jfv wrote: Mon Apr 22, 2024 8:44 pm

losthighway wrote: Mon Apr 22, 2024 8:21 pm Reincarnation is very romantic. Rebirth has a stronger natural analog.

Never thought of them being different, and even after taking a few minutes on the internet reading up on it, still not really sure that the difference is that significant.

Or if it really matters anyway. Once your brain dies, you won’t remember anything.

Well, if you're reincarnated that means you have a personality (immortal soul?) with fundamental characteristics that carry over from one life form to another. Impersonal rebirth means that your vital energy has combined to make this particular identity but will scatter in the wind to help form multiple other identities that are in no way related to this current ego.

But I suppose you're saying without any memory it wouldn't make any difference to each of us, so who cares which one it is?

I think many people get some comfort in the idea of some echo of their identity rebooting even if they'll never have the satisfaction of being aware of it. It's also one of the major external pressures to behave ethically in some Hindu/Buddhist cultures. But the importance of sky pie as a motivator for good behavior isn't going to impress this choir of agnostics, atheists, and secular humanists we call the PRF.

Sorry, where was I? Ghosts, man. Ghosts.

losthighway wrote: Mon Apr 22, 2024 10:38 pm Well, if you're reincarnated that means you have a personality (immortal soul?) with fundamental characteristics that carry over from one life form to another. Impersonal rebirth means that your vital energy has combined to make this particular identity but will scatter in the wind to help form multiple other identities that are in no way related to this current ego.

When you word it that way, rebirth seems more plausible to me.

Anyway, not ready to find out.

Been in funeral service 27 years and had 30 years of walking the Earth prior to that. Never have had any experience that I would consider paranormal, certainly nothing I would think of as an apparition. I have had co-workers at places I have worked tell me there were things going on, but I must not have the gene that makes a person receptive to it.

losthighway wrote: Impersonal rebirth means that your vital energy has combined to make this particular identity but will scatter in the wind to help form multiple other identities that are in no way related to this current ego.

I'm pretty down wth that if "vital energy" is left undefined and "identity" encompasses everything; rocks, dust, the hydrogen that makes up the vast majority of all matter, vacuum energy, whatever else we don't know about, in a potentially infinite space. The idea of an individual consciousness hopping from one human to another human seems far-fetched, because I don't trust any hypothesis that involves putting humans in a special category. But I have a problem with the idea of individual consciousness, anyway. I don't see a mechanism for it. There's no me/non-me divide in the physical world.

It's kind of hard to put into words but there's no reason we know of why reality would be experienced from one perspective and also not from all others, and I'm not inclined to invent some phlogiston like a "soul" to explain it. Maybe individual consciousness is an illusion and just an evolutionary quirk of ours. So that's nice. But meanwhile, we still have infinite time to contend with and all this shit is going down a black hole one day. Also, if the universe were to be infinite - and there's no way to say whether that's likely or not - that would imply an infinite number of you are out there somewhere, impossibly far away. Which is weird.

Anthony Flack wrote: Tue Apr 23, 2024 5:48 pm There's no me/non-me divide in the physical world.

In some circles this is called enlightenment. This perspective is an important value/philosophical axiom for me as a person, but that doesn't mean I'm great at experiencing it as my reality much of the time. I believe it, but only occasionally feel it.

Yeah, the "I" in that sentence is a tell.

Consider: if some magical change occurred and suddenly you were me and I was you... but we don't take our memories with us. What is different? I don't think we'd even be aware. Is there even anything to be aware of? Maybe the "magical change" is nonsense and there's nothing to change.