I think Popper was talking about his famous falsifiability criterion for judging whether a given theory is scientific/empirical or not. If a given theory T explains everything then, nothing contradicts it and so it's unfalsifiable. — TheMadFool

So relegating the theory of reincarnation to the realm of non-logical theories doesn't undermine it. — Pantagruel

But being unfalsifiable relegates any theory of reincarnation based solely on memories of past lives to pseudoscience. Can we do anything to repair such theories to make them scientific? — TheMadFool

But as I was pointing out, not all theories in the "human" realm are - or must be - scientific. To think that all theories must be scientific in nature is what leads down the slippery slope of reductionism. — Pantagruel

But as I was pointing out, not all theories in the "human" realm are - or must be - scientific. To think that all theories must be scientific in nature is what leads down the slippery slope of reductionism. — Pantagruel

Making such a theory scientific will push up its credibility rating to 100%, a desirable state of affairs, don't you think? — TheMadFool

"current science." — Pantagruel

false memory — Philosophim

1. There are verifiable memories of past lives — TheMadFool

1. There are verifiable memories of past lives — TheMadFool

So relegating the theory of reincarnation to the realm of non-logical theories doesn't undermine it. — Pantagruel

So your claim is that if we permit illogical theories then reincarnation is permissible? — Banno

Pareto — Pantagruel

the children who recalled their last lives — Wayfarer

The theory would not be proven even if all the children's reports were true and not explainable by the children being told what they said they remembered. — Janus

Stevenson’s magnum opus, published in 1997, was a 2,268-page, two-volume work called Reincarnation and Biology. Many of his subjects had unusual birthmarks and birth defects, such as finger deformities, underdeveloped ears, or being born without a lower leg. There were scar-like, hypopigmented birthmarks and port-wine stains, and some awfully strange-looking moles in areas where you almost never find moles, like on the soles of the feet. Reincarnation and Biology contained 225 case reports of children who remembered previous lives and who also had physical anomalies that matched those previous lives, details that could in some cases be confirmed by the dead person’s autopsy record and photos.

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.

But in many cases, prior commitments are unlikely to be swayed by such considerations. — Wayfarer

The philosopher Paul Edwards, editor-in-chief of Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, became Stevenson's chief critic. From 1986 onwards, he devoted several articles to Stevenson's work, and discussed Stevenson in his Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (1996). He argued that Stevenson's views were "absurd nonsense" and that when examined in detail his case studies had "big holes" and "do not even begin to add up to a significant counterweight to the initial presumption against reincarnation." Stevenson, Edwards wrote, "evidently lives in a cloud-cuckoo-land."

Almeder was strongly influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce, Ian Stevenson, and W.O. Quine, and subscribes to Cartesian dualism, broadly rejecting scientism and materialism. Stevenson's reincarnation research work on children who claimed to remember past lives convinced Almeder that minds are irreducible to brain states. He has argued in several papers and in his Beyond Death: The Evidence for Life After Death (1992) that Stevenson's critics, most notably the philosopher Paul Edwards, have misunderstood the nature of Stevenson's work.[5]

I say not, because reincarnation is just one theory to explain this phenomenon. Others are that there are "Akashic Records" or a "collective unconscious" or "universal mind" where every detail of everyone's lives are stored, and that the children were inexplicably able to "tap into" those details. — Janus

Discussion of reincarnation is a taboo topic on this forum in Western culture.

If you really want to know what research has found, google Ian Stevenson and read some of the facts. This is as good a place to start as any.

The point to note is that in the many cases he documented, the children who recalled their last lives knew facts for which there was no external explanation - buried coin boxes, hidden doors, locations of buildings and trees no longer there, and numerous other such details. Of course, it is widely accepted now that Stevenson was a dupe and a fraud who was sucked in by wishful thinking. In this matter, people will believe what they will, I know a few western Buddhist converts who refuse to believe anything Stevenson published.

A more recent and quite scholarly study by a Buddhist monk can be found here. — Wayfarer

If the ability of a person to remember another dead person's memory is not reincarnation, what is your definition of reincarnation? — Philosophim

A greater problem with reincarnation is the nature of the self. That is, what is it that is being reincarnated?

Suppose, TheMadFool, that you found yourself remembering, as if they were your own, things that did not happen to you, but happened to someone else. Suppose you remember being Chancellor of Germany in 2019.

Would you then conclude that you are Angela Merkel?

And if not, then if you had the memories of Julius Caesar, why would you conclude that you were Julius Caesar?

That is, there seems to be more to being you than just having your memories.

IF reincarnation is to make sense then one needs to be clear as to what it is that is being reincarnated. — Banno

IF reincarnation is to make sense then one needs to be clear as to what it is that is being reincarnated. — Banno