This would only be the case if reincarnation is completely random, and it depends on what we consider an individual. You could arbitrarily define a human as just a cluster of cells, does that mean you could reincarnate as a single human cell?
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Similarly, could you be reincarnated as a society? A body and a society are both a conglomerate of individual organisms...
Now I want to write a book about a world where individual humans don't have immortal souls but cities do. Would a person moving to a different city be like someone having a blood transfusion? If dead cities can be reincarnated as other cities, does that mean current-day Istanbul was Constantinople in a past life? Or does reincarnation happen more randomly, and Constantinople just happened to become some random town in New Jersey? Is genocide like murder for cities, or is it more like having a limb amputated?
~~oh shit i've accidentally reinvented hetalia from first principles~~
Yes, possibly
Yes, in fact, only for higher animals it is possible to draw a clear line between them. For plants (clones) this is less possible.
So considering the life of anything other than an animal, probably there is no clear "I" anywhere else. It is always rather a "we".
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The cells of your body are part of you. They share the same DNA and descend from the same cell (the fertilized egg) and depend on each other to stay alive. However there are more gut bacteria inside of you than there are cells of yourself (they are a lot smaller than human cells). And they are not related to you. So you could reincarnate as a gut bacteria of somebody else
Me: Dies
Me: Wakes up as a bacterium that was just asexually produced inside my former life's corpse
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However there are more gut bacteria inside of you than there are cells of yourself
That's a debunked myth. The number of human cells and gut bacteria is about the same which is still astonishing. If you ask me to, I can look up the YouTube video I've learned it from
Yes, please, would you share that video? It sounds as fascinating as your reply is delightful!
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OK, but there are some organisms that can live either as single cells or in colonies, like algae. How do you categorize them? Plus there are some colonial animals like Portuguese man o war that are composed of hundreds of separate individuals connected to each other, or ant colonies which work as a collective superorganism. And even in humans there are some cells that do not stay attached, like sperm cells. Could you reincarnate as a sperm cell?
By this logic (which I, as of now, ascribe to, entirely due to how cool it sounds), you would reincarnate as the entire ant colony. You would be the hive mind. Enjoy!
You’re already described in the third comment
Some could call human civilization a form of superorganism. So you could reincarnate as a city.
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Seamen.
Maybe every one of your cells each gets reincarnated as a distinct single cell. Some end up as part of multicellular organisms and some of which are single-celled organisms.
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"Mushroom!"
Mushroom!
I thought most plankton looked like small bugs though?
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I mean…I wouldn’t be depressed if I were a bacterium.
Bacterium life 🦠
Reject humanity, return to prokaryote.
Yeah, like, even as fungi best case you connect a vast rainforest and provide communication and transportation services (also for sharing forest memes) ... only to be keenly aware at all moments of how pollution, deforestation, and climate change is damaging the forest in real time. Yeah, no.
Even if I were an undead virus (a virus that is dead-ish, not a virus causing undead humans to pollute the planet even after death) I wouldn't know how to (re)arrange my genome to target some apes.
Bacterium is peak lifeform, just settle into a literal rock, sleep a few billion years.
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Fungus is cool as shit. I wouldn't mind being a part of a large mycelium hivemind.
Join the Fungiverse
You die and become a bacterium
billion years later: still that bacterium.
When a bakterium divides, what becomes of the soul? We need some rules for that.
Unfortunately bacterium were unknown when reincarnation was written into indo-eruopean religions.
I was just thinking that meme perfectly illustrates the idea of reincarnation, though. Probably better than the [laughing and crying goat] (https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/teachingbuddhism/2020/06/03/the-goat-who-laughs-and-weeps/) parable.
I think it also depends on the reincarnation you're looking at. I only really know the eastern version from Hindu. Isn't there some Native American one where you are reborn as animals? I'm pretty sure Hindu has non-human life as a punishment for being bad. Could be wrong though I'm not an expert.
Bad Karma leads to reincarnation as an animal befitting the specific sin as well. Like pigs for gluttony. The idea of karma is neat.
Interesting. More information needed, before commenting. It may take some while of learning
The problem with consciousness is we don't actually have a standard for it, largely because we see humans as conscious and everything else as not. But when we isolate a given trait (language, tool use, humor, etc.) we find examples in other species.
So we're in a sorites situation: We can point to clearly conscious things and clearly not conscious things, but it's rough finding an edge case that is by consensus on one side or another. Coco the gorilla might have been but turned out to be far removed (largely because she faked knowing sign language and her handlers didn't know sign well enough to see she was faking it.)
That said, our brains clearly operate through material mechanics, and when its components deteriorate, so do we. Parkinson's and Alzheimer's are serious cosmic horror: It's not just tears in rain but tears of oceanwater joining rain into the sea. We really do dissolve into oblivion, and it would take some pretty fantastic steps to assume that whatever experiences an afterlife is the same thing as the engine that lived (👓🗲).
Heck, we can't be certain the person who wakes up every morning is the same as the person who went to sleep. Continuity, like the Ship of Theseus, is the only thing that links us. And if this is the case, then you can bet your crypto some billionaire right now is looking at DeepSouth and wondering how far we are from putting their brain sim in one to run their estate from beyond the grave. If Deepsouth/EMusk was booted up the moment he died, would that be a legitimate case of immortality?
If this is the case, we can assume that any life is a continuity of ourselves, which doesn't mean much without our memories and experiences that establish who we are. By the same argument the Ship of Theseus continues today as the USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79), Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier as well as the Space Shuttle Columbia.
The most convincing theory to me is Integrated Information Theory.
Basically the more integrated the information in a system is, the more potential for conscious experience. Different structures or "shapes" of information translate to different qualia, like the color red or the sound of a note.
Integration in this case means that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts; you can't remove a piece without affecting the whole/most of the system.
This is an answer to the Ship of Theseus problem, because the old pieces of wood are getting un-integrated from the whole, they are no longer the ship. The ship made from old pieces is a new ship, with it's pieces integrated into a new whole.
Animals would be as conscious as the complexity of their brains (not necessarily smarter), and yes this is a spectrum of consciousness.
Computers and AI are far off from this requirement. We purposely designed them to be modular and not overly integrated with itself. Even LLM's have their neurons in strict layers that has information travel from Input to Output.
No concrete proof, but the theory is very robust and could maybe even be provable one day.
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Coco the gorilla might have been but turned out to be far removed (largely because she faked knowing sign language and her handlers didn’t know sign well enough to see she was faking it.)
Language comprehension is often mistaken for sentience, but everything communicates on some level. Developing a means for communication doesn’t necessarily imply sentience. By default, Mammals are conscious because of the way they propagate themselves through different means in complex environments. OTOH, bacteria are not conscious because their propagation is mostly driven by chemical responses. For example, indv. bacteria are not engaging in game theoretic interactions with other bacteria over resources for self-propagation.
Heck, we can’t be certain the person who wakes up every morning is the same as the person who went to sleep.
Yes, we can on many levels. I am not sure who says these things, any links?
Yes, we can on many levels. I am not sure who says these things
Never heard of the "universe started Thursday" theory?
Essentially, there is no proof that the universe didn't start last Thursday. All of your memories, your experiences, your tangible progress, could be planted and you would never know.
So how do you know you are "you" as you think you are, or if you're just a week old construct that believes you are "you"?
Also, I think that the whole "we can't be certain we are the same person who wakes up every morning" is based on the ship of theseus concept they were building on.
You wouldn't consider yourself the exact same person you were when you were 5 for obvious reasons. So it stands to reason that that change happened at some point. How would you know that you did not change over night? And if you did, are you the same person as yesterday? And if you answer yes, where's the line? Are you the same person as last year? 5 years ago? Obviously not, so how can you know that that caliber of change hasn't happened to you in a night, or that any amount of change makes you someone else?
Also, they could be referring to the broken consciousness theory, where consciousness is destroyed when you fall asleep, created when you wake, and dreams are an illusion.
In that scenario, if your stream of consciousness actually is broken, can you say you are the same person as yesterday? If the breaking of consciousness doesn't matter in that question, would a perfect copy of you with all of your memories also be you? Or not, because you can't experience their perspective?
I think the break here is whether or not you can define consciousness as "you". For your supposition to be true, the answer would necessarily have to be no, as you said you can prove that you are yourself in many other ways.
But without a point of perspective experiencing the universe, what are we?
Ah rationalism, my mind blocks out unpleasant things all the time. There’s no proof the Universe wasn’t farted out by God. In this case, I guess I’d treat it as any other fantastical statement: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I think people who liken consciousness to a collection of properties make the same mistake as people attributing language comprehension as a property of consciousness. You cannot put discrete elements together and call something a ship any more than you can put discrete elements together and call it conscious. A translation app can see and translate images from one language to another, but the app is not conscious.
Regarding the changes a conscious being experiences over time: you can change on a chemical level (as one does over time), you can change on a genetic level (this also happens for any living thing over time), and you can change over an organism level, but you remain the same person (even after you get up from sleeping) because you maintain some internally directed sense of self. Internal self-direction is a key property of consciousness.
In this case, I guess I’d treat it as any other fantastical statement: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Ah, so this conversation doesn't matter. You made up your mind even before you even asked for explanation.
By design, philosophical concepts neither require nor can produce proof. If they could, they literally wouldn't be philosophy. If your idea of arguing how "you" exists includes the line of reasoning that you need proof, then the truth to you is that "you" don't exist, because you cannot prove your consciousness to someone else either. Just the same as I cannot empirically prove my consciousness to you. You are an amalgamation of chemicals and genetics, as you said.
So really, one taking your stance doesn't have the conversational authority to even ask what proof is there. The hard evidence is just chemical reactions and genetics all the way down.
In any case, all three of the concepts I listed are not my ideas. They are debated topics, some for literally centuries, in the philosophical world. If you suppose yourself better than the likes of Plato or Socrates because you think you can label a fundamental aspect of the universe as a "mistake" people make when they think about it, then there's really no honest way you can even approach theories like those without immediately discrediting them.
I guess have fun with that. But for me, there's no point in contemplating with someone who supposes that proof precedes basic concepts of philosophy in a question inherently about philosophy.
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I'd be interested in an elaboration on how you assert the person who wakes up every morning can be certain they're the same person who went to sleep the night before.
The notion that we might not be comes up in multiple places, but is largely an extrapolation of the Transporter Paradox, in which continuity is the only known link we have between some things in two states (as per the Ship of Theseus). AI programmers contemplate it when they have to reboot their test subject (which are related to, but not the same as LLMs or Generative AI projects, rather are efforts towards creating AGI). When an AI is rebooted, is it the same entity as it was beforehand? In the webcomic Freefall this is considered by robots, and while a large bloc of robots are not keen on upgrades. Mark Stanley gets deep into the discussion within the comic
CGP Grey noted in his Transporter Paradox video that sleep might be the same as a transporter event since the brain's cerebellum shuts down to a state of unconsciousness in NREM sleep (SWS sleep) and in fact, as old people approach death they experience increasing amounts of NREM sleep until, if they are lucky, they just don't wake up.
exurb1a's video Sleep is just death being shy is a philosophical look at this phenomenon.
So yeah, without any kind of established spiritual phenomenon (for which there is absolute zero evidence -- we've checked at length) the only thing linking who you are when you wake up, and who you were when you went to sleep is the consistency of the material world matching (more or less) the memories of the person waking, which gets weirder when unconsciousness extends longer than a night's rest (such as going unconscious due to anesthetic or a coma state).
Who we are is a very ephemeral state, a quasi-stable event. And we exist longer than a day of consciousness only because we define our narratives that way. And some creators like Phillip K. Dick have notoriously raised challenges to this by offering narratives in which continuity and identity are unreliable.
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On a slightly related note, my theory* is that the next step in reincarnation after human is moth, and that's why when people are dying they describe a bright light and a strong urge to move toward it.
*I don't actually believe this, just being silly here :P
Andy Weir (author of The Martian and others) once wrote a short story called The Egg that was kinda similar in premise (though obviously not as a meme). You can read it here It's maybe a 5 minute read, very good
I read this 15 years ago in highschool. It was probably the single most defining piece of literature that shaped how I view life.
Every time I look at something or someone and ponder their perspective, I can't help but get the itchy feeling that "I" (not myself of course, but my little point of consciousness) might be them one day and have to deal with their problems.
It usually makes me a lot more charitable in conflicts and it gives me a compelling reason to randomly make someone's day better.
So thanks for changing my life that way, Andy Weir
This is sorta what I believe. Consciousness is something we don't understand and it connects us all.
I think truthfully we are just the universe trying to understand what is happening to itself. We are the actual panicked screaming in real time
Whooa🤯
If you're a bacterium, you can't think though. So would you even perceive your life as bacterium? Or would your mind rather skip all those lower life forms? Also, wouldn't you immediately forget that you lived when you leave your body that keeps all the memories?
We have more bacteria living on and in our bodies than we have "human" cells.
Kinda makes you wonder where the "human" starts and stops. Maybe we are bacteria driving human mechs.
fuck yeah I love distressingmemes
Reincarnation is real, in some way. I interpret reincarnation as this: One hydrogen atom in my body could have been the exact hydrogen atom which was part of Isaac Newton's body. Or a carbon atom in me was one which was part of a bacterium's. :) About the eternity of a soul, or even the existence of it, I don't believe.
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