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Reincarnation Is A FACT!!!!!!!!

Space_Ed said:
Thanks for the reply :)
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I like debunking, actually I just love arguing. I've listed links to the relevant psychological biases and fallacies along with my responses. In the same way I watched your video, I'd appreciate it if you'd read them and try to understand what they mean and how they apply to this

Space_Ed said:
I do not agree with all of your assertions. But firstly, yes they do find it easier to find cases in countries with a belief in reincarnation. These people will be more willing to share their stories and ofcourse more likely to take the child seriously. This would be the case if reincarnation was taking place and if it wasn't. The fact that more cases are reported in these countries does not sway the argument either way. I would actually say that the fact that people who do not believe in reincarnation report having children saying this type of thing is potentially more persuasive of prorenincarnation than the fact that people who initially believe in reincarnation report children saying these things is persuasive against reincarnation. The argument that these people are more likely to be deluding themselves is ofcourse extremely valid.
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I think we can agree to disagree. What this does is make me suspicious more than anything. The only way to disambiguate is with a rigorous statistical analysis, but I would say the burden falls on the people making paranormal claims to prove that this is not the case.


Space_Ed said:
I completely disagree when you compare the phenomenon to the placebo effect. The mind is extremely complex and powerful and is able to distort and/or create reality but how could the brain implant a series of extremely verifiable facts about an individual that the child has has no (apparent) contact with? Like Dr Tucker says- coincidence in these incidences is 'preposterous'.
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I'll handle the statistical argument below, but with respect to the placebo effect, I can think of numerous ways. First, I don't really think it is the placebo effect, just something similar. Maybe the family talked about this person, before they thought the child knew language or when they thought the child wasn't listening, and thus failed to report this to the investigators. Maybe when conversing they led the child to the correct answer unconsciously via body language and facial expression. That is what I meant by cold reading. The parent can lead the child from very general abstract statements to very specific ones, easily and quickly in the same way that fraudulent psychics have demonstrated that they can. In general, people see patterns everywhere and see causation where there is only correlation, its really no surprise.

Here's an explanation of cold reading, I would look at the section titled "subconscious cold reading" and check out the references listed for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading

Space_Ed said:
I agree that Dr Tucker is wrong to say that the families have nothing to gain from it. But a lot of these cases occur with people who have no inclinations towards this type of thinking. It would be strange for them to suddenly think this to make themselves feel better. Although there is always the possibility. Doubtful though for all these cases.
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These are unsophisticated people in rural India and Sri Lanka. They are very ready to believe, superstitious, and know absolutely nothing about how science should work. They see a couple general details or specific details and fill in the rest. The biases in perception smooth out any rough edges, and these people's biases are stronger than most.

In psychology, this is called confirmation bias:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
also related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Space_Ed said:
Your assertion that because the have only a few hundred cases (+2,500 to date) this implies that the phenomenon cannot be real because there are billions of people, I feel is silly. The obvious objection to what you said is that perhaps they have a small team? Perhaps these cases are hard to find? Perhaps reincarnation is a rare event and usually people do just die? Your rationalisation there is not, to my eyes, rational.
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I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. If you flip an unbiased coin a number of times there are going to be patterns in the results, where it goes HTHTHTHT or HHHH.... whatever. If you only look at those subsequences of the overall sequence of results you will see patterns there, the only way to learn that the pattern is actually random is to look at the statistics of the whole sequence. If you flip the coin billions and billions of times It will happen a whole lot. If I have a team of people that just search the sequence of coin flips, big or small, they're going to find tons and tons of patterns. Plus, people are wired to see these patterns.

What they really need to do is follow a single community, or population, one that is suited to their available resources. If they can't catch all the cases, they must be able to say what percentage of the cases they do catch. Then they must take into account the huge wealth of psychological and mathematical data available to generate an estimate of how often these cases will occur by 'chance' or more 'chance+bias'. If the number of cases they find, corrected for their accuracy of detection, is higher than a conservative number expected number, by greater than the statistical error, then they'll have a reasonable claim, not proof, but a claim that the scientific community can debate.

So if :
detected/detection_rate > error + predicted
Then they might have a claim worth listening to, although there will still be a lot of wiggle room.

Right now these experimenters are searching a sequence of flips for patterns, They claim the expected number of patterns is zero, when they say that "the cases cannot be coincidental" and compare that to the number they found. This is just not a credible way to do science. I assure you there are tons of cases where this has happened that they've missed, statistics demands it.

Here are some relevant links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

Space_Ed said:
Er the last paragraph you wrote... cultural bias is not a factor in many of the cases and even if there were cultural bias (which there is) this does not disprove his claims. It only makes them less credible.
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I'll say it again, extraordinary claims extraordinary evidence.
Right now they don't even have ordinary evidence.
 
They have extraordinarily weak evidence. I wouldn't accept this sort of third-hand anecdotal rubbish in support of something that I already knew was real.
 
Space_Ed said:
Hi. I just did the dramatic thread title to get your attention... buuuutt there does appear to be pretty strong evidence of reincarnation. The evidence is predominantly events where young children appear to know many facts about other places that they could not have been to and people that they could not have met in their life. They claim that they know these facts because they were someone else in a previous life. Some of these claims are backed up by correlations between birth marks and wounds on the body of the 'previous personality'.
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I just watched an exact program on a Boy who claims to have lived a previous life. It was on channel four, part of their cool 'extraordinary people' series.

‘The Boy Who Lived Before’ is one such production centering on Cameron; a young Glaswegian boy aged five. For three years he has astounded his family with stories of an apparent previous life on the remote island of Barra saying: "I used to be big but now I'm a kid again"
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He describes his childhood on the island in some detail: the white house he lived in, the black-and-white dog he walked on the beach, the surname of the family, the position of the house right next to the beach, etc. He was obsessed with planes landing on the beach, and they found out when they went there in the documentray that the only airport on the Island, Barra, is on the beach.

At the end they go and speak to one of the people that would have lived there during that time with that surname. She confirms some aspects of his story, but others she does not.

Not sure what to think, its a pretty interesting watch though. Some things seem to match with extradordinary precision, some not. Certainly gets you thinking about how he could have got these memories;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RRs7fXjs_w

Theskepticexpress reviewed it, and although they complained about the way the documentary was shot, the actual case got a "Verdict: Inconclusive", which is much higher than most of the other supernatural things they review. http://www.theskepticexpress.com/the_boy_who_lived_before.php
 
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Zosima- thanks for those links I especially liked the conformation bias one but a lot of the things in those links I already knew about and are common sense really. I'm still not swayed either way.
 
Arkayik said:
Sweeping generalization, I question its veracity and relevance, please provide evidence or retract.
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Fair enough, correction:
"These are generally unsophisticated people."
You're right, I don't know they're rural. My bad, but not central to my argument. I also followed that statement with a qualifying statement that explains what I meant by that sentence:
"They are very ready to believe, superstitious, and know absolutely nothing about how science should work."

I'm not the one with the evidence, Space Ed asked for comments on the video. I inferred this from the way the speaker in the video was talking about the different reports. The speaker directly confirmed my claim that the people are superstitious and ready to believe. I actually gave the speaker the benefit of the doubt by assuming his set of reports was representative of the population. If the sample wasn't representative that raises even more serious statistical problems than they already suffer from. Otherwise, I can infer that these people don't know the scientific method. These are countries where education and literacy are only starting to become widespread, and the people making the reports are from the previous generation, when these problems were even worse.

If this assertion is wrong and these reports happened to be coming from Indian scientists, I'd be just as interested as anyone to hear it.
 
Space_Ed said:
Zosima- thanks for those links I especially liked the conformation bias one but a lot of the things in those links I already knew about and are common sense really. I'm still not swayed either way.
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Did you understand the statistical argument and how that relates to the clustering illusion? IMO that is the strongest argument.

But there is no way to disprove the supernatural, only show that the evidence for it is terrible, which is what I think I've explained at length. So if you're waiting for the argument that proves reincarnation doesn't exist before you make a decision about it, then you're going to be waiting a long long time.
 
zosima said:
Did you understand the statistical argument and how that relates to the clustering illusion? IMO that is the strongest argument.

But there is no way to disprove the supernatural, only show that the evidence for it is terrible, which is what I think I've explained at length. So if you're waiting for the argument that proves reincarnation doesn't exist before you make a decision about it, then you're going to be waiting a long long time.
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Lol. Well I'm not sure I do understand completely what you are getting at with the clustering illusion but I think I do. Undoubtedly the more cases they have, the more reliable the evidence will be. However, these cases are not as simple as flipping a coin and getting heads or tails. Each case is different and has different features which make the cases stronger or weaker. I don't really think the clustering illusion argument has much validity here as these investigations are complex. The thing is, if hypothetically just one person knew a large list of facts that have not been learned through normal means and says statements etc that really do seriously imply reincarnation as the most plausible explanation (because it is known that they have not learned these facts through normal means) then that has to be an option that has to be taken seriously. No matter how much it conflicts with current scientific understanding. Galileo, a flat Earth, Archimedes etc.

I am not the sort of person to believe anything on faith. I try to base all my decisions on evidence, no matter how weird the outcome may be. Anyway, why is reincarnation such a ludicrous idea? Noone here has died recently and is able to tell us what happens. Although, despite the type of study we are looking at, there is no reason to think anything happens when you die other than lose consciousness, we dont know that for a fact. All the people here are just as human as the Nazis and the people who laughed at many of the worlds greatest minds such as Darwin etc and just as liable to make mistakes- as am I. Thats a strange analogy I know but I hope that makes sense.

Anyway even if Dr Tucker is right it really doesn't make much difference because the few people who do seem to remember previous lives forget it soon enough. The only thing that seems to be transferred is consciousness itself. Little to no sense of the previous self is passed over and so in effect you are always back right where you started with little to nothing gained from the previous life. So in essence even if reincarnation is a reality, the majority of people still really do die to all intents and purposes and so in the end knowing that reincarnation is real and not knowing both have the same indifferent outcome.
 
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zosima said:
Otherwise, I can infer that these people don't know the scientific method. These are countries where education and literacy are only starting to become widespread, and the people making the reports are from the previous generation, when these problems were even worse.

If this assertion is wrong and these reports happened to be coming from Indian scientists, I'd be just as interested as anyone to hear it.
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It makes no difference if the parents are Mr and Mrs Einstein. It only matters how competent the people conducting the study are.
 
zosima said:
If this assertion is wrong and these reports happened to be coming from Indian scientists, I'd be just as interested as anyone to hear it.
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I think you are fooling yourself there. If an Indian scientist did say theres evidence for reincarnation you'd be saying the same stuff. "They are from a biased and less 'sophisticated' culture" etc. You'd be saying "Now, if there were an American study..."

News flash: America and the west do not know everything. They are not superior human beings and you have no right to say that your culture is more sophisticated than theirs when you are clearly ignorant about it. Most modern organic chemistry techniques such as distillation were developed by arabs and there were 7 year long medical courses in India over 2000 years ago. In those times western europe really was a lot less sophisticated and more barbarous but they were no less human. Just as people in the east are no less human than westerners now.
 
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Space_Ed said:
Anyway even if Dr Tucker is right it really doesn't make much difference because the few people who do seem to remember previous lives forget it soon enough. The only thing that seems to be transferred is consciousness itself. Little to no sense of the previous self is passed over and so in effect you are always back right where you started with little to nothing gained from the previous life. So in essence even if reincarnation is a reality, the majority of people still really do die to all intents and purposes and so in the end knowing that reincarnation is real and not knowing both have the same indifferent outcome.
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This is actually very common across all fields of woo. Start out by making extraordinary and definitive claims, and when skeptics start looking into it, back off further and further until you're not really claiming anything at all.

It's similar to the "God of the Gaps" position in religion. I call it the retreat to unfalsifiability.
 
Space_Ed said:
News flash: America and the west do not know everything. They are not superior human beings and you have no right to say that your culture is more sophisticated than theirs when you are clearly ignorant about it. Most modern organic chemistry techniques such as distillation were developed by arabs and there were 7 year long medical courses in India over 2000 years ago.
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But the state of science in the Arab world, and the state of medicine in India today, is pretty pathetic. The argument that people in India are less educated and more likely to fall prey to superstition is not a strong one, but it's not a logical fallacy either - unlike your argument here, which consists of a strawman and an argument from antiquity.
 
PixyMisa said:
But the state of science in the Arab world, and the state of medicine in India today, is pretty pathetic. The argument that people in India are less educated and more likely to fall prey to superstition is not a strong one, but it's not a logical fallacy either - unlike your argument here, which consists of a strawman and an argument from antiquity.
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Actually I think the argument that the fact they are poorly educated means that they are more likely to fall pray to superstition is a strong one. The state of asian scientific endeavor has no bearing on this discussion whatsoever. I was just having a bit of a rant about the arrogance I see in people.
 
PixyMisa said:
This is actually very common across all fields of woo. Start out by making extraordinary and definitive claims, and when skeptics start looking into it, back off further and further until you're not really claiming anything at all.

It's similar to the "God of the Gaps" position in religion. I call it the retreat to unfalsifiability.
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You don't.... say. Tell me something I don't know. Please Dr Tucker cannot be compared to a creationist.
 
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