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Past Life Memories
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In this episode, Megan and Frank investigate the strange phenomenon of past life memories. Are past life memories evidence for reincarnation? Is what we remember a good guide to who we are? And how might a single identity span different lifetimes? Thinkers discussed in this episode include Plato, Pythagoras, Thomas Reid, J.M.E. McTaggart, and Michael Sudduth.
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Hosts' Websites:
Email: philosophyonthefringes@gmail.com
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Bibliography:
The Next Dalai Lama: Preparing for Reincarnation and Why It Matters to India
Claire White, Robert M. Kelly & Shaun Nichols, Remembering Past Lives
Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
Children Who Report Memories of Past Lives - Division of Perceptual Studies
The Case of James Leininger_ An American Case of the Reincarnation Type
Jim Tucker - Response to Sudduth’s “James Leininger Case Re-Examined”
The Science of Reincarnation—VIRGINIA Magazine
The Philosophy of Dr. McTaggart.
S2, Episode 6: The Self and Survival (Mar. 27th, 2018) – Hi-Phi Nation
New evidence shows false memories can be created | UW News
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Cover Artwork by Logan Fritts
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Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/neon-signs
License code: ZMHYPZTDWFJ3QXU2
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Transcript
Introduction to Past Lives and Reincarnation
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange. We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera. On today's episode, we're talking about past lives.
00:00:16
Speaker
Are past life memories evidence for reincarnation? Is what we remember a good guide to who we are? And how might a single identity span different lifetimes?
00:00:38
Speaker
Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. I'm really excited for today. This is a topic that I've been hounding Frank about doing for like probably a year. i got really into this literature probably like a year ago or so.
00:00:53
Speaker
i remember, ah you but because it was right at the end of my pregnancy with Annie and I was listening all these podcasts on this topic and reading these things. I was like, Frank, we have to do an episode on it and we finally just got around to it. So I'm excited about today. Frank, how
Research Styles: PowerPoints vs. Sticky Notes
00:01:08
Speaker
are you doing? um Well, you did most of the research for this podcast, so I'm just going to be along for the ride. I'm going to be the kind of Socrates, like, asking you questions about things. Yeah, look out, everyone. Actually, with the it's actually really funny to compare what it looks like when I do research for an episode versus when...
00:01:25
Speaker
Frank does research for an episode. So Frank, when he does research, when when it's a Frank episode that he is mostly puts together, he has like a 75 page PowerPoint presentation he sends to me and he's like, here you go. Here's Here's here's all this. We don't use all of that. It's just fun to do. It's it's it's just it's just for the future. maybe Maybe it'll come in handy. You know, we might write ah we might write a book based on the podcast. It'll come in handy. All right. When I do research for an episode, i so i swear to God, I'll actually upload a picture of this so you guys can see.
00:01:57
Speaker
It is literally on like a two by four yellow sheet of sticky notes. Our whole agenda, what we're going to talk about. I got it all i got it all stored in the cranium.
00:02:09
Speaker
And so this is, yeah i the Megan episodes are chaos, but you know, you got to sprinkle in some chaos. Yeah, that's why we work well together. have different styles, they complement each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:02:20
Speaker
So this is a Megan episode. So look out, buckle up.
Children Remembering Past Lives: Scientific Insights
00:02:24
Speaker
Let's start talking about memories of past lives. So were the larger emphasis today ah is going to be on children who remember past lives.
00:02:33
Speaker
And the reason for that is because there is actually a substantial body of scientific research on the phenomenon of children who claim to remember living past lives.
00:02:45
Speaker
Actually, out of the University of Virginia has a center called the Division of Perceptual Studies. It's housed in the social sciences. We've actually used work from the Division of Perceptual Studies before in other episodes, our episode on near-death experiences.
00:03:02
Speaker
They have a whole unit that researches near-death experiences, and they also have a unit that researches children who report memories of past lives. I told Frank earlier that working Yeah. And that not derogatory at all. That would kind of be my dream job. Although we just saw X-Files movie it's terrible. So not highly recommended.
00:03:20
Speaker
basically working on the x-files yeah and i say that not derogatory at all that would kind of be my dream job although we just saw vfiles movie and and terrible so did not highly recommend can't recommend the movie, but can recommend the show hardcore and can recommend work from the Division of Perceptual Studies because this is some hardcore science applied to really, really weird phenomena, which is obviously something that we're very into on this podcast.
00:03:46
Speaker
um So they have a whole... division devoted to children who report memories of past lives. This is headed up by Jim Tucker, who is ah the lead psychiatrist in the center and was the head of the i the psychology department at the university prior to this work, if I remember correctly.
00:04:06
Speaker
And there so so there's there's a lot of research on this because i i guess this kind of just happens a lot. I mean, it's a rare phenomenon, but in the last 50 years, people have been researching this phenomenon for about half a century now, and they've collected about 2,500 cases of children who report robust, substantive memories of living a past life.
00:04:30
Speaker
Now, most of those cases are outside the U.S. and in recent years they have restricted their research just to cases that occur in the United States because they want to screen off the possibility of people's worldviews, maybe legalities. leading them to infer past life memories.
00:04:50
Speaker
So a lot of these cases occur in that they had looked into before occurred in India, where belief in reincarnation is pretty prevalent. um And so they want to just screen off that as a kind of obscuring factor in their research. So they're just focusing now on cases in the United States where belief in reincarnation is really, really low. On that note, it'd be worth citing some statistics here. So according to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll on U.S. adults, three quarters of them believe in heaven in the traditional sense.
00:05:24
Speaker
A smaller percentage believe in hell, 62%. And when it comes to those who believe in an afterlife that is neither heaven nor hell but something else, ah that which is 7% of
Reincarnation Beliefs: US vs. India
00:05:36
Speaker
U.S. adults, a smaller percentage of that believe in reincarnation. So like 17% of the 7% that don't believe in a heaven or hell but believe in an afterlife believe in reincarnation. That's a very small number of U.S. adults who believe in reincarnation. So yeah, not very prevalent in the United States, but of course is very prevalent in places like India, where
00:05:57
Speaker
i In one lecture I listened to on reincarnation in India, the lecturer claimed that the belief in reincarnation is like the fundamental assumption of Indian religious tradition. Yeah. So it's yeah very common. Right.
00:06:09
Speaker
um So I'm just going, we're not going get into the specific cases right now. We'll look at a couple of those later, but I'm just going to give you some, some, Ground level data so you can kind of know ah what's going on here. So in the United States, there's been several hundred of documented cases.
00:06:26
Speaker
They do have a hard time finding cases to document. And the researchers say a lot of that is due to basically parental embarrassment. Mm hmm. So most children who report memories of a past life are between the ages of two and six.
00:06:42
Speaker
Some of them are a little bit younger. Not many of them are older. Most of them have lost their past life memories by around age six. But what the what the researchers say is in trying to gather different cases to look into, one thing they keep running into is difficulty kind of getting information out of parents who you might think that maybe parents would would maybe be making stuff up to to sell a book or whatever.
00:07:09
Speaker
um and so we shouldn't really trust parental testimony. But according to the field researchers, this is actually kind of the opposite of what's the case. um A lot of people are ah don't believe in the phenomenon that seems to be evidenced for by this phenomenon. ah they They don't believe in reincarnation.
00:07:26
Speaker
A lot of them might be, i you know, they might be like Christians or whatever, or not religious at all, and just be like, I don't believe in reincarnation, so obviously that's not what's happening. And they really don't kind of want to talk about it. Yeah.
00:07:39
Speaker
Some of the cases they do get are parents kind of seeking them out i because they kind of it's their last resort. they They've been trying to figure out like what's wrong with their kid. Their kid is very disturbed.
00:07:51
Speaker
And I should say that the kid is disturbed because over 70 percent of children who claim past life memories claim that they died a violent or unnatural death. Right. So the kids are off. They're not having a good time. and They're not like remembering really fun past life. and they're like, man, that was great. I can't wait to do it again.
00:08:08
Speaker
I imagine a lot of parents just think their kids you know making something up. It's just make believe or pretend or they don't they don't understand their experience. So they're not ah they're not going to reach reach out to the paranormal researchers. Yeah. And they don't until it gets really bad. So children who can't sleep at all, who have night terrors night after night, who are a lot of times they just are in extreme emotional distress and saying some very, very weird things. So, yeah, by the time the parents reach out to these researchers, and they're They're kind of at the end of their rope. And they're not they're certainly not looking to be told that their child is the reincarnated ghost of you know whoever. This is similar to the demonic possession case. So so we'll do an episode on this eventually.
00:08:52
Speaker
but ah ah So the the exorcist is not people's first resort when they're suffering symptoms that are go along with demonic possession. they're Crawling up the wall. Yeah. Yeah, they often seek out you know mental health professionals first. And then when all else fails, they they call up. When all hell breaks loose. They call up the Catholic priest and then they get the exorcist. right So yeah they don't they don't jump into it is is the point. Right, right. they don't jump to conclusions.
00:09:18
Speaker
so um So just some more ground-level
Characteristics of Children with Past Life Memories
00:09:21
Speaker
data. So both male and female children report past life memories, but about 60% of children reporting are male, so slightly more inclined toward male children.
00:09:30
Speaker
um They have done extensive psychological evaluations of children who report past life memories. And they don't report any abnormal levels of mood disorders or mental illness or anything like that.
00:09:43
Speaker
The only unusual thing that they found in their psychological profiling was that these children tend to report or tend to exhibit rather very high IQ and high ah ability, like advanced linguistically and um ah advanced in reading and and stuff like that. maybe surprise This surprised me.
00:10:02
Speaker
ah The median time between claimed death and birth is only about 16 months. So the vast majority of kids who are reporting past life memories think that they are someone who died pretty recently before they were born, just like maybe a few years ago, right? Yeah.
00:10:19
Speaker
20% of children claim that they remember the time between death and rebirth, but their account there's no, like, trends for those accounts. Some people- so like, when when they were in the platonic realm or, like, the the in-between, the limbo, that's what you're talking about? Yeah, yeah. I read what some kids answered. Some kids say like they were in God's house.
00:10:40
Speaker
Other kids say that they just waited by where they died until they found their new parents. And this is also interesting. So some kids say that they just sort of were born and they didn't really have any say in it. Some kids say they chose their parents.
00:10:55
Speaker
So there's not a lot of agreement. It's not like there's one solid account that they all kind of talk about. But 20% say they remember that time. And then between 20% and 30% of kids who report a past life memory also have some kind of scar or physical deformity that matches what they say occurred, some traumatic thing that they claim occurred in their past life.
00:11:17
Speaker
Anyway, that's some data for you just to kind of give you an idea of the scope and details of this phenomenon as it presents itself in young children. Interesting. So yeah, so we've you've been talking a lot about children here. And I imagine that a lot of believers in like the reality of past lives, that is to say that what the children report is veridical. They were actually somebody else in a past life. The memories are real.
00:11:42
Speaker
i think I imagine the fact that it's the children reporting these things lends more credence to the claim. Like the idea is like they're too they're too innocent and naive and they're too far removed from cultural factors and societal factors for those to be influences on them. Like it's what their testimony is more genuine because they're so young. They're so they're so innocent. They're not corrupted by society.
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah, mean, I think it goes in both directions. So there's certainly that, right? It's not like you got your like two year old who's like, man, I really hope I can get a book deal out of this. yeah But at the same time, children also are super imaginative and sometimes do have a really hard time separating imagination for our reality.
00:12:23
Speaker
So I think there's some aspects of it being so prevalent in children that make it maybe seem more veridical and other aspects that maybe make us doubt it more. Yeah. But maybe it's not just strictly an issue of integrity. Maybe we think that there's something about children that are sort of like they haven't had the true reality of the world hidden from them in the way that adults have.
00:12:47
Speaker
Yeah, what this reminds me of is this sort of argumentative move in Hellenistic philosophy. So like the Stoics, epicureans you know the the Cyrenaics, the schools of philosophy that flourished ah in the in the ancient world like after Aristotle.
00:13:01
Speaker
And they they often argued about like what sort of thing comes naturally to us. And they thought the good, what what is desirable in life, what is good for us, is to be determined by what comes natural to us. So what do we seek out naturally?
00:13:15
Speaker
Children have this kind of wisdom because they are uncorrupted by society and convention. Yeah, and I think that's like that's the ah that's the underlying thought that structures the debate between the Epicureans and the Stoics.
00:13:26
Speaker
And it seems like something else like something like that is going on here too. The believers in the reality of past lives say, look at the children. They have this kind of special wisdom and we can learn a lot from them. It is it is significant that the children are saying that they've lived past lives.
00:13:43
Speaker
so let's move away from the discussion of children specifically right now. We'll come back to this, but let's talk about belief in reincarnation more generally.
Philosophical Interpretations of Reincarnation
00:13:54
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if you put it that way, if you think about this topic in terms of reincarnation, then it might not seem that weird, right? It might not seem that on the fringes, Because reincarnation is a topic in Eastern religion, the Eastern philosophy. It's ah it's a topic in ah Western philosophy, too, in Plato's philosophy.
00:14:10
Speaker
um So if we turn to Plato, reincarnation comes up in a few dialogues. One of them i have in mind is in the Timaeus. The Timaeus, by and large, contains Plato's account of the the creation of the world.
00:14:25
Speaker
We talked about this in our myths episode. So Plato has this kind of really elaborate scheme whereby what you do in life determines how you are reincarnated. So the cowardly men, that is all male born humans who live lives of cowardice or injustice, they're reincarnated as, I'm sorry to say, Megan, women.
00:14:46
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. The simple minded, naive men. This one offends me. Plato, I've always defended This one offends me, too. Also, simple minded, naive men who studied the heavens with sense perception, they're reincarnated as birds.
00:15:01
Speaker
a He's hating on birds. Now, that one makes sense. No, no. Those those men who don't study philosophy and didn't use their heads at all, but use their chests to get to to decide what to do. right. Use their their their spirit.
00:15:14
Speaker
Lions. They have their heads toward the ground. They're reincarnated land animals. So I guess lions and um ah and among other ones. And snakes, they're the most mindless. and That's why they're closest to the ground.
00:15:25
Speaker
And the water animals, they're the the most stupid of all. The men, they were the stupidest ones of all. They get no air to breathe because their souls were tainted. Their due reward, quote, for their extreme stupidity is their extreme dwelling place.
00:15:38
Speaker
So if you're really, really stupid, you're reincarnated as a mollusk, for instance. That's interesting to me because snakes are actually associated with wisdom in a lot of ancient literature. yeah Being wise as serpents, that's like literally in the Bible. yeah Well, they're you know they're conniving. they're out They're not wise in Plato's sense. That is, they have right you know an accurate perception of the good or anything. Yeah, but it takes some... Okay, that's fine. That's fine.
00:16:02
Speaker
I mean, the woman thing is... Yeah, it's very offensive. I mean, you know, this was ancient Greece. Plato probably only met like three women in his life. So it's, you know, i'm I'm going to give him a pass and say if he would have met me.
00:16:16
Speaker
Yeah, he would have changed his mind. but Yeah. Yeah. So Plato probably got his beliefs on reincarnation, it is said, right by the historians from Pythagoras, who who may have gotten them from the East.
00:16:27
Speaker
So Pythagoras was is was known that he traveled to Egypt, so he might have imbibed Eastern wisdom. And interestingly, when when it comes to Pythagoras, he himself thought he was reincarnated. Like he or he had past lives. He remembered them.
00:16:41
Speaker
According to the the biographer Diogenes Laertius, Pythagoras, ah he could recall being other people. So Pythagoras had a lot of... Who was he? Who was he? I just... Well, I guess ultimately he recalls being ah the son of Hermes. So here's Diogenes Laertius.
00:16:58
Speaker
This is what Heraclides of Pontus tells us Pythagoras used to say about himself. That he had once been... Athelades and was accounted to be Hermes' son. And Hermes told him he might choose any gift he liked except immortality.
00:17:11
Speaker
So he asked to retain through life and through death a memory of his experiences. So that was like, that was the way Hermes' son got around not being able to get immortality as a gift. He got remembrance of past lives.
00:17:24
Speaker
So it goes on and on. Pythagoras, were met he remembers being, you know, this guy and this guy, Pyrrhus, a fisherman. and Pythagoras was born and Yeah. That's hysterical. yeah I'm sorry. That's that that's really funny.
00:17:38
Speaker
um Okay. All right. So he used to be Hermes. you know So is that like forever? so like is is is Hermes still being... I suppose Pythagoras is still among us if if he's right because he you got this gift from her And Hermes is still... Hermes' son. Hermes' son. Right. Okay. Right. Hermes' son. all Yeah. yeah he was the He was the patient zero. Hermes' son. Okay. Got it. Got it. Yeah.
00:17:58
Speaker
I mean, there is a famous reincarnated person on Earth, right? the um The Dalai Lama, right? He is supposed to be... Absolutely. Yeah, so he is the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. he But he might be the last. yeah That is... Yeah, this this is super, super important news. So he's the 14th Dalai Lama, right? The 14th reincarnation of this this spiritual leader um who I guess the first one was like in the 1600s or something.
00:18:20
Speaker
But he's being a little coy about whether there will be a 15th Dalai Lama. He's going to announce his decision in July this year. He gets decide? He gets to decide. They get to decide if they go on or not? Yeah, gets to decide. He's like, you know what? Wait, how long have they...
00:18:37
Speaker
what A couple hundred. four Four hundred years. Four hundred years. so I mean, I'd be done by then. yeah I'll tell you that. I'd be done by then. I mean, and and you're getting at a fundamental truth of, ofie like, at least Hinduism, right? Hinduism. And and Buddhism, right?
00:18:49
Speaker
That, like, the reincarnation cycle is, like, kind of a drag. It's not a gift. It's burdensome, right? So the term for it, the cycle of reincarnation, is samsara. And it literally means wandering. so you're wandering.
00:19:02
Speaker
And yeah, you really you really want to escape eventually. right Even though you can sometimes be reincarnated as a god or a demigod, even those even those guys suffer a bit. And so for the Buddhists, ah the point of of um existence is to free yourself from this cycle of birth and rebirth. right That's nirvana and all of that.
00:19:21
Speaker
um So, yeah, I mean, it sounds like a drag. it sounds like a drag in Plato's scheme, too. It seems like, you know, it's very easy to get it wrong. And then you're reincarnated as a mollusk. yeah Yeah. Or a woman.
00:19:34
Speaker
I'm just as a side note. I want all of our listeners to know that my watch just told me I hit my step goal, even though I have been sitting down. Megan is so committed to the step goal that she will sometimes surreptitiously take steps during faculty meetings. That is true. It's funny to watch.
00:19:52
Speaker
But it says I've hit my step goal even though I was sitting down. And I feel like there are questions I could ask about the integrity of my... No, you're shifting. You're shifting. The integrity of my step counter.
00:20:03
Speaker
But I'm not going to. I'm just going to be happy that I got here. um Okay,
Analytic Philosophy on Past Lives
00:20:10
Speaker
great. So this is philosophy on the fringes, but it's on the fringes. It's not totally outside of the fill verse here. So Frank did actually end up finding one paper that kind of discusses reincarnation in the in our sort of analytic philosophy paper Yeah, not just reincarnation. like like I'm sure you can find Plato's scholarship on reincarnation and all that. it's it's ah It's a central view of his doctrine. I found something on past lives in in our Phil Papers database.
00:20:38
Speaker
so the Fantastic. So the paper is called Remembering Past Lives by Claire White. That's exactly what we're talking about. Claire White, Robert Kelly, and Sean Nichols. It's a paper in a volume but called ah Advances in Religion, Cognitive Science, and Experimental Philosophy, edited by Helen DeCruz and Ryan Nichols.
00:20:54
Speaker
And yeah, so it's really ah X-Fi. So it's it's it's experimental philosophy. So really they just did some surveys and polled people mostly about like why they believe they have had past lives.
00:21:06
Speaker
But it did make some important distinctions and and and all of that. And it was interesting to see the survey data. So one important distinction that this paper makes is that there's like two sort of general arguments that you commonly see for why someone...
00:21:24
Speaker
ah generally thinks they had a past life. So the first one is what I call the memory argument. I remember being a soldier who fought in the Battle of Hastings in 1066. So I fought in the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It's that simple. I remember doing this, so I existed at that time.
00:21:40
Speaker
um But there's another kind of approach you might offer, and i and they call this the external validation approach. The idea here is not to focus so much on your personal memory of you being at a particular place, but focus on, like, the information you have. Maybe you wake up and don't really remember being a soldier who fought in the Battle of Hastings.
00:21:59
Speaker
But you have so much information about what William the Conqueror was doing when he landed on the shores of England and and all of that. You have so much knowledge about the the weapons they were using and tactics and all that stuff that it just couldn't be a matter of chance that you have this knowledge. And therefore, you must have been there. right you You wake up with this knowledge that couldn't have been acquired otherwise and having been the person that existed in the past.
00:22:26
Speaker
So that's a little bit different, right? you're focus It's a little more ah indirect. You're focusing on the knowledge you have rather than your personal memory. already have a question. Sure. All right. So my question is, this seems like the external validation approach that you were just talking about. Yeah.
00:22:41
Speaker
i'm I'm struggling to see how this would work because either this is, you know, so super secret information about, say, 1066 that we do in fact have, that historians have, and therefore can externally validate. Yeah.
00:22:56
Speaker
In which case it seems like there is some of the way you could have known it. Or it's information nobody does know, in which case there's no external. Yeah, I imagine. So it would be similar. If remember the case you talked about in the ghosts episode where the guy, he said, look, I saw these Roman soldiers down here. Go dig up that site and you'll see what I'm talking about.
00:23:17
Speaker
So I imagine the approach would be something like that. Well, they validated it after that, which was significant about that. So, yeah, I suppose if you're trying to convince the skeptic, you would want to, and you're going down the external validation route, you'd want to say, I have this knowledge, and secret knowledge. yeah You don't have it right now. right Go look over there and you'll find it that would it convince them.
00:23:39
Speaker
Okay, you have to give them something to to help them discover more, kind of. Maybe to convince the skeptic, but maybe but maybe to convince yourself you don't need all of that. Maybe you wake up one day with all this knowledge in your head about what it was like in and ancient Sumeria, and you're like, man, i must have been there.
00:23:56
Speaker
Okay. Even if you don't remember you yourself being there. Mm-hmm. Yeah, to convince the skeptic, right, you need to you need to make a novel prediction, of course. So it seems like maybe there are some kinds of arguments for reincarnation or past lives, rather.
00:24:11
Speaker
Past lives. i guess that's different than reincarnation. For past lives that fall in between these or outside of these two categories. Like I mentioned before, between 20 and 30% of children who remember or claim to remember past lives have some kind of mark or scar or something on their body that corresponds to a memory of some traumatic event in a past life.
00:24:38
Speaker
And so maybe that's like a kind of, i don't know, it's not it's not really a memory at all. it's a It's a physical manifestation of something.
Memory and Identity in Past Life Claims
00:24:48
Speaker
So that seems like maybe a kind of argument for a past life that it's not memory based at all.
00:24:54
Speaker
Well, don't don't don't they say they they remember getting this mark in their past life? Isn't that... so is it isn't it kind of memory-based then? they so It is a little different because there's a physical manifestation. That's that's different. but So someone might say, like, ah you know, I got stabbed in the leg as a child by my brother or something. And then they'll have, like, a birthmark or a scar or something on their leg where they say they got stabbed. Yeah.
00:25:17
Speaker
So they don't necessarily... Like, they remember getting a wound or something there where they have some kind of mark now. Yeah. Yeah, it's almost like it's almost like a mix of the two because there is some kind of external validation in some of some set in some sense. yeah Yeah, kind of. ah Yeah.
00:25:33
Speaker
Again, it's not a memory of actually receiving, but but yeah, it's, yeah, kind of. I don't know. That one's weird. well and so And I mean, just to add more sort of confusion to the kinds of arguments people give for believing had a past life. um When it comes to the Dalai Lama, for instance, so he, I looked up how it is they determined that that he was the the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.
00:25:57
Speaker
And it was based on the fact that he could identify as a child, again, The purity principle. Children have this wisdom. He could identify as a child monks in the temple that he allegedly would have no way of knowing their names. He knew all their names. like Like, hey, buddy, I remember you.
00:26:13
Speaker
and and he could identify artifacts that the the Dalai Lama used, a staff of or something like that. so right So that's another kind of argument. You can add that to the list. Right. yeah Right.
00:26:25
Speaker
So I think now would be a good time to kind of talk about memory as a phenomenon. yeah Because obviously all of these cases rely on memory. All of these ways of delineating, you know, interesting cases from non-interesting cases rely on memory and whether we can validate these memories.
00:26:42
Speaker
But we haven't, and in fact, not a lot of stuff that I've read on this. In fact, I don't really think anything I've read on this. actually like talks about memory as a phenomenon it's just kind of assumed that like if you're really having these memories of this you know super secret or intimate information that it must be that you kind of are this person that these things happened to but memory kind of a more memory is a more complex phenomenon than that so i think that it deserves some discussion Yeah, and and it's good that you mentioned that because another important distinction this paper made was between different kinds of memories. So this is this is standard fare in the psychology of literature. It's it's in it's standard distinguish between ah what they call semantic memory, that is memory of facts.
00:27:32
Speaker
I remember that William the Conqueror landed in England, the tried conquer England, 1066, memory of facts. versus episodic memory, which, to quote someone from the article, is, quote, So have semantic memories of facts about 1066, the Battle Hastings, and of that, because studied medieval history.
00:27:54
Speaker
so i have semantic memories of facts about ten sixty six the battle of hastings and all of that because i've studied medieval history But of course, I don't have any episodic memories of that time because I don't claim to have a past life where I was a soldier who fought in 1066 in the Battle of Hastings.
00:28:10
Speaker
So, so yeah so that's the that's important distinction. Memories where you sort of can feel yourself being there and mere memory of facts. Yeah, so this, Frank knows what I'm about to say. This is an interesting topic for me, largely because I, well, actually, it's an interesting topic for both of us, because we both have interesting issues with memory. It's just that they happen to be the opposite. Oh, really?
00:28:37
Speaker
Yes. Frank has a photographic memory. Many of you may not know that, although I think I have mentioned that on this podcast before. Frank has a photographic memory, which I will say being married to someone with a photographic memory is sometimes irritating, but mostly awesome because he literally can find anything that I've lost.
00:28:56
Speaker
It's it's a real part. hey am, i struggle with episodic memories, actually. i i don't have a lot of memories where it feels like that happened to me.
00:29:09
Speaker
And weirdly, I do have memories of past events, but they feel more like semantic memories. I know that this happened to Megan. And it's kind of, it's a weird thing to describe to people. I do have some episodic memories, but But ah usually of really emotionally intense moments that are positive, really emotionally intense moments that are negative, I really don't have a lot of episodic memories of.
00:29:35
Speaker
So that's kind of something I'm like, that's like a personal project I'm working on. I'm trying to figure out how to retain more episodic memories because that's something that I, for some reason, my brain just kind of dumps. So memory is a really interesting topic for me for this reason.
00:29:52
Speaker
Yeah, and and in the the past lives thing, according to this study, that it was it was the the episodic memory that was the grounds of most people's belief that they had a past life. It wasn't waking up with extra weird knowledge or physical markers, anything anything like that. For most people, it was ah memory, episodic memory, that that convinced them that they lived a past life. and It was that personal feeling of of ownership of the experience that you get when you when you have an episodic memory. like I can remember stuff from like first grade, you know, like I remember being there and it's it's it's mine. I feel myself there. I can picture myself there.
00:30:33
Speaker
ah When it comes to the people who have past lives, like they have that thing, like they have that feeling of personal ownership. They can picture yourself being in 1066. And that was what that's why they believe what they believe.
00:30:47
Speaker
But this is an interesting criteria for discerning these cases because we know that memory can be mistaken. and not just semantic memory. Obviously, that can be mistaken. But episodic memory, too.
00:31:00
Speaker
So here's some examples. Witness testimony at trial yeah has been shown to be deeply unreliable. Yeah, but often those are like memories about what other people did, like you you what you saw. But you were there. yeah but they did yeah i don' do they they don't get wrong that they were there.
00:31:19
Speaker
That's true. Well, here's another example. Now, I heard this story... in another class of mine. and I didn't realize I'd be pulling it out today, so I don't have the details, but I will, I'll find it and we'll find it and we'll put it in the episode bib.
00:31:32
Speaker
But basically a a professor of some class, and I want to say it was a psychology class. I'm pretty sure it was because it was a class focused on memory. She kind of ran an experiment that she didn't tell her students about.
00:31:44
Speaker
Y'all can debate the ethics of that. Oh, Where over the course of the semester, she did little things to try to cause her students to, at the end of the semester, have a false memory of meeting Bugs Bunny at Disney World. That's cool.
00:31:58
Speaker
Now, nobody meant Bugs Bunny at Disney World because why, Frank? Why did they not meet Bugs Bunny at Disney World? Yeah, that's Looney Tunes. That's not Disney. Absolutely right. Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character.
00:32:09
Speaker
But by the end of the semester, she had convinced a large amount, large amount of people in this class were convinced that they had met, they remembered meeting Bugs Bunny at Disney World. yeah This is kind of part of a larger phenomenon that people sometimes refer to as the Mandela Effect. We should do an episode on that. Is that is that is that possible?
00:32:28
Speaker
should! Why haven't we done one? Okay, we'll do a whole episode on the Mandela effect. The Sinbad-Shaq thing, like that's just nonsense. The Sinbad was not in a movie as a genie, all right? He wasn't.
00:32:40
Speaker
What I kind of do... the So the the the one Mandela effect that really got me is the Baron Steve Harris. Yeah, yeah. That's because you're like you're you're like five years old and you just like can't read stuff. Yeah.
00:32:53
Speaker
That's probably true. um But right. So people. OK, so for you who don't know what Mandela Effect is, it's where there's this mass phenomenon of people remembering something that didn't happen. The the the name goes back to apparently people thought Nelson Mandela died in prison. yeah even though he became president of South Africa and lived long. Yeah, no, they remember him dying in prison. they're like, who's this guy?
00:33:15
Speaker
Um. Right. So episodic memories can be mistaken, too. but We can really feel like we have this memory. We were there. We experienced it. We know what it was like, but it didn't happen.
00:33:28
Speaker
So what do we do with that? Well, what I would say to this is I would i would quote Thomas Reed, the Scottish philosopher. Beautiful. There's always there's never a bad time to quote Thomas Reed. And and what what he says is, how do we how do we know how do I know I was the same person that I was in first grade? Even if like the memory doesn't constitute my personal identity over time.
00:33:47
Speaker
It's like the only evidence I have, the only strong evidence I have. Why do I believe I was a person that I was yesterday? Because remember it, right? he says, to this I answer. The proper evidence I have of all of this, that I am a persistent being over time, is remembrance.
00:34:01
Speaker
I remember that 20 years ago I conversed with such a person. i remember several things that passed in that conversation. My memory testifies. Not only that this was done, but this was done by me, who now remembers it. If it was done by me, I must have existed at that time and continue to exist from that time to the present.
00:34:16
Speaker
and So the the difficulty is the same grounds by which these people claim to have had past lives. It's the same sort of reasoning we use when we say I was the same person I was yesterday and 10 years before that.
00:34:29
Speaker
I remember being that person. So i find I find this really interesting, and this was mentioned in the article too, that the results of this study, that most people believe they had a past life because they have a genuine episodic memory where they have exclusive ownership of that memory.
00:34:47
Speaker
um that's if If that's how it goes, and that makes belief in past life, quote, less bizarre, or at least psychologically, these, quote, extraordinary convictions, including those associated with reincarnation, are critically underpinned by some of the same processes that govern mundane social cognition.
00:35:06
Speaker
in other words, the the the route, the reasoning by which people get to these weird beliefs is similar to the reasoning by which we get to ordinary, non-weird, socially acceptable beliefs. that You are a persistent being over time. The same sort of cognitive processes are underlying both.
00:35:24
Speaker
Now maybe there's some compelling external reasons that defeat the reasoning in the past life case, but that makes it kind of kind of interesting. Yeah, I mean, ah you know, not to maybe state the overly obvious, although that is what I'm just about to do.
00:35:39
Speaker
i The distinction here seems to be that it seems like a stronger claim to make, you know, i I'm the same person that I was yesterday versus I'm the same person that, to use one famous case, and Frank was back in the forty s ah The distinction, thing that makes one a more bizarre claim than the other is that it's a different body.
00:36:02
Speaker
But maybe, mean, depending on your view of the mind-body relation, maybe that's not too crazy of a thing to possibly. Yeah, the memory people don't think the body matters.
00:36:14
Speaker
The memory people don't think the body matters. Yeah, the people who who rely on memory in answering questions about personal identity, they don't think the body really matters. They're psychological theorists, not physical theorists.
00:36:26
Speaker
They don't think... Right. Well, okay. Let's be a little more specific. So maybe if you're a psychological continuity theorist about personal identity, you don't think the body matters for personal identity.
00:36:38
Speaker
But you might also be a physicalist and think the body matters for having any cognition at all. And insofar as the body when the body ceases to exist, so does psychological continuity. Yeah, of course. So this odd obviously, and I gestured at this, there might be some relevant differences. you got You got some explaining to do if you want to say that the memory of the past life grounds and provides sufficient evidence for belief in the reality of the past life.
00:37:06
Speaker
Because in these cases, and going back even to the cases of children who remember past lives, even though the the the average time between death and rebirth, supposed rebirth, is only 16 months, that's 16 months.
00:37:21
Speaker
where that that's That right there is a discontinuity. Yes, right. Which I suppose could get picked up, but at this point, the metaphysics is really obscure to me. course. Yes. Yes. You are right.
00:37:31
Speaker
Right. But I do find it interesting that it's like, you know, on its surface, memory grounds your belief in your own personal identity. And, you know, for these people who believe they have past lives, memory is also doing the same sort of thing. Right. So either when we start talking about this kind of phenomena, our ordinary, reliable epistemic reasoning processes have to go out the door. Or i don't know, maybe we need to change our credences about what kinds of postulates are plausible and what ones aren't.
00:37:58
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, there could be compelling reasons. and like you said, there could be compelling reasons to doubt it. Sorry, yet I thought you were fully on board. no, no, no. no I just and but I think one of the themes of the podcast is the kind of big picture sort of approach is that we've been sort of highlighting this throughout is that but like the like the the authors of the article said, what makes these weird things interesting is that they are under what underlies them for many people is a familiar pattern of reasoning that we rely upon. and doesn't seem at all illegitimate in other domains. Take the Bigfoot case. Testimony. We use that all the time.
00:38:33
Speaker
Similar sort of things go on in in other cases. Patterns of reasoning we rely upon in ordinary life lead to belief in strange things. That's interesting to me. Yeah, I agree.
00:38:44
Speaker
Okay, so I told you guys that we were going to talk about some specific cases um because that's where the, you know, all the juicy stuff lies.
Famous Past Life Cases
00:38:52
Speaker
I'm not going to give this like a full treatment basically because there's other places that you can listen to an hour-long podcast just going over the details of these cases. There's a lot of them.
00:39:05
Speaker
If you go to the Division of Perceptual Studies website, they have a list of all the different articles and podcasts written on the research that they do and on specific cases.
00:39:15
Speaker
One podcast in general that I'll just rep here, even though a lot you probably know about it, is Hi-Fi Nation. They did an episode on um children who remember past lives, and they focused on one of these cases in particular and even interviewed Jim Tucker. So if you're interested in just doing a deep dive into these cases, I would recommend that.
00:39:36
Speaker
um But I'm going to try to give some details and then we'll we'll we'll discuss those. I'm not going to talk about them for an hour, basically. But anyway, there's two specific cases that I want to talk about. Well, I guess il I'll briefly talk about three.
00:39:50
Speaker
The first one, and the one that definitely is the most famous, that gets the most press, is the case of a young man named James Leiniger. And so James Leininger, when he was, i think, just shy of two years old, he started exhibiting weird behavior, basically.
00:40:11
Speaker
i think his first sign was that he would wake up with night terrors every night, yelling something like, plane crash on fire, a little man can't get out. Mm-hmm. Over and over and just in a state of extreme distress, as well as during the day The only game he wanted to play was with toy airplanes just crashing them into things, which according to Jim Tucker is it in psychology is called something called trauma play, where little kids play out what happened in their traumatic event. Wow. apparently Yeah.
00:40:44
Speaker
Wow. Apparently this is the thing. As he got older, he got more and more interested in aviation and particularly World War II era aviation and started talking about a past person that he used to be. So he um was able to say the name of the plane that he flew. He was a pilot in World War two He gave this the exact name, Jack Larson, of a person that he co-piloted with All these other interesting details. Oh, and a detail that was really interesting is that he ah would sign his name James 3.
00:41:22
Speaker
And his parents thought it was because he was three at the time when he was doing this. He was three. um And they said, is oh, is it because you're three? And he said, no, it's because I'm the third James. And so out of an abundance of weird behavior, his parents finally sought out Jim Tucker, who talked to them about what was going on. They were is Is he a famous past life researcher? Jim Tucker, you've mentioned him. He's in charge of the Division of Cseptual Studies Unit on Past Lives. Yeah, he's the one who does all all this stuff.
00:41:52
Speaker
Well, he has people working for him. He's that he's the head of it. But anyway, case in point, they were able to track down... A person who flew with a guy named Jack Larson in exactly the same kind of plane that this little three-year-old boy named as the plane that he flew, who went down. He flew in Iwo Jima, which the boy had said. Imagine a two or three-year-old knowing about Iwo Jima.
00:42:17
Speaker
ah um Apparently he'd had no reason to, but he did. He had flown in Iwo Jima, but he didn't die in Iwo Jima, but he did die in a plane crash a couple months later in a battle where he was the only person who died. His plane went down in the water and he died.
00:42:33
Speaker
And this person was also named James and he was a junior. So James Leinegger then would be the third, the third James. Exactly.
00:42:44
Speaker
um So anyway, so he got all of these details right and shouldn't have known anything about World War II aviation, plane styles, shouldn't have known anyone named Jack Larson. who External validation. at So much external validation, which is definitely why this case gets the most attention. Mm like There's a lot more to this case that we simply don't have time to go through on this podcast. So again, if you if you want to look into the kind of extraordinary details of this case, I super encourage you to do that. There's a lot you can read about it.
00:43:16
Speaker
But James Leiniger is kind of the archetype case that you want to see. right This is like the the perfect example. in In other things that I've read from them, people at the Division of Perceptual Studies have said, this is what we're looking for. More cases like James Leinart. Because if we have you know more of these, then basically be irrefutable that at least something strange is going on.
00:43:40
Speaker
I was reading about another case recently, someone by the name of Ryan Hammons, who, when he was four years old, so a little bit older, i think, than the average age of kids who start having these memories, ah he began directing movies or pretending that he was directing movies, shouting action.
00:44:01
Speaker
and that was sort of the only the only thing that he wanted to do. he just wanted to pretend like he was directing movies. Nothing really weird, about that on the surface, but he would also wake up with night terrors and he would wake up with the the night terror that his heart exploded, said, while he was in Hollywood working on a movie. Yeah, you know, it can be really intense.
00:44:25
Speaker
Hollywood schedules, lot of pressure. Yeah, I'm not sure that's what's causing exploding hearts in Hollywood, but yeah, you never know. ah And apparently he just one day said to his mom, I used to be someone else.
00:44:38
Speaker
So his mom pushed him about this. He said he remembers living in a ah big white house. It had a big pool. It was in Hollywood. He said he remembered having three sons, but, and this is something that really upset him, he couldn't remember their names.
00:44:54
Speaker
And he would start crying because he couldn't remember the names of his three sons. His mom didn't know what to do, so she, which I find this absolutely... Amazing and also really cute. but She went to the library and she got a bunch of books on old Hollywood, like all the books she could find on old Hollywood. And they started going through them together.
00:45:14
Speaker
And he would point to people. He couldn't read, but he'd point to people, tell her their names. And say, oh, I worked on this movie with him, this movie with him. he saw one picture. He pointed at a guy in it and He said, oh, that's me.
00:45:28
Speaker
But the picture wasn't labeled. It didn't say who it was. So it was at this point that his mom sought out Jim Tucker and was like, hey, my kid said he remembers a past life. He said this is him. i don't know what to do.
00:45:42
Speaker
And what these researchers did was they were able to track down the unlabeled person in this photo, not a significant figure in Hollywood and an unnamed extra, someone who ah just who I guess maybe he did direct some movies, but he was also kind of an unnamed extra in a lot of movies named Martin Martins.
00:46:05
Speaker
I don't know if that was that's probably stage name, but that was named Martin Martins, I guess. His parents just weren't that creative. i know' I knew a lot of Robert Roberts growing up. You did?
00:46:16
Speaker
i There's a philosopher named Robert Roberts. He does good work. i He did have three sons. Martin Martins had three sons. And he, in fact, had a heart attack and died.
00:46:28
Speaker
Exploding heart. Huh? it's Exploding heart. Absolutely. He also had a daughter, and his daughter was still alive whenever they were doing all this research and agreed to meet with Ryan Hammonds.
00:46:39
Speaker
This is really interesting. Apparently, the meeting went very badly. So Ryan Hammonds and his mother went to meet this woman. She confirmed the information that Ryan was saying. a But Ryan did not want to interact with her.
00:46:51
Speaker
Apparently, he hid behind his mother the whole time and said, oh, this is... and i I remember her, but her energy has changed, she said. and Oh, there was one other ah source of external validation, too. So when they first started to look into his case, they put a bunch of black and white photos of women in front of Ryan.
00:47:14
Speaker
And they were like, hey, do do any of these women, you know, do you recognize any of them? And he said no to all of them except one. He said she looks familiar. And that was Martin Martin's wife.
00:47:26
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like the Dalai Lama case. He could recognize people. He didn't recognize her as his wife, just said she looks yeah familiar. So his case is interesting because he seems to have faded memories.
00:47:38
Speaker
He knew he had three sons, but he couldn't remember their names. he knew this woman was familiar, but couldn't remember it was his wife. Yeah. That kind of thing. um But knew a lot about directing and Hollywood and people that he worked with.
00:47:50
Speaker
So that was another interesting case. Then there's ah one more that I'll just briefly mention. Interesting case of a woman who believed that she was the reincarnation of or she in a past life. She was Anne Frank.
00:48:03
Speaker
Yeah. And she apparently presented such a convincing case that the who was at the time president of the Anne Frank Society believed her and was excused from his post.
00:48:16
Speaker
Yeah. they ah They fired him yeah for believing her and befriending her. um So that's another interesting case. Hi-Fi Nation discusses that case more. But ah those are three kind of high profile cases and ones that ah seem at least the most weird, especially the James Lanager case.
00:48:33
Speaker
so So, yes, interesting cases. um So what do like skeptics say about these kinds of cases? So, I mean, imagine there's been a lot of investigation on these things, you know, pouring over the fine-grained details. Who are these parents?
00:48:48
Speaker
What are they saying? can they Can we corroborate the stuff, the claims being made by the children? So, I mean, did you come across in your research, ah like, the skeptics' response to these claims?
00:49:02
Speaker
You know, I mean, think in general there's not a lot written on this, um but there is an interesting back and forth between Jim Tucker and the American philosopher Michael Suduth, who have, so they've they've written a few papers back and forth to one another, where Suduth is the skeptic to Jim Tucker's non-skeptic?
00:49:27
Speaker
Believer. The believer. Believer. And I should I should say right now that Jim Tucker has written a book on this phenomenon where he presents it explicitly as a case for reincarnation.
00:49:38
Speaker
And Sudhu's response is skeptical to the claims that these are evidence for reincarnation. Um, there's a lot of details here that, again, i'm I'm not going to get really into the weeds on, but basically Suduth is skeptical that the, he he focuses on the James Leininger case.
00:49:56
Speaker
ah He has a paper called James Leininger case re-examined, where he basically pulls a couple moves. I don't mean that in a negative way, but he he does question Jim Tucker's reporting on the case, basically saying that he has been overly credulous of the parental testimony, considering the parents did write a book on their are kids' experience before they actually even talked to Jim Tucker. Uh-oh. Yeah. Book deal.
00:50:24
Speaker
Right. They did write a book before they even discussed anything with the Division of Perceptual Studies. So, of course, there's the question of motives. Were the parents, did the parents kind of have this same motive?
00:50:39
Speaker
As Tucker tells the story, the parents were actually really averse to thinking of this as a case of reincarnation, because apparently they were Christians. They don't believe in reincarnation and they really don't want to think of it as that.
00:50:53
Speaker
Yeah. um And still don't, according to him. But Sudu says, look, they wrote a book about this before even talking to you. you know, you don't have, in the you're relying on what they said happened. You weren't there when their kid apparently said all this stuff.
00:51:09
Speaker
So there's no real way to validate that, right? Going back to external validation, um there's really not any way to validate the vast majority of evidence for this. You just have to go based on their testimony.
00:51:22
Speaker
So that's his first, or that that that's the the core of his argument. He also thinks that maybe this is like evidence for something, but we shouldn't think that it's evidence for reincarnation. That maybe there's something weird going on. And in fact...
00:51:38
Speaker
He's a really good person to play the skeptic here because Michael Suduth is in fact Hindu. So not averse to reincarnation, but thinks this isn't maybe like the the best kind of phenomenon to point towards. What does he think it could be instead of reincarnation? right That's like the natural interpretation.
00:51:56
Speaker
right That's why we've been talking about reincarnation in this episode too, because it it seems like it's the same phenomenon. So what does he want to say it could be if not that? Right. And, you know, I also had this question when, well, I actually, so I had a similar kind of, had similar thoughts to Michael Seduth when I was reading all this literature from Jim Tucker as well, because so Tucker makes this move.
Quantum Mechanics and Reincarnation
00:52:18
Speaker
He argues for reincarnation. via quantum mechanics. So he he makes it a point to say, look, i'm not um I'm not a religious person. I think there's a natural explanation for what's going on here.
00:52:31
Speaker
And the natural explanation is quantum mechanics. Isn't that always funny? You know, something weird's going on and then someone just says, maybe it's quantum mechanics. It really is a catch-all. They're like, well, quantum mechanics is weird, so. It's like a trope now. I i bet it's like a named trope on like tvtropes.com. Well, so interestingly, his argument is almost Kantian. So he's like, look, our best quantum mechanics theories tell us that reality arises from human consciousness. Yeah, no, it doesn't. ok Well, you know, what are about the slit experiment? A reality arises from our consciousness. You know, things aren't in position until we observe them, etc.
00:53:14
Speaker
If reality arises from our cognition, then when certain physical objects go out of existence, if they're grounded in consciousness, that doesn't mean consciousness goes out of existence. If the physical body goes out of existence, that doesn't necessarily mean the consciousness attached to that physical body does. So maybe that consciousness could simply reattach itself yeah to another physical body.
00:53:37
Speaker
Bada bing, bada boom. yeah You got reincarnation. It's pretty hand wavy, but okay. A little bit. But my thought was always, why reincarnation? And the main reason that I questioned this, even putting on my super, super credulous hat, is that almost all kids who report past life memories totally lose them by age six.
00:53:57
Speaker
There are like no or virtually no adults walking around, I guess besides the Dalai Lama. who like still claim to have episodic past life memories, who still feel like they were someone else in their past life. Maybe some of them remember thinking that, but they don't feel like that's true anymore.
00:54:14
Speaker
Well, I mean, there's definitely some though. Like there were research subjects in the one paper I read. Like they surveyed people. Why do you believe they were adults? Why do you believe you have a past life? Yeah, I'm sure there's not. Virtually not. think there like 160 in the study something like that.
00:54:31
Speaker
Okay, right. But most of these kids lose these memories. yeah you said there was like a couple thousand. Right, exactly. Yeah, and nearly all of them have lost their memories, or at least the episodic memories. they don't They don't feel as though they were these people yeah by the age of six.
00:54:48
Speaker
So why how could it be reincarnation then um if if you kind of cease to have this continuing consciousness, you know, once you enter like adolescence or whatever?
00:55:00
Speaker
Well, we talked about this a little bit. I mean, you have a theory, Megan. Like, what's... Do you want to tell the listeners your theory? Like, you had a theory about ghosts. So, what's... Yeah, so I guess I'm just kind of messing around with this. yeah i don't know You seem a a little embarrassed by your theory. i'm Don't be embarrassed. Don't be embarrassed. I'm not embarrassed by it. It's just a theory. It's just the theory.
00:55:19
Speaker
I don't want people to think this is like definitively what I think. This is just like another possibility out there. But I'm not sure it follows from the fact that someone has some past life memories of someone else, that they are this person.
00:55:35
Speaker
So there's a view that we talk about a lot, mostly because I bring it up. in philosophy of mind called panpsychism, which is the idea that the fundamental nature of reality is consciousness.
00:55:48
Speaker
So at the fundamental level, all of reality consciousness. consciousness. And everything's conscious. all And there's a sense in which the rocks are conscious. or Yeah. They're composed of consciousness. There's obviously different ways of cashing out this theory. like um But the ah basically, like consciousness is a fundamental property.
00:56:06
Speaker
ah it's It's kind of like mass or charge. as It's its own sort of thing. And everything has at least some bit of consciousness. So it stands to reason that it's maybe at least if pants, I can assure something like it, ah that at least in theory, i could have some, you some aspects of someone's consciousness could become embedded in me somehow, maybe through matter transfer, maybe through, i don't know, some, maybe through quantum mechanics.
00:56:38
Speaker
Yeah, so is the idea, so this is going to sound little bit farcical, but is the idea that, like, memories are like dusts of pollen that just, like, float around, they can like attach to you, sort of like that?
00:56:51
Speaker
Kind of. Yeah. This does not sound weirder than reincarnation. Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay. yeah I mean, you're just trying to make sense of what the what the what are what are these things what are these things evidence for? That's what you said. What what is the what are these cases evidence for? And think this actually fits better with what Tucker says about this. So he says, well, at age six, the the body undergoes ah ah ah huge developmental stage, right? So we're always turning over like...
00:57:17
Speaker
cells in our bodies, brain cells included. And at age six, the body undergoes a huge fundamental like developmental change. And we shift, especially like psychologically, to start forming longer term memories.
00:57:29
Speaker
So maybe like it's just at that stage that we shed these kind of pollen particles that have gotten attached to us somehow. You shed skin cells and you shed memories. Yeah, maybe. does Does it follow just because we have someone's episodic memories that we are them?
00:57:46
Speaker
i mean, none of these kids have every episodic memory of these people's lives. How many, how how much memory would it take, even if you're a psychological continuity theorist, how many memories would it take to say, well, this is a continuation of that?
00:58:02
Speaker
Is one in enough? I mean, if you have a memory of being that guy, that's enough. That's enough. Yeah. So just insofar as I have one of this. I mean, i that definitely in the in the in the the X-Fi article I read, it wasn't like it wasn't like the um the number of memories that was compelling to the subjects. It was like a one very specific, convincing memory where they have ownership of it.
00:58:26
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess I don't really care about that because I'm not a psychological continuity theorist about personal identity, as you know. so I'm just kind of like, I don't care what they say. um But there's a of people who are, so, you know, for their sake.
00:58:44
Speaker
Okay, yeah, I guess I'm not convinced by psychological continuity theory about personal identity. So I don't necessarily think that having a couple episodic memories of someone else means you're them.
00:58:55
Speaker
Might just mean somehow you got their little consciousness bits that are memories of having a heart attack. That sucks for you. That's your theory. That's my, yeah I mean, I don't, i' I don't want to say that's my theory. I'm just saying that that's another possibility. yeah Right.
00:59:08
Speaker
That's another, instead of reincarnation, maybe it's this other thing. i that That was your first theory, Megan, but you actually have another theory. you have two theories. Well, this one could be, it they could be the same. Okay. Okay. They could go together. Yeah.
00:59:22
Speaker
yeah as Yeah. I guess we can call this like like a mechanism by which these memory transfers ah occur. now So what's going on here? I think this is compelling. i think this is a compelling.
Trauma and Consciousness Persistence
00:59:32
Speaker
I don't I don't think you can say it's not compelling.
00:59:34
Speaker
So the vastness of 70 percent of children who remember past lives report dying in traumatic, awful ways, often at a young age.
00:59:48
Speaker
So the the very large majority of them do. This is interesting to me because it is not the first phenomenon where trauma has played a central role. Yeah, ghosts. was just going say ghosts.
00:59:59
Speaker
Ghosts, right? Every ghost story starts with a horrible traumatic event, right? A house is haunted not just out of the freaking blue.
01:00:10
Speaker
It's because some people got super murdered there, right? Or whatever. They unalived themselves there. Or something awful happened. Right. People report seeing ghosts.
01:00:23
Speaker
They're not usually happy. They're usually upset. They're in mourning clothes. They're wailing. Yeah. They they don't seem happy. no Which is often what leads them to research the house and find out, oh, yes, there was a traumatic death here. Yeah.
01:00:36
Speaker
Or people buried on the property or we disrupted a ancient burial ground or whatever. ah Similar to people who have near death experiences, it's more common and people who flatline in traumatic ways. Right.
01:00:53
Speaker
yeah Is that correct? Yes. You did most of the research on that one, but I think that's right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, so if you if you die or nearly die in a traumatic, violent, sudden way, you're more likely to have a near-death experience.
01:01:08
Speaker
So this got me thinking. All of these weird phenomena have something in common, which is that trauma and violence play a really big role in how likely they are to occur.
01:01:21
Speaker
Something about that seems significant to me. like There's something about trauma that just it won't let go. It lingers. Trauma makes things linger. Maybe it makes psyches linger. It makes...
01:01:36
Speaker
souls or spirits linger. It makes consciousness linger when it should be, you know, whatever your view is, ending or going on to the afterlife or whatever. It makes it stick around. It can't let go.
01:01:50
Speaker
don't, I have nothing up analytic metaphysics you to say about that. It just is interesting to me that that's a common feature in all of these kinds of weird happenings.
01:02:02
Speaker
You know, it's it's it's interesting that you have this theory, um your second theory, um because it's kind of like the opposite of of like the movie Interstellar, right? Where love is sort of like bringing and binding everything together. Like love is like the fundamental force of the universe.
01:02:17
Speaker
But like it seems like trauma. Yeah. A theory more famously and earlier put forward by John McTaggart. Yes, that's right. J.M.E. McTaggart. That's right. John McTaggart, Ellis McTaggart.
01:02:29
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So you thought like love, love made the world go round, like literally metaphysically. Yeah. And here you're, you're countenancing the opposite of that, whereby trauma is sort of binding things together.
01:02:41
Speaker
That's, that's deep. That's melancholic. So I don't I don't know if I want to say binding things together in this kind of. Well, it's binding those memories to people who have past lives. Right. The the memory particles are bound to.
01:02:54
Speaker
i think seems like what trauma is doing is like arresting things from their natural development. It's keeping people from going where they're supposed to go. Yeah.
01:03:04
Speaker
Right. Which, yeah know, I guess all these cases is away. yeah Um, it's, uh, it's preventing them from moving on to the next step or from, or from, or from ending, right? They, they, they cling on, uh, when they ought not because of trauma. yeah Um, so yeah, it's binding, but a not in a way that makes the world go round in a way that kind try it.
01:03:28
Speaker
keeps it from going around in in a you ah in a small way. I don't know. Yeah, again, this is not like this isn't like something that's ready to be submitted to a journal or anything. This is just an observation. i But if you were a little more unscrupulous, you could probably get a book deal out of it. but
01:03:48
Speaker
That was funny. That was good.
Speculating on Our Own Past Lives
01:03:50
Speaker
All right. So we always like to end I guess this is a new trend, but I like it. We'll keep it up on on a question, a question that we pose to each other, ah which is that we like to end the episode with. So Frank, if you were someone in a past life, ah who do you think you would have been?
01:04:06
Speaker
Thousand percent without even having to think about it twice. A monk, a medieval monk. Yeah, he's not lying. Yeah, I love routine. ah Yeah, they do manual labor, too.
01:04:17
Speaker
I love medieval arts. You know, i love history. I love medieval. i was listening to <unk> I was listening to Byzantine chanting the other day. they these These folks recreated what the chanting would have sounded like in the Hagia Sophia and former Constantinople.
01:04:31
Speaker
ah You know, that they they they were the scholars of the day. ah Yeah, what I would have done it. I would have been a monk without a doubt. You super have the the disposition to be a monk. i could I could sit in a chair for hours copying stuff. I could do it. Yeah. 100% monks. And you're good at like learning languages.
01:04:50
Speaker
Yeah. And just, you know, I don't like singing that much, but but I guess I could probably manage. It's not like they're doing solos. Yeah. Yeah. What about you, Megan? What would you have been and a past life? I know the past has not been that kind to women, as we learned from Plato, but what would you have been, do you think, in a past life?
01:05:10
Speaker
Well, so I'm going to take a different route than you because I have i I don't have the ability to reflect on my dispositions like you do. um But so i I told you earlier that I struggle with episodic memories. But as you also know, because we are married and live together and talk a lot.
01:05:30
Speaker
I do weirdly have things that seem like episodic memories to me, but by all appearances are not. I will have flashes of things that feel like episodic memories, but that couldn't be. Yeah.
01:05:45
Speaker
Basically, they're really overpowering, actually more overpowering than a normal episodic memory. of scenes with people that I don't know in locations that I've never been, but it feels like I was there.
01:05:59
Speaker
So you know this happens to me every once in a while. And one weird feature that a lot of them have is that a lot of them seem to take place in like what I guess is the American Southwest. Yeah.
01:06:12
Speaker
the the desert basically not like yeah i guess just like desert highways and and little adobos and and clay pots and gardens but this predates your love of cormac mccarthy it does it's so far back to my childhood i remember having kind of the same set of like 10 or so flashes and yeah not all of them are but a lot of them ah take place in this kind of general terrain. So I guess if I if i had to say, maybe someone who lived in the American Southwest.
01:06:45
Speaker
A cowboy. Cowboy, yeah. You love horses. I do. I do love horses, even though I barely spent any time around them. So, I mean, i think probably I was a cowboy. Can you see that?
01:06:56
Speaker
One time, Frank and i You love feeding horses.... whether I could be a cowboy. Yeah, right, right, right. We made a list of reasons I could and reasons I couldn't. Love cows,
01:07:07
Speaker
Well, no, I love horses, and i am i I'm okay with Okay. ah con too many ailments he said i had too many ailments to be a cowboy but in a past life i think i had fewer ailments yeah and was a cowboy that's right that's very encouraging mean i can encourage you as you go forward maybe i'll get to be one in a future life too maybe i'll be a monk in a future life yeah with the way civilizations heading maybe we'll go backwards and i'll not i'll be only a monk in this
01:07:36
Speaker
Oh, Lord. All right. Well, we are super out of time for this episode. This has been a really fun one. I had a good time. um Hopefully you listeners did as well. Join us next time where we will be discussing by special listener request, the Enneagram.