The Reincarnation Debate by Jeremy Trollope

A lot of people laugh at the thought of reincarnation as being something that could be true. Most scientists don’t believe it. Post-modern philosophers don’t believe it. Even I didn’t believe it for most of my life.

Why is that?

I think it’s because in the West we’ve separated science from religion. Some religions make scientifically impossible claims. Some scientific discoveries defy ancient religious teachings. But I think this separation is not necessarily correct. Science is all about making observations, testing theories with experiments, and replicating/criticizing those experiments until the theories can’t be disputed anymore. Nowhere in that definition is there the assumption that all religions are entirely false or that everything is just physical matter.

So what is the science that supports reincarnation? Testing reincarnation isn’t as easy as testing the existence of gravity or atoms. But I think there is some evidence out there that demonstrates that the afterlife could be a beautiful reality of the universe we live in. And just like any scientific thinker, I invite an intellectual debate to be had on this topic to either reinforce my current view or change my mind to something more correct. Please comment below if you have other arguments

1. There’s no proof

The reality is that reincarnation isn’t something that can be proven or disproven yet because of its very nature. There are groups of scientists that look for evidence of reincarnation, but their research is based on documenting claims made by children which can always be denied as just being ‘their imagination’.

But let’s say as a thought experiment, we consider an ‘imaginary’ world where reincarnation was true. In this ‘imaginary’ world, what evidence would there be? I think an obvious answer is that people would remember past lives. Particularly small children because they’re more likely to still be able to access those subconscious memories. Well in reality, there are lots of cases of children that do remember mysterious things (One of my favorite examples is an American kid named James Leininger). These cases can be very compelling.

Little James knew specific things about WW2 fighter planes that there’s no way he picked up in his everyday life. But the hard-headed skeptic can always say ‘he must have learned those things somewhere’. Hence why there will never be proof so long as a skeptic can deny what a child or their parents claim to be true.

If people strongly believe in something no amount of evidence can change their minds. The Flat Earth Society refuses to accept any evidence of a round Earth that’s presented to them. Instead, they come up with alternative explanations for things that justify their beliefs. The skeptic in the James Leininger video is doing the same thing. If you watched the video, he claims that James picked up the strange things he said from his friends or by picking up cues. But I think it’s pretty out there to think that a 4-year-old knows details of WW2 fighter planes by talking to his friends. Even in the small chance that he stumbled on a PBS documentary about WW2 fighter planes, how did he know the name of his crew member and the name of his ship? Just a coincidence? Seems unlikely at that point.

You could also say that the parents are just lying for attention. But saying that everybody who makes a claim that you don’t believe is a liar, makes it impossible to prove anything to you (the Flat Earth Society thinks everybody is lying). Some of the best scientific discoveries in history came from people challenging the common beliefs of their times such as Galileo asserting that the Earth revolved around the sun, or Darwin’s ideas about evolution. We haven’t proven or disproven reincarnation with absolute certainty yet, but who’s to say we never will? Should we entirely dismiss it from the realm of possibility even though there may be some indications that it’s true? Is that truly how a scientist thinks?

2. Isn’t everything I experience in life linked to my brain? Wouldn’t the death of my brain mean that I would stop existing?

The mind-body-consciousness debate has been a hot topic for philosophers for centuries. Some philosophers think that everything is purely physical and that all of our experiences are nothing more than brain activity. Others assert that conscious awareness isn’t purely physical and that brain activity and the awareness of brain activity are different. If the brain and consciousness were in fact, separate, then the death of the brain would not necessarily imply the end of consciousness.

A great book called Biocentrism by Robert Lanza outlines a metaphysical framework using a scientific understanding that I believe justifies the separation between consciousness and matter. I highly recommend this book for anybody interested in this topic.

Lanza makes compelling arguments using quantum physics, science, and logic to assert the claim that life is what creates matter, and not the other way around. Put in another way, the answer to ‘If a tree falls in a forest and nothing hears it, does it make a sound?’ is a firm ‘No’ in Lanza’s view. He goes even further to claim that ‘If a Big Bang happened and there was no conscious life in the universe, there would be no physical universe’.

We can imagine an empty universe full of rocks, stars, and space dust without life, but Lanza argues that’s not possible. One of his most compelling arguments is a unique interpretation of the strange phenomenon in Quantum Physics called ‘The Double Slit Experiment’ (Here’s a video that explains it well). A high-level summary is that scientists found that photons behave differently when they’re ‘observed’ than when they’re not. When a photon isn’t being observed, it acts like a wave. When a photon is observed, it suddenly acts like a particle. This was a ground-breaking discovery that has confused many scientists.

A materialist explanation for the Double Slit Experiment is something called ‘The Observer Effect’.  The Observer Effect is basically the idea that when you measure something, you change it by the act of measurement. For example, checking the air in your tires releases air when you put in the pressure reader. The Observer Effect explains the results of the Double Slit Experiment by saying that the measurement devices are what changed the behavior of the photons. This was proven false in the case of the Double Slit Experiment through another experiment called the ‘Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser Experiment’. I won’t go into it because it’s too long to explain here but here’s a video if you’re curious. The conclusion of the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment was that it isn’t the measurement devices that determined whether the electron behaved as a wave or a particle, it was whether or not an observer knew about the electron’s behavior.

The conclusion of all this quantum stuff is that there’s something seemingly ‘magical’ about conscious observation that can affect sub-atomic particles. Most quantum physicists accept this fact.

So how does this all relate to reincarnation? Brain activity is just atomic behavior, electrical neurons that fire back and forth to relay information. But observation must be something different because observation can affect quantum behavior, firing electrical neurons can not. Our brains give us access to observation but are not exactly the same as the observation itself. Therefore, the death of the brain is not necessarily the end of consciousness.

3.   The populations of the world are growing. How can we think that lives keep getting recycled if there are many more lives now than there were say, 100 years ago?

Dependent Origination implies that everything is connected and nothing is separate.  Therefore, it may be possible for what was an individual seeming animal to be reborn in multiple bodies across many generations. For example, it’s possible that what was once an individual in Ancient Egypt, to now be manifested in many different people who became further individualized as they learned and grew within the Earth.

Dependent Origination implies that the ‘soups of souls’ can be infinite, especially when you factor the possibility of being reborn as non-human animals. If there are an almost infinite number of souls to choose from, populations could grow almost infinitely.