence cannot be physical, not even partly physical. — Relativist


If you were a process philosopher, then you might analogise the possibility of rebirth as being more like a coherent stream of consciousness, than an essence. In fact that's close to the Buddhist attitude, which is that there is no person or singular self-existent entity which transmigrates from one life to another. Instead it's conceptualised in terms of the terminology of the 'citta-santana' (sometimes translated as 'mind-stream') which is the moment-to-moment continuum (Sanskrit: saṃtāna) of sense impressions and mental phenomena, which is also described as continuing from one life to another . — Wayfarer

I don't see how you can escape the essence issue if we are to regard this as an individual person (such as ME) being re-born. Whatever it is that is reborn is not ME unless it has all the necessary and sufficient properties that individuates me.

But that does rely on there being an essence. What is 'essence'? It is 'what makes a thing or being itself' in the tradition of Aristotelian metaphysics. But Buddhism is not an essentialist philosophy, it doesn't recognise essence as such. According to Buddhist principles, 'everything arises as a consequence of dependent origination and is empty of own-being.'

And I might add, every being's self-perception gives rise to the sense of 'me'. I guess that this sense is fundamentally the same in every being - what is different in each, is the unique memories and experiences that are associated with it.

If there is no notion of essence involved in a claim that rebirth is real, then it is meaningless to say that a particular individual is reborn as @Relativist has noted.