(real) Scientific reincarnation?

[~enigma~]

Yes I am. But using it to say that atoms can't sometimes arrange themselves into organized patterns through chance alone is just as silly as ID proponents using it to 'prove' evolution wrong.

Apparently you really aren't familiar with it. Read it and get back to me and tell me again why your idea is ok according to the second law of thermodynamics.

 

[~enigma~]

I'm sorry, I didn't mean any offense. I'm not sure the customs on this forum quite yet, so if there is some kind of taboo against ideas that are on TV shows (although I don't know what show you are referencing) I will be sure to avoid that subject in the future.

But yes, I was asking a question of the more learned people on this forum, and I know there are many. I'm sure they are busy doing more important things so I wasn't expecting a lot of replies anyway.

But if someone does take the time to reply, I would hope that they would use that time to tell me why the idea is rubbish instead of just that it is.

Thanks again to any and all repliers!

Actually, there is a reason alot of people aren't responding. There is also a reason why your "idea" is on a fictional TV show. If you want to believe in reincarnation that is fine but don't even think that it's scientific because then we have a problem and you are never going to be able to produce any scientific backing for your view.

ETA - Reading your replies tonight will lead me to give you a word of advice. Cut the condescending tone out of your replies or you will find this a very unresponsive forum.

 

[Third Eye Open]

Apparently you really aren't familiar with it. Read it and get back to me and tell me again why your idea is ok according to the second law of thermodynamics.

Say I have box full of numbered tokens, numbered 1 through 100. If I shake the box and dump them on the ground enough times, eventually they will land neatly in a row, numbered 1 through 100.

Does this violate the 2nd law?

If not, how is this any different than a universe (or an infinity of them) "shaking" the atoms around until they happen to land in the right order to produce me?

 

[Third Eye Open]

Actually, there is a reason alot of people aren't responding. There is also a reason why your "idea" is on a fictional TV show. If you want to believe in reincarnation that is fine but don't even think that it's scientific because then we have a problem and you are never going to be able to produce any scientific backing for your view.

ETA - Reading your replies tonight will lead me to give you a word of advice. Cut the condescending tone out of your replies or you will find this a very unresponsive forum.

Righto. Like you said, it's just an idea, not a belief. I'm not sure why so far it has seemed to offend everyone so much. I really don't care if its torn to shreds, I would just like it to be torn apart with ideas as opposed to insults.

 

[~enigma~]

Say I have box full of numbered tokens, numbered 1 through 100. If I shake the box and dump them on the ground enough times, eventually they will land neatly in a row, numbered 1 through 100.

Does this violate the 2nd law?

If not, how is this any different than a universe (or an infinity of them) "shaking" the atoms around until they happen to land in the right order to produce me?

Do not insult other posters. Attack the argument, not the person making it.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Cuddles

 

[~enigma~]

Righto. Like you said, it's just an idea, not a belief. I'm not sure why so far it has seemed to offend everyone so much. I really don't care if its torn to shreds, I would just like it to be torn apart with ideas as opposed to insults.

You got an answer only you are being to bullheaded to notice I SAID 2ND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS. Forget your reply....you are a lost cause. Welcome to ignore.

 

[Third Eye Open]

Your really a stubborn unthinking little twerp. I asked you to read the 2nd law and then tell me how your idea doesn't violate it. What kind of idiocy leads you to ask a question? Don't bother replying with ANYTHING but what I asked otherwise you are going on ignore.

The universe as a whole will not lose entropy from 7*10^27 atoms becoming organized for a brief period of time.

 

[Deneb]

The problem with your idea would be, first off, that there is very little that is scientific about it. You seem to think that a human being/consciousness could somehow be spontaneously generated. However, the chemical interactions that lead to us are extremely intricate and would, essentially, require the recreation of Earth's entire evolutionary history, not saying anything about the creation of a carbon-copy of yourself. A simple analogy could be made with the combustion of wood, which is a non-reversible chemical reaction. It's fairly easy to light a piece a wood on fire and produce ash, but one cannot simply recreate wood from ash (you'd need an entirely new tree). Ultimately, one can consider that once you are dead, you are quite simply dead. Arguments could be made when considering such hypothetical scenarios as the transporter paradox you stated, but we have no idea if this is even possible to begin with.

In the future, you may consider posting such a thread in the Religion/Philosophy sub-forums, where it will not give the impression that your arguments are backed by scientific fact. Though I would caution you that this will not preclude you from feeling the scorn of opposition to your ideas, at least they would be seen for what they are and (possibly) won't be dismissed off-hand.

My personal view on this, for the sake of philosophical discussion, is that I find the idea of experiencing nothingness to be logically inconsistent and that we may simply be living our own lives from the first moments of consciousness onto the last over and over with absolutely no recollection. It may seem odd that this would, in a way, require going back in time, but if you consider that time, to an individual, is meaningless outside of their own existence, then the idea seems a bit more solid. In essence, since one has already existed through this whole period, you are not creating or modifying any past events, but simply resetting the pointer value, to employ computer terminology.

 

[EHLO]

Well, after reading that other reincarnation thread about the population of Japan I decided to make my own

I came up with this idea a couple years ago, and of course my friends laughed at me, but recently there has been a scientific paper which is somewhat the same thing (unfortunately these scientists were also laughed at for the most part.)
The paper was called 'Big Brain Theory', I cant post links, but it should be easy to find on google.

Anyway, my slightly different idea does require infinite universes, and if that is easily debunkable please do so.

Now, first off, a thought experiment. What would happen if you were to use one of the transporters in Star Trek? (Bear with me) From what I understand (and I'm no Trekie) all the atoms in your body are torn apart, and then reconstructed elsewhere.

Well I have one small problem with this. That would kill me. Assuming that whatever device this is can scan the location of every atom exactly in my body, it should be able to re create my body exactly, with every neuron in it's correct state in my brain, keeping all my memories in-tact from the moment I used the transporter. ( I am also no neurology expert, so I'm not sure if this is possible.) But, the question is, since I have suffered the effects of death by having my body torn apart, after its put back together... would that be me?

If one thing has exactly the same properties of another thing, then those things are the same. So, for the sake of this argument I am going to say that that should be me.

Now we take away the machine. Could this happen by a natural process? All the atoms randomly (or even through another process of evolution) coalescing in exactly the right way to make my body exactly the way it was the exact moment that I lost consciousness in death?

I'm sure any ID proponent would know what kind of odds these are. But even if they are a googleplex to one, with an infinite number of universes it must happen eventually. With infinite time and space, everything that can happen must happen.

So when you die, just wait. A trillion years from now, in an unknowable universe, all the atoms required, aligned and arranged in just the right way to produce your consciousness as it was the moment before you died, will arrange themselves that way, and you will wake up. Whether it (most likely) is in the middle of space, or a star or some other uninhabitable location, causing you to immediately die again doesn't matter. Another trillion (just picking a large number here) years will pass, immediately in your eyes, and you will appear in some other location probably dieing again, over and over.

Well, there it is, inescapable infinite reincarnation. Please tell me why this doesn't work, the more I think about it the less appealing it sounds.

I wouldn't lose any sleep over it!

Any living organism, in particular the "you" that you speak of, is a rather complex arrangement of atoms that I think we can safely say would never occur by chance alone based on what we know from basic physics, chemistry and biology. I would suggest that you delve a little deeper into the very special conditions that occurred in our little corner of the Universe and on our planet that allowed self replicating molecules to come into existence and evolve into the myriad of life we see today, including "you".

This should give you some sense of how lucky and unique "you" are, and perhaps abate any fears you have about spontaneously coming into existence sometime in the future several miles above the surface of Magrathea.

 

[Third Eye Open]

In the future, you may consider posting such a thread in the Religion/Philosophy sub-forums, where it will not give the impression that your arguments are backed by scientific fact. Though I would caution you that this will not preclude you from feeling the scorn of opposition to your ideas, at least they would be seen for what they are and (possibly) won't be dismissed off-hand.

.

Thanks! I guess I should have posted this somewhere else, but I was hoping for scientific reasons against it, even though apparently its not very scientific.

So i guess what your saying with the wood burning analogy is that some things can't be reproduced simply by putting all their parts together?

I don't know enough about the brain to know how memories are stored, so I guess it could be impossible to make an exact copy of one.

This whole idea is pretty silly, but with infinite universes silly things would have to happen. I was hoping for some reasons why there can't be infinite universes, but from what I've heard it's one of those things that can't be falsified, so it's pretty useless I guess.

I suppose I shouldn't be bringing up unfalsifiable ideas and expecting not to piss people off!

 

[Ysidro]

Isn't this just a permutation of a reincarnation flight-of-fancy written by Carl Sagan in A Demon Haunted World? My book is at home and I'm at work, so I can't check right now. I swear I've heard of a similar concept before today.

 

[PixyMisa]

I'm not sure if this will actually work. If the Universe were static (neither expanding nor contracting) and eternal, then yes, you'd be right. Given enough time and the laws of Quantum Mechanics, stray particles would eventually configure themselves into anything you might imagine. Sure, that's a contravention of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but the second law gets broken all the time, if you focus on small enough scales and short enough timelines. Wait long enough and it will get broken on any arbitrary scale.

The problem is that the Universe is expanding, and the expansion is accelerating. Thus the probability against the spontaneous reassembly of the Earth and all its enhabitants is a polynomial function of time, and no matter how long you wait, it may never happen.

Although - if the Local Group is not bound for gravitational dissociation (some theories say it is, others not) then you can potentially reconstruct at least that much. Which includes the Earth, and us, of course. But the astronomers will be unhappy.

 

[PixyMisa]

Thanks! I guess I should have posted this somewhere else, but I was hoping for scientific reasons against it, even though apparently its not very scientific.

It's not very scientific, but I think the discussion could have been better.

So i guess what your saying with the wood burning analogy is that some things can't be reproduced simply by putting all their parts together?

Well, you have to put them together the right way. One of the flaws in this reincarnation idea is that it is vastly more likely that things will be put together the wrong way than the right way. You will be reincarnated dead a million billion times before you are reincarnated alive.

This whole idea is pretty silly, but with infinite universes silly things would have to happen. I was hoping for some reasons why there can't be infinite universes, but from what I've heard it's one of those things that can't be falsified, so it's pretty useless I guess.

There can be infinite universes, but there are things that can't or won't or are unlikely to happen even then.

 

[Eos of the Eons]

Did you even read my post? No sperm. No egg. Just the atoms arranging themselves through random chance into the same way they were the moment before I died. There is nothing to prevent this from happening naturally given enough time. And if there are infinite universes it will happen eventually.

Oh, now humans are not conceived and born, but are randomly formed in some weird alternate universe? Huhhhh???


You have never died before if you are alive now. When you die you don't have atoms doing whatever hooey randomness, you just get your body getting broken down in various fashions by various other living things and natural physical chemical properties, etc.

I like how people imagine purple unicorns with green wings and somehow think it should become reality just because they can make it up. I guess the "Secret" holds a lot for you?


Oy, Biology should be a required course in High School.

 

[calebprime]

Oh, now humans are not conceived and born, but are randomly formed in some weird alternate universe? Huhhhh???


You have never died before if you are alive now. When you die you don't have atoms doing whatever hooey randomness, you just get your body getting broken down in various fashions by various other living things and natural physical chemical properties, etc.

Of course, Eos is right.

But to take this discussion briefly into zoidal territory.

-The closest we get to reincarnation is the good old-fashioned experience of seeing the resemblance of our children to us.

-Nietzsche, that brilliant crackpot, toyed with a similar idea with his Eternal Recurrence. He thought the universe was cyclical, with infinite time. Matter somehow, according to him, has a finite number of arrangements. So everything you experience, you will experience again, exactly the same way.

He liked the idea, but he presented it as a sort of fantasy, told to you by a spider, if I remember. A night thought.

Now, this is worthless as science. The only thing to be salvaged from it is the idea of affirming your life and your past, loving your fate (amour fati).
So, it's almost like a weird version of retroactive positive thinking. As in, it's all good.

 

[PixyMisa]

Oh, now humans are not conceived and born, but are randomly formed in some weird alternate universe? Huhhhh???

Yep. The proposition is that given enough time, the wave functions of a bunch of random particles drifting in spce will spontaneously assemble into a perfect replica of the Earth as it is today - for example.

Which is possible, given infinite time and a static universe, or at least, a locally static environment with sufficient particles to do the job. Of course, a trillion years doesn't even begin to describe the amount of time this would take. A googolplexplex (10^googolplex) years might be a start.

 

[Eos of the Eons]

Yep. The proposition is that given enough time, the wave functions of a bunch of random particles drifting in spce will spontaneously assemble into a perfect replica of the Earth as it is today - for example.

Which is possible, given infinite time and a static universe, or at least, a locally static environment with sufficient particles to do the job. Of course, a trillion years doesn't even begin to describe the amount of time this would take. A googolplexplex (10^googolplex) years might be a start.

Ergh, I have to smoke something to get on the wavelength of this thread.

It's like saying monkeys typing randomly on a typewriter will get something resembling even a paragraph. It can't and won't happen because writing is not a random process that accidently gets us these posts or any books. You actually have to know words and how to use them.

It's the same with the formation of matter, the universe has matter that behaves in predictable ways, and not randomly forming entire planets full of living things in a blink of an eye. Things need to form, and it happens very very slowly over eons using what is available in the physical reality.

The reason I think this discussion is so ridiculous is because things like the above quoted post is not how this earth, and this time on earth, came to be. It was physical biological and chemical processes that got us here over billions of years. The formation of planets is not random, the formation of life is not random and it was never spontaneous. There is some coincidence sometimes, but the matter has to be there with the right ingredients with a light and heat source, etc. for life to form. We debunked spontaneous generation long ago. Nowadays we know flies don't just form out of garbage, we now know that the flies lay eggs in the garbage.

People who philosophize like they do in this thread conveniently chuck reality out the window.

 

[Cuddles]

The idea is actually entirely valid. Given infinite space and time, everything that is possible within the laws of physics will eventually happen. Even things with ridiculously low chance of happening, such as an entire living human being coming together by random particle motion. However, the big problem is that there is almost certainly not either infinite space or infinite time. The probabilities we are talking about here really are very small, the current age of the universe is nothing in comparison. It wouldn't need just billions of times longer, but billions of orders of magnitude longer for something like this to have even a tiny chance of occuring just once.

However, while we are still not sure exactly what will happen, we are pretty sure that the universe is going to end, one way or another. The three classic possibilities are a big crunch, where the universe has enough mass to collapse back in on itself. We are fairly sure this won't happen, but it can't be ruled out. Until recently the most likely outcome seemed heat death. The universe would expand forever, but always slowing down so it never reached infinite size. This would end up with all the energy being spread out thinner and thinner until it was no longer possible for any work to be done. Finally, with the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe, there could be a big rip. This happens when the expansion of space becomes fast enough to overcome the attraction between particles in space, and all matter is pulled apart and becomes isolated. This would happen gradually, with first clusters seperating, then galaxies falling apart and so on until even individual atoms and their nucleons were torn apart. There are also various other possibilties, such as things like phase change, but they often involve the laws of physics changing and so it isn't really possible to say what could happen.

Although these are all very different and we're not sure which one will happen, they all have the same consequence for the OP. In the first case, particles can't randomly form humans because the particles themselves will no longer exist and neither will space for them to exist in. In the second, the particles still exist, but with energy spread out so thinly, nothing would ever be able to leave its lowest energy state, and so complex molecules would not be able to form. In the third case, the fundamental particles would still exist, but they would not be able to interact with each other and so again, complex molecules would not be able to form.

Of course, if you start adding in multiple universes, either through a multiverse or through expand-collapse cylces of one (or many) universes, things are different. If there are an infinite number of universes then even if each one only exists for a limited extent, there can still be infinite time and space for things to happen in. Many idea like this even include variation, often infinite, in the laws of physics, so things that are unlikely or impossible in the universe we know are actually extremely common. The big problem with this is that it is all pure speculation. There is often valid maths describing this sort of universe, but we have no reason to believe any of it actually eixsts in reality.

 

[Eos of the Eons]

I propose the "possibility" and "probability" are nil due to reality and real physical, chemical, and biological processes.

Things just don't happen "spontaneously". No matter how much matter, time, or space there is.

Atoms are not free to do anything willy nilly.

 

[PixyMisa]

I propose the "possibility" and "probability" are nil due to reality and real physical, chemical, and biological processes.

Things just don't happen "spontaneously". No matter how much matter, time, or space there is.

Atoms are not free to do anything willy nilly.

In fact, they are. It's just that this is defined by probability curve, which makes the unlikely events unlikely, and the really unlikely events really unlikely.

Radioactive decay is a good example of this. All ²³⁸U atoms are identical (ignoring nuclear isomers and ionisation for the moment). And yet, one such atom can sit around for a trillion years, and another go bang right this millisecond. You could have a chunk of uranium sitting on your desk, and on average, it would be pretty harmless. But there's no law - other than probability - that says it couldn't spontaneously fission and vaporise your entire building.