Empirical Proofs of reincarnation.

[aleCcowaN]

...

This is what's really silly. He promises an empirical proof. Then when his critics point out that it's not empirically valid, he says he doesn't believe in empiricism, or that the nature of what he's studying defies empirical expostulation. I just laugh when he says his critics don't understand proof. Buddha can't seem to see all the times he shoots himself in the foot with his own rejoinders.

...

It's the whole "¡Viva el Popper! ---> you don't understand Popper ---> I'm not with Popper in this ---> Popper is garbage" all over again. He's basically a prolific epistemological hedonist when it comes to choose fields and write random assertions to impress femmes de ménage and pimple-ridden teen hillybillies, but as a wannabe dialectitian, he's a wanting one-trick pony.

"Buddha" simply threw in the towel in his last post, for what he ended up being an extremely disappointing fellow, falling short to every expectation of being a resilient arguer and being able to make sense now and then as it was insinuated at the beginning of his participation.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I do not have a choice but to reply to several posts at once. I’m going to go over the most common objections.

No, you aren't. You just have thrown in the towel and are going to provide a façade.

1) I didn’t consider all possible explanations of the empirical data that I observed.
These possible explanations include souls of the dead humans (a psychic would come up with this explanation), souls of the dead aliens (L. Ron Hubbard/Scientology), demons, evil spirits, benevolent spirits, goblins, banshes, Leprechauns, etc. It appears that I would have to prove on a separate basis that none of these entities exists. Luckily, I do not have to do that, all I have to do is to say the magic words, “Maxwell demons” and all these cooties disappear.

There is a reason why Maxwell demons do not exist, it also applies to all these non-existent critters.

There is a famous doctrine developed by Buddha, it is called non-atman doctrine (the word “atman” means “soul” in Sanskrit). Buddha put forward this doctrine to show that the Hinduism concept of the soul (self) is false. He provided several proofs showing that the souls and astral bodies do not exist.

2). I didn’t provide empirical proof of the reincarnation.

Empirical proofs in general are facts and explanations of them. Let’s take a look at the facts that I provided: a. Natasha gave correct answers to all my questions that I delivered in Russian; b. Joe and Henrik recalled phrases and written words delivered in the languages that they didn’t learn in their current lives; c. A past life recall procedure is presented in the book Buddhist Scriptures written by Conze, at least this is his interpretation of the procedure, although not everyone agrees with him. Conze also named the original Sanskrit text describing the procedure. What are possible interpretations of these facts?

I. These facts is a lie, I made up these stories to promote my book about reincarnation.

I am not promoting my book because it doesn’t exist. Some of my opponents know my name, they could check if there is a reincarnation book under my name on the market.

II. These facts is a lie, I made up these stories because I am a pathological liar.

Pathological lying is a symptom of mental illness. I cannot prove that I am sane; in fact no one can prove that he/she is sane. But if someone thinks that I am mentally ill they should not waste their time arguing with a crazy person.

III. My subjects somehow fooled me, they actually learned their “past life language” in this life.

There is a small chance of that. But, realistically speaking, how small it is? Unless they all conspired to fool me, it seems that this chance is almost zero.

IV. There are other explanations of these facts that do not involve the reincarnation.

That brings us back to the Maxwell demons

3. I didn’t observe the reincarnation process.

The opponents who raised this objection are unfamiliar with current scientific requirements of a proof, in particular in quantum mechanics.

In a nutshell, you do not have to propose a mechanism of a process, but you have to predict its outcome. Take, for example, quantum tunneling. According to the rules of classic mechanics, a particle cannot enter a region surrounded by a potential field large than its kinetic energy. But quantum mechanics predicts that there is a possibility that a particle can enter such region, which happened to be the case. However, quantum mechanics doesn’t say anything about the events that take place when a particle penetrates the potential barrier, so you might say that the mechanics of this process are unknown.

The same is true for the reincarnation – the mechanics of it are either unknown or there is none (I prefer the latter).

Boring ruminations those of yours. You just provided evidence that you have personal reasons to believe reincarnation is true, and that you don't like other beliefs. And that's basically all that you really said in those paragraphs.

We already know you write about topics you don't know, that you argue based of books you didn't read. And we mainly know that your wishful thinking is on steroids making the term "epistemological hedonist" a very mild one to describe you. So there's enough reason to believe you didn't check if Natasha had learnt some Russian from other people in contact with her or whether she was a very smart kid language-wise and she could cold read you (I imagine you like Clever Hans' owner providing anxious hints of what you wanted to hear). The dialogues and "written texts" mentioned by Joe and Henrik are moooost probably the projection of your own wishes, hence they matched the languages you believed you knew (Your language profficiency is not rich as you claim it to be -maybe in Russian, your native language, it is-)

 

[Buddha]

Especially when the corollary to the claimed validation is, "...but it may not work for you." That fails the reproducibility test, the same thing that dooms all sorts of mumbo jumbo like tarot readings. (Tarot readers are not supposed to consult the cards more than once for the same question.) If the method only works for some researchers and not others, or one time but not another, then it is not an empirically valid method.

"Some people don't have past lives." Very well and good as part of the hypothesis, but then there's no observation that distinguishes the case of the method not working from the case of the method working but having no past life from which to draw results. The method is not empirically valid without the ability to make such an observation.

"If you're open-minded enough, you can try the method for yourself." This entirely misses the point and invites the critic to reason in circles. I'm open to the possibility that there exists a method by which legitimate memory regression can occur. However, I'm prima facie skeptical because, as Dave Rogers notes, false memories are a well-studied phenomenon. Any proposed method has to deal with that. And any method claimed to have empirical validity must deal with the possibility of false memories empirically. And the meditation methods as expressed in Edward Conze's works are exactly the sorts of things that would give rise to false memories, and no control applies to validate them. (No, Buddha, I'm not going to allow my review of your methods to devolve into quibbling over irrelevant excerpts from some other author. This is about your "empirical" proof for reincarnation.)

That said, I'm open-minded and willing to entertain evidence that the Conze method works. Conze provides none. And the experiment Buddha proposes has no control. I perform the procedure and obtain something that seems like a memory. By what observation am I expected to verify that what I've thought of is an actual memory from my life? That it simply exists is not the proof. Loftus et al. showed the ease with which such false memories can take root. The empiricism relied on experiences which the researchers knew for a fact the subject had not undergone, but which were "recalled" later as if they were memories. Open-mindedness still requires me to have an observation by which a real memory that I conjure up Conzesequely can be distinguished from the false memories real science tells us will easily occur.

This method has no way to detect either false negative observations or false positive observations. It's empirical doo-doo.

But wait, there's more. The method purports to recover memories from past lives. Since the validity of the method in that respect relies on the premise that past lives exist, which is what Buddha is trying to prove, it's yet another example of his notoriously circular reasoning. Let's grant for this paragraph the condition that if past lives exist, then (without loss of rigor) a method could be said to produce evidence of it. But we're still stuck with mental images and snippets of what seem like recollection that now allege to come from possibly the distant past, placing them almost entirely beyond the range of one's own ability to verify. No observation distinguishes present-life memories from past-life memories; it's all the subjective impression of the subject. Whatever the subject "remembers" is labeled a past-life memory, quod erat demonstrandum. Yet another circle in the argument.

When someone claims to be making an empirical argument, I assume he knows what empiricism means. This is simply and clearly not the case with Buddha. He demonstrates no working knowledge of empiricism as a theoretical notion or empirical methods as a practical approach to developing real-world knowledge. For someone supposedly well versed in empiricism to ask what "empirical controls" are is like someone claiming to be an expert in applied mathematics and not knowing what finite element methods are, or someone claiming to be an expert in control theory not to know what a differential controller is. It's that level of fundamental deficiency.

At this point it's clear what a waste of time Buddha's "proofs" are.

Let's talk about false memories. False memories refer to events that didn't happen, including the languages that don't exist. But if a person reproduces a REAL language that he didn't learn in his current life, how this could be a false memory? I would like to see your response to my remark.

Every scientific theory begins with a hypothesis, not with assumption. later the hypothesis is either confirmed to proved to be false. In this case the hypothesis is that the past lives exist. I claim that I found the evidence that supports the hypothesis of existence of past lives. But I didn't assume from the start that reincarnation exists for a simple reason -- I was an agnostic before I begun my past lives research. Of course, I heard about reincarnation before, but I was not sure that it is real, so I decided to investigate it as a hypothesis.

You didn't follow my logic completely. I didn't cite Conze because I see him as an authority on the past lives, I was just saying that his book is printed on the paper, which makes its existence a fact.

 

[Buddha]

Or that the child was, to some degree, exposed to an environment where Russian was spoken during the three years you didn't know her. I've personally seen children as young as four years old pick up bits and pieces of languages that are occasionally spoken around them, with suitable comprehension. Then if you study the language development of children from the literature in the field, you realize that children eight years old and younger have a remarkable facility for languages that disappears in adulthood. This, being part of the relevant body of knowledge, should have been something you thought about and investigated if your goal was to empirically prove reincarnation.

All you have in terms of actual observation is a three-year-old who responded to you while you were speaking Russian. All the rest is embellishment. And your "empiricism" amounts to assuming it must be due to reincarnation, and throwing out a straw man of deliberate deception as the only alternative.

Natasha's mother told me that her daughter grew up at the Church of Scientology's kindergarten where nobody speaks Russian. Theoretically speaking, she could have lied about that although I do not see why -- she could not have known in advance that she would meet a Russian-speaking person. She was not trying to promote her book either because the cult doesn't allow its stuff to write their own books. In order to do that she would have to quit her job.

 

[JoeMorgue]

It's the whole "¡Viva el Popper! ---> you don't understand Popper ---> I'm not with Popper in this ---> Popper is garbage" all over again. He's basically a prolific epistemological hedonist when it comes to choose fields and write random assertions to impress femmes de ménage and pimple-ridden teen hillybillies, but as a wannabe dialectitian, he's a wanting one-trick pony.

It's the game that never ends because every step in it can be defended via "But that's valid philosophy" even if as a whole thing added up it's a pile of sawdust and rat droppings.

 

[Buddha]

The criticism was to your co-opting of the phrase to mean cajoling your critics to lower their standards so that your argument clears it. You didn't address that. Nor did you answer the question whether you are open-minded enough to accept that you might be wrong.



Not until you demonstrate empirically that the procedure actually recalls past lives. Since you're unwilling to do that, your proof fails right there.

You're judging me too harshly. I do not want the critics to lower their standards, I just simply do not have time to respond to all posts.

Let's make a deal -- I accept that I am wrong if you explain how Joe was able to reproduce phrases in a Turkic language. You could say that Natasha's parentsfooled me by teaching her Russian because it is very helpful for a person (tons of scientific literature is published in Russian). The same true about Henrik -- Spanish is one of the world's leading languages. But the language that Joe reproduced is completely useless, it might be as well a dead language, it is not even Turkish. Who in his
right mind would learn it just to fool me? Besides, Joe would have known in advance that some day I will ask him if he wants to recall his past life

 

[Crossbow]

Let's talk about false memories. False memories refer to events that didn't happen, including the languages that don't exist. But if a person reproduces a REAL language that he didn't learn in his current life, how this could be a false memory? I would like to see your response to my remark.

Every scientific theory begins with a hypothesis, not with assumption. later the hypothesis is either confirmed to proved to be false. In this case the hypothesis is that the past lives exist. I claim that I found the evidence that supports the hypothesis of existence of past lives. But I didn't assume from the start that reincarnation exists for a simple reason -- I was an agnostic before I begun my past lives research. Of course, I heard about reincarnation before, but I was not sure that it is real, so I decided to investigate it as a hypothesis.

You didn't follow my logic completely. I didn't cite Conze because I see him as an authority on the past lives, I was just saying that his book is printed on the paper, which makes its existence a fact.

Since you did not record your sessions with this person, then it is impossible to verify that the person in question was actually speaking Russian. Also, since the mother of your subject was a native Russian speaker, then it is quite likely that your subject learned at least few Russian words/phrases without realizing it.

Furthermore, since you already have a well established record of getting things wrong, then people here at the Forum have great difficulty in accepting your version of events as the factual version of events.

 

[Buddha]

Dave Rogers suggests this statement should be taken out and shot. I say it should be shot, hung, drawn and quartered, and its head left to rot on a pike. The sentiment you express here is about as anti-empirical as a statement can get. And before you get all pontifical, keep in mind that empiricism is how quite a lot of us make our living. We know what it is. And we certainly know what it isn't.

Your proposition is that reincarnation exists as an actual phenomenon. But you don't define what that means in terms that can be empirically tested. Predictably your proof is as far as one can get from empiricism. The bizarre excuse you gave was simply a vague handwaving reference to names you've dropped before.

Buddha: Here is an empirical proof for reincarnation.
Jay: There's nothing empirical at all about that.
Buddha: I don't believe in Popper.​

And if your hypothesis is that the process of reincarnation exists operatively, then the null hypothesis is that there is no such process as reincarnation (however you define it a priori). Empiricism seeks to falsify the null hypothesis. Most often it does so by deducing what would necessarily follow only if the null hypothesis were false and the proffered hypothesis true, and observing those consequents as the occur in nature or as they are made to appear by design. This is the hypothetico-deductive method, also called the scientific method, also called the empirical method.

You don't do any of that. You simply observe a consequent and, without any further observation whatsoever, declare that your desired antecedent "must" be its cause.

You must define reincarnation such that it is empirically testable. Then you must devise experiments or engagements that produce observation relevant to those tests. That's what empirical proof consists of.



Only you know your purpose. But if you're inviting us to speculate, here it is :—

I think you're trying to convince yourself (and possibly others) that you're an accomplished scholar who deserves recognition for tackling the "hard questions," most of them having to do in some way with your religion. I'm not going to address any of the straw men you threw out there, except on the one point below. You clearly want to be seen as knowledgeable and well-read, but you employ chiefly social-engineering methods to create that impression dishonestly out of what amounts to a very little actual knowledge. I surmise that your contribution here is an ego-reinforcement exercise. You want a theatrical exercise that you can mold according to your "plan" into a shape that resembles having made a good showing regardless of the actual outcome.

The common thread in all your stories is your personal accomplishment in one way or another. You wove a similar thread through your "proof" for God. It's all about what a skilled and venerable person Buddha is, and how respect must be given for it by accepting the proofs based on it. You embellish your stories with hearsay and detail that serve more to discredit them than support them. Why the irrelevant detail? Because it's the detail that polishes your self-image. So what's a reasoned conclusion to draw from stories that provide irrelevant ego-stroking detail at the expense of credibility? What could be the teller's purpose?



No.

I'm an agnostic here and your stories convince me you are frantic to prove your belief in the Buddhist flavor of reincarnation. This "proof" is an act of desperation, not of scholarship or science. Certainly not one of logic. An agnostic looking for a non-religious reason to examine a religious claim would laugh at what you've posted. You're not as objectively credible as you believe.

You made the veiled accusation in your opening post that people would accept your proof if they were sufficiently open-minded. As an agnostic (and as a skeptic in general) I showed you what would be required to convince me. If I did not have an open mind, I would reject claims of reincarnation as preposterous on their face. However I gave your argument a careful reading and -- with reasonable objectivity -- pointed out exactly the ways in which it did not meet the standard of proof that other empirical arguments meet or seek to meet.

You did not give that review a reasoned response. You simply handwaved it away. In that response I asked you whether you were open-minded enough to consider the possibility that your religious beliefs are wrong. Or whether you're open-minded enough to consider that your proof is unconvincing for reasons that have nothing to do with the shortcomings of your critics. Well, I have my answer.

I am growing tired of listening about Popper and his failed philosophy, so I will skip that portion of your post.

Now about my reasons for "inventing" these stories. You see them as an attempt to aggrandize myself. An aggrandizement is also a form of mental illness (think about Hitler, Lenin and several others). It would be simpler for you to say that I am mentally ill and drop out of discussion because, as I noted before, it makes no sense to argue with a crazy person. Do not be afraid to hurt my feelings because no one can do that. I'll be honest with you -- I like flattery like anyone does. But I am completely immune to criticism; I do not know why, I was just born this way.
Sorry guys -- I am making too many grammatical mistakes because I am running out of time.
Buddha out.

 

[Porpoise of Life]

Let's make a deal -- I accept that I am wrong if you explain how Joe was able to reproduce phrases in a Turkic language.

No, first, you establish that he did.

I am completely immune to criticism; I do not know why, I was just born this way.

Oh, we've noticed...

 

[JoeMorgue]

But I am completely immune to criticism; I do not know why, I was just born this way.

This is one of those statements that a certain... let's just say type of poster likes to drop in the middle of a word salad wall of text and hope it goes unnoticed yet somehow makes it impossible to think they don't understand exactly what they are doing.

 

[Pixel42]

Natasha's mother doesn't even need to have spoken Russian around her, let alone deliberately taught her Russian, just listening to Russian language broadcasts whilst the child was in the room would have been sufficient for the child to pick up a few words.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Let's talk about false memories. False memories refer to events that didn't happen, including the languages that don't exist. But if a person reproduces a REAL language that he didn't learn in his current life, how this could be a false memory? I would like to see your response to my remark.

There's only evidence that you believed they were talking in languages you declared to know. Where are the records? Aren't any of them? Well, then, in one of many of your explorations into this subject you must have crossed ways with other individuals that recalled snippets of languages you somewhat knew; where are their records?

Don't make the sloppiest and scarcest job at gathering information and try to pass it as "evidence".

It begins to be obvious that you have told all of what you "have" on this subject and as I already told you -and nobody would disagree- the whole bunch is real evidence that you have some personal reasons to believe in reincarnation/past lives or whatever you believe.

 

[carlitos]

This is one of those statements that a certain... let's just say type of poster likes to drop in the middle of a word salad wall of text and hope it goes unnoticed yet somehow makes it impossible to think they don't understand exactly what they are doing.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Every scientific theory begins with a hypothesis, not with assumption. later the hypothesis is either confirmed to proved to be false. In this case the hypothesis is that the past lives exist. I claim that I found the evidence that supports the hypothesis of existence of past lives. But I didn't assume from the start that reincarnation exists for a simple reason -- I was an agnostic before I begun my past lives research. Of course, I heard about reincarnation before, but I was not sure that it is real, so I decided to investigate it as a hypothesis.

And what a sloppy job you did. You winded up buying the hypothesis even before having gathered the very first piece of real evidence.

I provided you with a link to a serious researcher in the field you're promoting and asked your opinion. You didn't bother in replying. That's a sign that not only you have nothing solid on the subject but you are also here to parade your ignorance and generate as many verbal duels as you can just for narcissistic reasons.

 

[aleCcowaN]

She was not trying to promote her book either because the cult doesn't allow its stuff to write their own books. In order to do that she would have to quit her job.

I think we have something to work here (I suppose you meant "staff"). Have you noticed that your stories go changing every time you provide additional "information"?

 

[calebprime]

Thank you. One had not seen this, nor indeed, heard it.

 

[aleCcowaN]

You're judging me too harshly.

No wonder. You introduced yourself here as the author of a piss poor "criticism" on evolution and you started a thread saying you were going to prove there was a creator which you abandoned after a thousand posts of you failing and mostly ignoring the fair criticism aimed at you.

The same true about Henrik -- Spanish is one of the world's leading languages.

You have still to prove you have the slightest command of Spanish. Let's see what can you make of the following de-googled fragment (a native speaker of any country would be able to render the text correctly and identify almost all the terms used there)

"carancambon ba seizoalmar consuban dera ien un perno mescloparis conpuentealsina"

But the language that Joe reproduced is completely useless, it might be as well a dead language, it is not even Turkish. Who in his right mind would learn it just to fool me?

Wait a minute. How did YOU know it's a language close to Turkish? What was really said in that session?

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Buddha, can you provide as many details as you know about your past life, please?

 

[JayUtah]

Let's talk about false memories. False memories refer to events that didn't happen, including the languages that don't exist.

No, that's not what the false-memory syndrome is. I can see you've done little if any actual reading on the subject. A false memory is simply a purported memory that contains things that did not happen. It does not have to be entirely false. In fact is is almost entirely the case that a false memory (as we're using the term) is a combination of several poorly-remembered real incidents combined with fabricated and induced elements that serve to combine the disparate elements in a coherent narrative, often a narrative unconsciously imposed by a facilitator.

As usual you're trying to pretend that what little you know or can guess of a subject is sufficient. You don't know what you're talking about. Please stop gaslighting me and your other critics into thinking you do and we don't. It's offensive and rude.

But if a person reproduces a REAL language that he didn't learn in his current life, how this could be a false memory?

Because the subject could be combining poorly-remembered past exposure to a language with a narrative he unconsciously invented and elements of your guidance with which you unconsciously cued him. Didn't you find it strange that your subjects remembered only languages with which you had some familiarity, while you were also a participant in the experiment? While Conze meditation can be performed individually, in your trials it was a guided meditation session. Since you applied no empirical controls to your interviews or your method to eliminate false positives, and since you admit your method cannot distinguish false negatives, you cannot claim that your proffered hypothesis was supported empirically by the process you describe.

I would like to see your response to my remark.

My response is that, as usual, you don't know what you're talking about. It is further my response that you clearly don't understand how empiricism works.

Every scientific theory begins with a hypothesis, not with assumption. later the hypothesis is either confirmed to proved to be false. In this case the hypothesis is that the past lives exist. I claim that I found the evidence that supports the hypothesis of existence of past lives.

You hypothesize that past lives exist. You further hypothesize that events from past lives can be remembered in subsequent lives. You deduce that if someone were to produce knowledge they can't have obtained in the present life, it must have come from a past life. You proposed an experiment by which you conversed with subjects and tested their knowledge of languages you presumed they did not know. Based on a certain form of demonstrated proficiency, you asserted your desired antecedent.

However, you did nothing to falsify any other antecedents. The procedure you did not do -- and in fact argued you shouldn't have to do -- is the heart, soul, liver, and kidneys of empiricism. What you're doing is a rudimentary form of induction that, in fact, empiricism was devised to replace. You really know nothing about empiricism or scientific inquiry.

You didn't follow my logic completely.

Yes, I did. And I pointed out exactly where it went wrong. It's a very straightforward example of confirmation bias, which -- in logical terms -- is an affirmation of the consequent. It's known also by the term "converting the conditional." Before you turn to your dictionary, "convert" in this case means to construct the converse of an inference. Your inference is

If a subject had a past life in which he spoke a different language, then he will know languages he didn't learn in this life.​

Its converse simply reverses antecedent and consequent.

If a subject knows a language he didn't learn in this life, then he had a past life in which he spoke a different language.​

By categorical logic, the first is of validating form while the second is not.

Don't tell me I can't understand the logic of your arguments. I can tell you far more about the logical errors your arguments make than you could possibly grasp. In fact, this is largely the same error you made in your failed proof for God. But there you made several other errors too. You are not evidently proficient in logic or logical analysis.

I didn't cite Conze because I see him as an authority on the past lives, I was just saying that his book is printed on the paper, which makes its existence a fact.

What utter nonsense! Are you even seriously participating in this debate anymore? Do you understand that your critics can read your past posts and quite easily see when you try to reinvent your argument surreptitiously to get yourself out of awkward corners?

You cited Conze as the authority for the method you adapted, and which you purported could recover not only lost memories from the present life but also memories from past lives. You encouraged your critics to attempt the method, as described by your author, and verify for themselves that it was a valid memory regression technique. You did this mistakenly thinking it would answer your critics' request for empirical proof that the method worked as you advertise and produced the results you said it could produce. You still haven't faced that glaring hole in your proof.

You completely ignored the obvious empirical problems with such a reproduction of method. You completely ignored the problems in Conze's method as it applies to a putatively empirical proof. You completely sidestepped the problem of having adapted his method for your guided interviews and what that would mean for empirical verification.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Now about my reasons for "inventing" these stories. You see them as an attempt to aggrandize myself. An aggrandizement is also a form of mental illness (think about Hitler, Lenin and several others). It would be simpler for you to say that I am mentally ill and drop out of discussion because, as I noted before, it makes no sense to argue with a crazy person. Do not be afraid to hurt my feelings because no one can do that. I'll be honest with you -- I like flattery like anyone does. But I am completely immune to criticism; I do not know why, I was just born this way.

Wouldn't be "being immune to criticism" also a sign of mental something?