Why I Believe in Reincarnation
...Probably
I have a lot of beliefs that some people consider “spooky”. Tentatively, I think we have souls, that a God of some form exists, and that there are at least some objectively true things to say about morality - basically heresy in the 21st Century. One belief of mine that raises quite a few eyebrows is a sincere belief in reincarnation. At least, it’s the outcome of death that I am most confident in at the moment. Here’s some thoughts on why I think that’s the case.
It’s not that spooky
Ask your average secular person what they think happens after they die, and they’ll probably say some variation of “nothing”. It’s not in vogue these days to believe that something happens after death. I think this is usually motivated by a lack of empirical evidence. There’s no trace here of what happens after death, so we’re best justified in believing that nothing happens.
I think this move is a mistake. At best, it should make us reserve judgement and be agnostic about what happens after death - but I don’t think it should even do that. Lack of empirical evidence doesn’t mean that we can’t justify some beliefs, or acquire reasons to adopt one position over another. At least some knowledge doesn’t come from empirical data. Through reason alone, I know that there are no true contradictions, nothing can be red and green all over at the same time, and that 7 is a prime number. I didn’t learn these things from looking around and finding their truth carved into a rock. You can learn a few things about the nature of reality from the armchair.
I think sometimes people don’t like asserting that anything happens after death because an afterlife sounds a bit weird or spooky. It feels unscientific - but I’m not sure why. This might come as a revelation to some readers, but life is spooky. It’s actually really strange that there is anything. Not just that we’re some little self aware piles of gloop on a rock in nothingness, circling a giant ball of fire (although, that is pretty weird) - but mainly that there is a context in which anything can be in the first place. It never fails to amaze me that there is such a thing as being. Like, how the fuck is any of this happening?
Me, looking at the ocean, into the eyes of a loved one, or at a Youtube clip of Tony Hawk’s 900.
Imagine trying to explain the world we live in to some pre existent primordial essence. They’d probably turn around snarkily and say “So, you believe that you’ll be born into a body, on a rock, in a giant void? Then what, there’ll be others there, you’ll fall in love, and replicate yourself with another body? Sure thing, pal, whatever helps you sleep at night!”.
Our current existence is stranger than we give it credit for, so I don’t consider it much of a hit to some theory that it sounds a bit odd. Also, I’m actually not sure that reincarnation is weirder than the idea that nothing happens after death. Consider these two options.
You’re going round and round, either living the same life repeatedly or incarnating as something else each time.
There was an eternity of nothingness, followed by 80 years of awareness where you worked as an accountant, then an eternity of nothingness.
I actually find the second option really weird! Maybe I’m crazy, but I intuit an eternal cycle of birth and death is more likely than the one off accountant dream. I certainly don’t feel like reincarnation is more weird, anyways.
Huemer’s Case for Reincarnation
Michael Huemer has a paper called Existence is Evidence for Immortality that argues for reincarnation, and I find it pretty compelling. Obviously, if you want to get a comprehensive understanding of the argument, you should read the paper, but here’s the basic idea:
Time is infinite in both directions.
If time is infinite in both directions, and you only lived once, your chances of being alive now would be zero.
You’re alive now.
Therefore the chances you’re alive now must be higher than zero.
Therefore you have not lived only once.
Sometimes people push back on premise 1 because of The Big Bang Theory, but it’s worth noting that the fact the universe is expanding now doesn’t really say much about what happened before it was a singularity. We assume that’s when the universe began, and therefore time began, but why? That’s like watching me drive to work, extrapolating that I came from my house, and assuming that literally nothing happened before I left. The universe could be cyclically expanding and contracting and we’d still see the same redshift.
Huemer also makes the point that a beginning of time is unintuitive because when you go to the start, you can always ask “What happened before that?” and it seems like a legitimate question. Maybe it’s possible for there to be a beginning of time, and it really did start 14 billion years ago, but I don’t feel like that’s something we should be certain about. It’s at least plausible it’s eternity in both directions.
Sometimes people find the second premise weird, but I think that’s just because infinity is weird. We have the feeling that even if it’s eternity in both directions, 80 years is still something. If there’s any amount of time where you live, your chances of being alive now isn’t zero - but if time is infinite, the chances really are zero, because it’d be 80 / ∞ years (Well, my mathematician brother who proof read this article says that 80 / ∞ is tehcnically undefined, but converges to zero).
There also might be some theory of personal identity under which reincarnation would be impossible, but they tend to be ones which I’m not sympathetic to. Huemer actually covers this objection in the paper. Let’s call a view of personal identity that permits reincarnation Permissive Views, and ones that don’t Restrictive Views.
P(L|H) > P(L|~H)
where L = [you being alive now], and H is [some Permissive view of reincarnation is correct]. If time is infinite in both directions, and a Permissive view is correct, you will have lived an infinite number of times, whereas under a Restrictive view you will have only lived once. This means that you being alive now is infinitely more likely if some Permissive view is correct than if a Restrictive view was. Given that, you would need to be certain that a Permissive view is incorrect to think that your current existence isn’t evidence of a Permissive view and Reincarnation - but you shouldn’t be 100% certain because there are lots of smart people with good arguments for Permissive views.
Then steps 3, 4, and 5 are uncontroversial. I wouldn’t consider this some kind of knockdown argument because maybe you can pick apart the first or second premise somehow. Still, I do think it has a decent amount of power.
We actually do have some empirical evidence
Dr Jim Tucker from the University of Virginia has collected many cases of one strange phenomenon - young children talking about past lives. What’s particularly strange about this, is that sometimes the children accurately describe circumstances that actually happened, such as a WW2 pilot being shot down.
My dad coming back to punish me for losing my phone charger again
Maybe this phenomenon has a naturalistic explanation, and the kids just read something online and their brains short circuited. However, I do think that were reincarnation true, you would expect to see young children accurately talking about past lives more than if reincarnation were not true - so until we have a conclusive naturalistic explanation, I think it counts as evidence.
It might solve the problem of evil
This is going to be more of a vague musing based on a limited understanding of Hinduism, rather than a well formed view, but I do think that reincarnation might be able to explain why there are so many bad things in the world. This is the hardest challenge for Theism, because it seems unlikely that were a benevolent god to exist, most lives would be not worth living. Yet, most lives are not worth living, because most of them are animals and insects starving to death and being eaten alive. Even most humans have lived lives of poverty, grief, and smallpox.
So, how does reincarnation fit in? Well, in Hinduism there is this concept of Brahman or the Godhead. Essentially, it’s the underlying entity that binds all things in the universe. I don’t think you need to believe in the Brahman to believe in reincarnation, but they do pair well together. Hindus believe that the universe is, in some sense, the playground of God. All entities are really God, repeatedly getting lost in and waking up from the illusion of separateness. Ram Dass (A.K.A Richard Alpert) had this analogy where he compared looking at different parts of our identity as flipping through TV channels.
“Let’s flip once more, to channel nine. When I turn to channel nine, it is as though two mirrors were facing each other with nothing in between. It is yourself looking at yourself. For on channel nine, there is only one of us, we are the Ancient One. In that reality, on channel nine, we are one acting like the many, in order to carry out this illusion, and there is only one of us doing all this, the one behind the many.”
Now, this sounds nice, but it’s not exactly like I have any rigorous philosophical argument for it. However, were it the case that we are all really the same thing deep down, there’d probably be some element of consent involved with all the suffering in the world. Presumably, whatever that entity is, it would’ve known that a lot of lives would be painful, and yet it chose to live them anyway. I’m not sure why (maybe it has instrumental value?) but then I am just a single man on the weird rock, so it would be hard for me to grok the intentions of the ultimate reality of the universe. I did well on my GCSE’s, but even I have my limits.
Knockdown argument that you’re an idiot if you reject
I did mushrooms once and it really felt true! I understood ultimate truth under that tree in Amsterdam, I swear!
1 is simply an empirical question, and physicists debate this. It's quite possible time isn't even infinite in the positive direction - it may end with a big crunch.
But I think more crucial is that 2 goes wrong in many ways. We're dealing with infinities and continuous values, so we use PDF here, not simple division. It doesn't make sense to ask what the probability that you exist at specific point is - you should be integrating over a range of values. You could say this range is like 80 years, but since it's an infinite set, we can't have uniform distribution - it will diverge if it's uniform, and you also have to be able to normalize the distribution. Presumably then, the PDF would make the probability you exist 5 billion years ago or 17 billion years from now near 0. I suppose a range you could integrate over is the time period that humans have existed. This at least will give you a non-zero value, but I'm still not sure what this probability measures. Human existence, and your existence, are not random events. They're determined. It's the result of some initial conditions in conjunction with nomological laws. Since it's not a random event, as far as I can tell the only meaningful probability to talk about is posterior probability, which in this case is 1.
Notice that if Huem's logic was coherent, the probability of any event at all would be 0 - every event occurs in time, then we could ask 'what's the probability this coin was flipped NOW' - it would always be 0 if Huem was correct.
But I think it's important to note here that even if the probability was 0, that wouldn't mean it's impossible. The probability of picking a specific number from a continuous interval - like .7452 from the real numbers between 0 and 1, is 0. But it doesn't mean it's impossible to get a specific number or that those numbers don't exist. The probability you get a specific number here is 1.
I'll try to be really brief on this next part: when it comes to surviving death, this seems to just violate everything we understand about physics and biology and chemistry. Our mental states are generated in the brain - if there is no brain, there is nothing to survive.
I think the probability argument fails. Imagine I pick random real numbers between 0 and 1 a countably infintie number of times:
{pick 1, pick 2, pick 3, ...}
Suppose that on the third, fourth, and fifth pick the number happens to be 0.55. The chance of this happening was 0 (as was the chance of picking any three real numbers), but this doesn't imply that every other number which was picked will also be 5. The prior probability that the third, fourth, and fifth pick would be 0.55 was 0, but once I know that they were 0.55, the condtional probability that they were 0.55 given that they were 0.55 is tautologically 1.
So step 4, "Therefore the chances you’re alive now must be higher than zero" is trivially true: the conditional probability that you are alive now given that you are alive now is 1, which is greater than zero.
In other words, the fallacy occurs with steps 2 and 4. It is an attempt at modus tollens, to deny the consequent, but it is a fallacy of equivocation: the "probability" or "chance of being alive" referenced in each statement use the same phrasing, but refer to different things: one a prior probability, and the other the conditional probability.
To drive the point home, let's recast it:
1. There are 7 differently colored balls in a basket.
2. One of them is red. If you pick 1 ball, your chances of picking the red ball was 1/7
3. You happened to pick a red ball, so your chances of picking the red ball is 1.
4. Therefore, by modus tollens, you didn't actually only pick 1 ball.
By the way, I think the empirical cases are actually quite compelling and worth looking into. The Buddhist conception of reincarnation is different as well and interesting. You might be interested in the book by Dr. Ian Stevenson about children who remember past lives. The book has a long discussion about all the sorts of issues you would naturally bring to the table. Many of these cases were pre-internet too, and occured in cultures that would surprise you.