Thread: Ok, trying this again -- refining my theory on NON-SPIRITUAL, NON-RELIGIOUS reINCARNATION

I find it very strange that a scientist would be so absolutely sure of something that hasn't been proved or even suggested in any way. You say you absolutely believe it can't happen - why? What evidence do you have to support that? I'm not being as stubborn as you are really, because what you're saying is "I'm sure it doesn't happen" and all I'm saying is "how can you possibly know?" What you do know is that it happened once. Incarnation. We know it happened once - how can we know it doesn't happen more than once?

And yes, I've been thinking exactly the same as you, that it actually works best to just call it incarnation. But then of course it fails to get across the idea. The fact that human language fails when trying to discuss this indicates how difficult it is to even conceptualize. That's the reason we have so much trouble with it. But I think ,as you seem to, that the awareness is an emergent property that develops in a growing body/mind. Nothing "gets in there" in any way. It forms in there. But somehow it is self aware. And one of them is "you".

When StepL was born, for some unfathomable reason that nobody can explain, it was YOU. And you know what I mean now by you - I'm talking about the subjective awareness that dwells inside that body and has immediate access to its thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations etc. Of all the bodies in the world, nobody can say why you are in that one and not a different one. Or none at all. And yet somehow it happened.

Since we can't explain it, how could you ever possibly PROVE that another awareness that is subjectively YOU won't come into being at some point inside a totally different, completely unrelated little embryo? I mean, if you want to appeal to science, then the logical answer is to say that it can't be proved because, as you said already, we don't understand the mechanism for why of all the bodies in the world, you are in only that one and I am in only this one.

Unless you can explain the mechanism that caused that particular body to become you, then you can't possibly determine whether or not it can happen again in a completely different body. Because the mysterious part - the part we can't explain, is why, or how, that emergent property of thought that we call self awareness is you.

And I'm qute fmailiar with the light metaphor your husband used. I've tried to frame it similarly before - as light from a bulb. But it just falls short because light has nothing like a property of self-awareness… it makes no sense to say "why couldn't the same light come into being later in a different bulb?" - words fail once again. But it does help to illustrate in some ways. In fact light, like thought, arises from electrical current. It makes no sense to talk about "the same electrical current", since electricity is energy that has no physical properties. Is it even 'the same current' from one moment to the next? How about water passing in a river - the patterns remain, though ever-shifting, but it's different water molecules from moment to moment. But self-awareness is something that, while born of electrical current in the brain, somehow maintains a shifting, often fractured sense of continuity, like the ripples in a river. But even though it is fractured at times, it's still 'you' subjectively.

Ok, and with that I give up.