Rebirth

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

I think rebirth is real, and would like to give my theory about it.
Part 1: universal consciousness
“I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain, or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about it metaphysics. What I am saying, however is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around in inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like there inside the body. And most people feel they are inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense. There’s no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. We know that everything that you experience – your consciousness emotions and thoughts and moods and the impulses that initiate behavior – all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain that are spread over the whole of the brain. They can be independently erupted. We have a changing system. We are a process and there’s not one unitary self that’s carried trough from one moment to the next unchanging. And yet we feel that we have this self that’s just this center of experience.” – Sam Harris
youtube.com/watch?v=fajfkO_X0l0

Let’s take the following philosophical question: What if you teleport Bob by instantly destroying him in one place, and recreating him atom by atom in another place.
Will his consciousness also be teleported? Is the original Bob dead? And the copy of Bob just thinks he is Bob?
It seems most people have the image of some sort of consciousness “receiver” in mind when thinking about life and death. That which experiences the consciousness. So when teleporting Bob, will his receiver also teleport? Or will the new consciousness not be shown to him but only to his copy?

We will call this receiver the ego from now on.
In essence this ego is what constitutes as “you”, it is what you really are. All the rest, your material body and memories, they can all change over time.
Another thought experiment:
If 3 year old Bob is conscious, and if all goes well, the biological computer (brain) that is Bob at age 3 will evolve to a different biological computer 30 years later which will also be conscious. Then it is logical for Bobs 30 year old consciousness to think his ego was the same as in his 3 year old self, 10 year old self etc. And this Is a correct assumption. However it seems very clear for Bob that he does not experience other people’s consciousness, and so he seems to have a personal ego, a personal self.
Its quit hard to define this ego. if you have the same ego all of your life but both the physical and the mental changes over time, this means that your ego has characteristics beyond the brain. But how does this ego know what conscious experiences are meant for you, or for another ego? If Bob goes to sleep, why doesn’t he wake up the next morning as Tom?
We can get rid of this problem by using the following interpretation:
There is not any specific receiver for anyone, consciousness just exists.
In essence we can talk of a universal receiver a universal ego
What this means is that your ego/receiver not only experience your own consciousness, you experience all the consciousness in the universe. You are everyone

Let’s clarify with a thought experiment:
We have the following building:
There is a central room, in this room is a bed. We will call this room C
There are also 2 doors in room C, door A and B. Behind them lay two different rooms, and different things to do.
We can give Bob a drug that depending on the formula will write and read memory out of different parts of his brain.
Every day, Bob will switch rooms (A and B), one day he will live his life in room B, the next in A etc. At the end of each day, Bob will sleep in room C
We give Bob the corresponding drug of either room A or B during the night.
When Bob agrees with this experiment, he thinks that he will both experience his life in room A and B.
At the end of his first day in room A, he might look forward to see what room B looks like, but the next thing he realizes when he wakes up is that he is again in room A.
The same goes for Bob in room B.
In essence Bob is now leading 2 life’s. one life in room A and another in room B. In theory we can add as many rooms that we want. It will seem to Bob that he only experiences 1 room.
The same can be said about all of us. It seems like we only live 1 life, but we live them all.
look at consciousness as frames. One calculation (that from 3 year old Bob) is not the same as another calculation (Bob at 30). So at some point you can break them up (If you go into deep sleep and lose your consciousness, you can already say that your conscious experience from the day before and the day after are separate calculations)
Al these conscious experiences (frames) exist, from you and me and all conscious beings in this and other universes.
And just as with Bob participating in the room experiment, he experiences all rooms. And so do you experience all consciousness in the universe, you just “forget” about it.
Part 2: Time
Einstein proved with his theory of relativity that time is an illusion, and that we live in a 4 dimensional universe called space time.
“For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” –Albert Einstein
“The past is not gone, the future isn’t non-existent, the past the future and the present are all existing in exactly the same way” - Max Tegmark
And so it is correct to assume that your conscious experiences in the past, present and future as well as other people’s conscious experience in past present and future exist. And always existed.
We will use the room thought experiment again to visualize better:
You have 4 rooms, room A and B, and room A- and B-
Room A and B are once again different rooms, but room A- and A are the same, and B and B- are the same.
Bob will switch rooms every day, and every 4 days he will have seen all rooms.
In each room there is a list of tasks for the upcoming days (for example day 1 is cleaning a bike, day 2 is solving a rubrics cube, day 3 is finding waldo, day 4 is watching a tv show, day 5 is reading a book, etc.)
The jobs in room A and A- are the same, but A- lags one day behind on room A. So during a 4 day block (when Bob did every room once) Bob from room A did the job from day n, and Bob from room A- did the job of day n-1. The same goes for rooms B and B-.

Part 3: So what does happen after death?
Most try to visualize it with some sort of eternal darkness, eternal nothingness. In which “their” ego will not pick up conscious experience from other people.
But how can we be sure that rebirth doesn’t happen? Your ego will still be around to experience all consciousness in the universe.
There are a lot more reasons I can give of why I think rebirth is real, but I’m going to leave it at this for now
I would also like to point out that although I currently use an analysis with conscious frames, the universal ego can also be explained if you have an analog stream of consciousness. However it is harder to explain and harder to visualize.

2

A counter-question: What if we just recreate Bob without destroying him? Are both Bobs what Bob “really is”? How do we resolve disputes as to which Bob is really married to his wife, or inherits his great-uncle’s fortune?

If you hold that only Bob1 is the real Bob, then you’re attaching the ego to a material arrangement. If ego is the subjective sense of self, presumably both Bob1 and Bob2 have the same sense, and we can’t rightly tell them otherwise.

If you could slam your finger in the door, I’ll let you know if I experience it. I should be able to tell you which finger and at what time, right? Otherwise, you may be using “experience” somewhat differently to me. :slight_smile:

Do we have any reason to think it should? “You can’t be absolutely sure it doesn’t happen” isn’t a convincing argument - I can’t be absolutely sure that my wife doesn’t speak Chinese and has simply been feigning ignorance since I met her, but I’ve no reason to believe she can.

We are aware that there are times that we don’t experience anything - sometimes our heads hit the pillow at night and we open our eyes and it’s morning. We also experience other people sleeping, and the regularity of night and day, and have every reason to reject solipsism as a useful theory. I’m inclined to believe others when they tell me they’ve had experiences I haven’t; a universal consciousness, if it exists, seems to be fragmented and contingent.

3

Your definition of ego is odd, but I’m glad you defined it, otherwise your theories would be very unclear.

False. The corporeal future and past only exist as derivative fantasies. The present is part of true time (t 0) ethereal time, and is like a glow, or a vacuum black hole rather than a point. It contains nothing outside of itself. Anything labelled as "past’ is a derivative fantasy, a reference one can use in an empirical way to understand and plot the flow of reality, but it is not part of reality other than a derivative fantasy.

Does not follow, not to mention you have zero evidence or proof other than an interesting thought game. In your game there were only three rooms, so how does it follow that we are conscious of everyone, and not just 2 people, or a trinity?
Secondly, according to your example, there would have to be an active process determining the dominant consciousness, yourself, and erasing the memory of all those who aren’t yourself. Which leads to the third problem.
If there is an active process erasing the memory of all people except one, that leads to a paradox, because after the one (you) dies, your memory is erased, so how could you go backwards in time to a past life which had already been erased prior? The only way to resolve the paradox is to say that your current life is the last life, or final life until the next dominant consciousness arises.

4

You can also have two ‘people’ in one body e.g. With conjoined twins joined at the head and sharing a brain. I think however it gets divided consciousness is projected, probably created. so your old ‘you’ would still be you, and the new you would think it is you but would have only just been created. My guess is that the brain creates individual consciousness relevant to its needs. In the case of conjoined twins, the brain is confused into thinking there are two people, and so produces two conscious individuals.

At some level that would mean it can be switched off and on again, and also duplicated.

When you switch off your TV it doesn’t go to nirvana, so why would consciousness do so given that it is similarly a kind of qualia? Qualities though, are the product of observations. so if ‘you’/your spirit is not a quality/qualia then it is most likely to be an observer [consider; perception and awareness] as these are the only two essential things, then it is something which the TV is not and doesn’t have [same with computers currently].

I am guided towards the idea that both observers and qualities can be turned on/off, be made and unmade.

The only possibility is that, because of the on/off switch, and because the universe records [becomes potential] itself between quantum incarnations [it’s ‘refresh rate’], then ‘you’ can be switched off and on again.

There may not in theory be a ‘nirvana’. On/off.

I think there is more to reality than that [and that it has an eternal base] but there is also that!

5

In terms of what who the “real” Bob is, well chances are his wife is going to choose for the Bob who isn’t teleported. Mostly because that’s what she feels like to be her real husband.
For Bob in the other hand there is a ½ chance he is going to teleport. Bob doesn’t have a personal ego, so it is wrong to say that one of the two Bobs is the real Bob.

I addressed this issue with the rooms thought experiment. When you experience something, but you forget it, does that mean “you” didn’t experience it?
If you have a nightmare, but you wake up the next day and you don’t remember it, did you experience it?

The thing is that goes both ways, I can’t be sure rebirth happens, and other people can’t be sure eternal death happens. We have good reason to believe that rebirth can be real, there are two options, either personal ego is real, or universal ego is real. Personal ego cant explain why your 3 year old self has the same ego as your 30 year old self. In fact personal ego looks a whole lot like a soul. Both your physical body and your mental consciousness can chance entirely but your ego stays the same.

Basically all physicists say that both past, present and future are all real, are you saying Stephen Hawking, Einstein, the smartest people in the world are wrong and the mathematics are lying?

The rooms thought experiment is used to visualize how universal consciousness can work.
We can also use a processor to visualize better. If we have a processor capable of consciousness. And the processor can read from 2 memory cards, A and B. Then while processing information from card A, it will think it is only card A, and the same goes for card B. If the processor itself does not have a dedicated memory card, it automatically forgets what it just experienced.
There is a good chance that consciousness is in frames, first of all, literally everything in the universe is quantized, going from time, to space and energy. Secondly if my brain calculates something and gives me conscious experience about it, it doesn’t take in to account what my brain will process a week from now, or processed a week ago. It only gives me experience about the present moment. In essence you experience a specific calculation.
You can view Bob experiencing one day in room A or B as a conscious frame. Just as we saw in the room thought experiment, this can work. You also do not need a mechanism to erase memory or to select a dominant consciousness which is you.
You can add as many rooms that you want in the thought experiment.

6

So we put them all in a room and ask them to sort it out. Both Bobs remember meeting the wife, the engagement, the proposal, waking up after the procedure. In what meaningful sense is the new Bob wrong?

You beg the question by stating that I’ve had the nightmare. The relevant question in this case is more “can you know you didn’t experience a nightmare and then forget it?” And the answer is “not for certain, but if someone wants to convince me I did they should have to provide some evidence for me to take them seriously.”

So we look at the evidence; that our personal experiences while alive (and also our lack of experiences) can be tied to certain physical processes, affected by physical processes, measured as physical processes, and that experiential processes can’t be found in people who aren’t alive.

Or that they’re both erroneous mental constructs.

7

What I mean with ego is that which picks up the consciousness.
You believe that when Bob dies, that’s it. It over for Bob and he will be in some sort absolute nothingness. If after Bob somebody else gets born (other conscious computer), Bob will not experience that persons experiences.
Now what instead that if Bob dies. Doctors came up with a medicine that made him live forever (by infinite cell renewal or something). Just like he evolved between his 3 year old self and his self now. He will keep evolving and constantly changing. Let’s say Bob evolved another 1000 years and he is once again a totally different conscious computer.
In the first scenario, when Bobs conscious computer dies, and another different conscious computer gets born . Bob will not experience the experience of the new computer.
However when Bobs computer changes over time, and becomes a totally different computer, he will experience what’s in this new computer.
In both cases a conscious computer dies, and a new computer gets created. However in the first scenario Bob dies and forever experiences nothing. And in the second he does not.
Why is this the case?
To me this really sounds like a soul which was inside Bobs original conscious computer and when he evolves gets carried trough to another conscious computer.

8

When it’s over for Bob? I think the time we are talking about is imminent or universal time, hence, there really are no today’s or tomorrow’s, there are only pockets of what we call reality. Bob himself never exists, although he thinks he does, in measurable time, in a measurable space. But this measure is relative, and relatively diminutive. The limits between what we call birth and death, approach zero, as we near infinitely repeating constructs.

If we were some type of super consciousness, being able to travel near, or at or even exceeding the velocity of light, He, or They, (because God may be multiple) may not be aware all the continua of egos who inhabit one particular section. Bob thinks he is unique, special, but the only specialness about him exist not in his own mind, but in the mind of this God, whom he(man) , may have invented as a repository of all memory, present, past, and future. If there is such a memory, a film of all possibilities, the. It is contained in this God, and it is eternally re-creatible. Everything we think inside our minds are actually not inside, or outside for that matter, they are consummate events, constantly recorded, and played out from some pre-recorded script.

We are eternal types of beings, the soul is at one end, and our evolutionary beginnings at the other. Karma dictates where in this continuum we predicate our existence, and are concurrently predicated, in this universal scintilla of a second, which we measure in years, decades, centuries. As we are born, we are almost nearly dead. The living and the dead in this way of thinking about it,mare somclosemtogether, that there really is no actual difference. We never ever die, we live in a universal eternity .

9

these statements seem to be incoherent.

you dont understand. i said these things are derivative fantasies, corporeal, but not real in the sense of Truth. they are empirical abstractions. for example, ww2 is an empirical abstraction, a fantasy that is not real, but corporeal. we assume ww2 was real based on empirical evidence, but ww2 is not Truth. so to say that ww2 is part of history, or that hawkings idea of past and future is real, is not saying they are lying, but its not part of Truth either.

Doesnt add up because the processes would decide an iteration is just one block of consciousness, a frame.
yet our lives are not just one block or frame, there is movement, there are near infinite frames.
now your theory may be true on the small scale, for instance we may rebirth into a few other people. but it doesnt make sense on the larger scale to constantly rebirth into millions of lesser entities and organisms, why would their memory be wiped and then your memory wiped in order to be them? how can it all occur in the same timespace, it seems i am the root consciousness that all entities rebirth into

10

But they are true in the sense that somewhere in the universe at this very moment ww2 is being fought.

Well there can’t be infinite frames since there is Planck time. Which is the smallest amount of time there is. So at most 1 frame of consciousness equals 1 Planck time.

This is the bottom line.
Your 3 your old self and your 30 year old self are both totally different robots, it is clear that we have the feeling both the experiences of the 3 year old self and the 30 year old self are experienced by the same being the ego, soul, self whatever you want to call it.
It is clear that conscious calculations from 2 different robots can be perceived by the same unity.
Not the “self” or “soul” but simply by the universe. Consciousness simply exist and is perceived by the universe.
1)Your 3 year old self was conscious, and your 30 year self is conscious.
2)You have a person which is conscious and kill him, and create a new person who is conscious.
There is no difference.
The reason we think we have a self is mainly because of information.
When two different calculation share information the illusion of a self gets created. Currently I am conscious, as I am typing this. At the same time my brain is writing my current visual information and other information to my brain, we call them memory’s.
Tomorrow or maybe in ten years in a different robot a different calculation uses that information (or what’s left of it) and it will naturally think it is the same person.
All the conscious experiences are equally real, but often times calculations share information.
The room thought experiment visualizes this. Bob experiences all rooms (bob=the universe) but in each room he only has access to specific information (we did this with drugs in the thought experiment)
The same thing that the universe in specific heads (rooms) has access to specific information.
Nature came up with a way to preserve DNA and procreate using evolving robots. It may seem that each robot is the same self throughout its evolution, but a 3 year old human robot is still different from its 30 year old version. The 3 year old doesn’t have the ability to procreate so he lays a foundation for a future robot yet to be build. It’s just nature’s way.
And so there is no self in your body which after it is dead will forever experience nothing.
You are the universe and will always experience everybody.

11

The fact is, ww2 did not manifest itself and we are not experiencing it right now. We dont know the timelines well enough to assume things, for all we know we never experienced nor never will experience ww2 in our past or future lives.

,
Not totally different, since the linkage was coherent, and there was no leakage for our energy and consciousness to leak out. Usually this is caused by death.

You have a counter theory to this, which says that if someone dies and 100 years later they are resucitated from the grave, that consciousness will resume where it left off. The only way to disprove your theory is to physically kill yourself, through science, and wait at least 1 month before they resusiate you. You have to be 100 percent dead.

However, that will not totally prove your theory either, because for all we know your body has to evaporate for the consciousness to rebirth into somebody else.

No it isnt clear, and conjoined twins dont have the same consciousness.

Prove it.

Then why is only my conscious experience real.

There is no way to experience nothing, nothing is the absence of consciousness and experience.

Prove it.

12

Let me ask you another question. How can there be a chance not to be born?

If your parents had a different child instead of you. In what sense does that child need to be different from you so that “you” are dead and forever experiences nothing .If the child was born a little different than you. Wouldn’t it be “you” who experiences the child’s experiences, only you were a little different? If the child was 70 to 90 percent different, would you experience life? . But the general opinion is if the child is 100 percent different, “you” are definitely in eternal nothingness. So it seems that the material body at birth is important.
That chance has been (roughly) calculated at 1/(10^2.640.000) percent and they did not take into account a HUGE number of factors.
And so it doesn’t matter how your physical body evolves throughout its life. What is important is the exact composition of your first material body. If somebody else was born, with a different composition at birth, it wouldn’t be you. And so you would never experience life, the same way that if you die now, you will be dead forever.
I don’t believe it is important what the exact material body consist of at birth. There is still no real definition of who you are. Your body can change over time and at different points in your life you can be a totally different conscious robot. And yet the ego stays the same. The ego has no properties.
And so if your ego wasn’t created but a different ego, in what sense is it different?
Is it impossible that you were born a different gender? Or race? Or in a different country?
I believe when you are born into this world, you just did the gamble of earth(and the universe), you could just as well be born in a different country or have a different gender or a different planet (or be a different animal).
Just like Bob who enters the rooms thought experiment, he does not know in which room he is going to end up. But he can’t say there is a chance he is going to die when he participates in the experiment. When Bob participates with this experiment, he will always end up in a room (all rooms actually, but it seems he only experiences one).

13

I dont believe so because honestly our lives our special because if we were born in a different age or planet there would be no mario or nintendo games, and my childhood wouldn’t have been as special. I think it is the special sauce which gives our lives meaning, ancient greeks didnt have this special sauce so they just talked about philosophy their whole lives and gazed at the stars because they had nothing else to gaze to. Meanwhile in are modern lives we have special sauce like hot showers, gettin drilled in the butts by our wives, gettin sex-changes and going on rock stage concerts dressed up as glam girls, having access to delicious foods 24/7, playing videogames and being all the war heroes we ever dreamed off, feeling the thrill of war without feeling the guilt of ever hurting anyone, overcoming the saying “war is hell otherwise wed be too fond of it” even being as gods forging our own lands and battles . I mean we are livin the dream, fantasy to reality

if you want to make the chance or birth to zero then you have to destroy the universe including the ethereal realms