Discussions on Reincarnation
By Wolfgang G. Gasser (Last update: 2014-12-01)
Reincarnation as a scientific hypothesis (original postings)
For the first time I consciously dealt with reincarnation twenty years ago. It seemed then as unacceptable to me as it seems to [most of] you still now. But already around one year later, in 1988, I became convinced that reincarnation is a scientific fact. At the beginning, the demographic development of mankind seemed to me the strongest argument against reincarnation. But already in 1997, when I wrote The Demographic Saturation Theory, demography had become a main support of reincarnation. And the last ten years have further confirmed the predictions of the demographic saturation model. See A Critical Analysis of the 2006 Revision of the UN World Population Prospects, published on the internet in June 2007 with these chapters:
- Introduction
- The most obvious anomalies of the 2006 revision
- The essence of demographic transition
- Direct-replacement versus generation-replacement fertility
- Saturated populations as the endpoint of demographic transition
- Classification in subpopulations and evolutionary relatedness
- The effect of migration on direct-replacement fertility
- The emergence of natural decrease
- The effect of wars on fecundability and on sex ratio at birth
- China's missing girls
- Conclusion
It is true that the assumption is possible that in China every
year around one million girls are killed before or after birth only because
they are girls. But at least in the poorer social groups and in remote regions,
antenatal sex determination should not be very widespread. And the Chinese
population knows that there are not enough girls, and this knowledge alone
makes the birth of a girl valuable.
Yet it is a fact that the sex ratio of the whole population of China does not
change and that "the missing girls" are confronted with a
"feminization of the elderly".
My reincarnation theory has nothing to do with religious or esoteric
reincarnation theories.
Two extracts from The Psychon Theory:
"For a
person to be born, what is required is a human soul which has evolved by
reincarnation. Human souls are reborn with increased probability in a similar
environment. This environment continuity can easily be verified
empirically (e.g. by examining persons with pronounced rare characteristics). A
manifestation of this principle is that persons are often in contact with
persons they have also been in contact with in former lives. Environment
continuity is also valid for animal souls. It is essential when a species
splits into subspecies. It stands to reason that environment continuity is
valid not only for human and animal souls but for all psychons."
"Essential human properties or their predispositions such as character,
social behavior, intelligence, talents, likings, aversions and phobias are
given by the soul. It is not astonishing that somebody who died in his last
life in an overcrowded cattle wagon after long suffering gets claustrophobia
e.g. in an overcrowded cable railway."
In any case, I'm a consistent exponent of evolution. I do not only believe that our ancestors were apes, but I'm convinced that we ourselves were the monkeys we descend from. Neodarwinism however seems to me a rather absurd creation theory, because it assumes that the universe was hyper-designed and super-created by a big bang in such a complex way that blind downhill processes (increasing entropy) can design and create whole ecosystems.
Is this Psychon Theory the same as your Demographic Saturation Theory?
Demographic saturation is a logical consequence of the Psychon Theory.
The psychon theory doesn't make sense to me because when you are born, you do not live your life with the memories/ experiences/ knowledge from any previous life.
It is obvious that the psychon theory does not agree with the premise that past lives cannot have any influence on a personality. But do we remember what happend to us in our first two years after birth?
The Psychon Theory is proof of reincarnation?
Are Kepler's laws a proof of heliocentrism? In the same way as Kepler's laws imply heliocentrism, the psychon theory implies reincarnation.
Souls exist for humans and animals?
Yes. See for instance my text: McDougall's Lamarckian Experiment on Training of Rats
Humans (homo sapiens) descended from themselves?
The abstract of the theory:
"The psychon theory is a panpsychist evolution theory based on a continuity from elementary particles to human souls. Elementary particles are like very primitive and basic organisms and we all (our souls) were elementary particles billions of years ago. During evolution our psychons (souls) have been responsible for the behavior of atoms, molecules, enzymes, living cells, primitive neurons, primitive animals, ... , monkeys and of our ancestors. The psychon theory has very concrete consequences, for instance there must be a limit to the number of human souls, which according to the latest demographic data could be even less than 7 billion."
All phobias come from occurrences in previous lives?
Many phobias come also from past occurrences of the current life.
After you prove the soul, I'll read more.
That's an excellent strategy to defend one's world view: "Only after you convinced me I start listening." It is impossible to prove the soul or similar concepts outside a theoretical framework. The only way to prove a physical reality of souls consists in giving concrete facts which suggest the existence of souls.
It's hard to start a scientific enterprise with wholly unscientific premises.
Nobody
can decide by metaphysical claims (e.g. about the soul) whether something is
scientific or not. The only method which has always been scientific is an
unbiased analysis of facts and theories. This analysis can lead to verifiable
hypotheses which can be in contradiction with well-established theories.
Helicentrism seemed once as unscientific that Osiander appended an anonymous
preface to the work of Copernicus which maintained that the hypotheses of
Copernicus made no pretense to truth.
"Ironically, Osiander's 'letter' made it possible for the
book to be read as a new method of calculation, rather than a work of natural
philosophy, and in so doing may even have aided in its initially positive
reception." (Source)
As others have suggested, addressing reincarnation requires first some evidence for dualism.
That's true. The form of dualism my theory is based on has been called
panpsychism or pantheism in the past (e.g. Cusanus, Bruno, Kepler, Leibniz).
Pandualism or simply dualism is probably a better name.
If reincarnation were real, how do you explain population growth?
Let
us assume that 7.5 billion human souls have evolved on earth. In this case the
world population cannot exceed 7.5 billion (corresponding to a saturation value
of 100%). However saturation values below 100% percent are possible.
"Before the onset of demographic transition, the saturation
values of populations are generally much lower than 100%. The more difficult
survival is and the higher mortality risks are, the lower are saturation
values." (Critical Analysis)
Do identical twins have one soul or two?
I've addressed this question in my article: The End of Reductionism. Here an extract:
"A most impressive refutation of reductionism represents a thought experiment. We assume a machine capable of producing copies of everything which do not differ physically and chemically from the original. According to consequent reductionism such a copy of you would be capable of surviving, and more importantly, it would not be distinguishable from you at all. The copy would have all your memories and properties and would believe like you that it is you. Not even the question whether you are the original or the copy would make any sense."
At what point does the soul become required: conception, birth, or somewhere in between?
"After death and before incarnation, souls exist only potentially and cannot be located in space. There is some evidence suggesting that the soul of a still living person can start a new incarnation. Then the development of the embryo and (in rare cases) baby is paralleled by a disappearing vitality of the person animated by the same soul, and it seems plausible that preventing a dying person forcefully from dying can lead to the death of a baby animated by the same soul." (The Human Soul)
Do you believe that reincarnated souls should be held responsible for actions in their previous lives? E.g. if we could find Hitler's reincarnated soul in someone, would it be just to imprison that person?
It seems quite probable to me that Jörg Haider (an Austrian politician) is Hitler's reincarnation. In future it will be more problematic to escape one's responsibility by committing suicide.
Article: McDougall's Lamarckian Experiment on Training of Rats
By Antranik1 in #H37:
I actually read this and it's difficult to read for me so maybe the answer to my next question is in there and I just didn't understand it. The entire time I was reading the study, I was wondering how or why you can make the assumption that a lab-rats soul will reincarnate in its future offspring? You're trying to differentiate between genetic and reincarnation so you're using all the same bunch of rats in one lab, but why wouldn't a soul of a rat reincarnate on a completely different continent, let alone the same lab?
It
is because of environment continuity mentioned in the opening
post. Souls are considered physically real entities and evolutionary
relatedness is considered a key property of evolution. The relatedness of
your soul to the souls of your family is bigger than its relatedness to the
souls of foreign cultures. So the probability that you will be reborn in your
family is higher than that you reincarnate among persons you haven't been in
contact with in former lives.
Or take the case of mammoths which separated from Asian elephants some million
years ago. Let us assume that their common ancestors lived in a moderate
climate and that the ancestors of the mammoths migrated to colder regions
whereas the ancestors of the Asian elephants migrated to warmer regions. Both
species adapted behavior and instincts to the regions they lived in. So if we
assume that instinctive behavior is stored primarily in the soul and not in the
genetic make-up, then it stands to reason to assume that the dead of both
groups must have had a higher probability to be reborn in the same group.
Otherwise the situation would be rather inefficient and chaotic. And that
nature has a tendency toward order, is a fundamental premise of the theory I'm
advocating.
"Both the potentialities of gene technology and its dangers
are vastly overestimated. The possibility of reviving, by means of DNA, animals
which became extinct a long time ago exists not even theoretically. The pychons
which built up and animated these animals very probably evolved further and all
together they are certainly not available any more. If a species becomes
extinct, the souls can be born within related species. The more distant the new
species is from the old, the more lives are needed to reach fertile age." (Empirical Relevance of Psychons)
Thus a mammoth soul reborn as an elephant cannot have the same instincts
as an elephant having lived for generations in this environment. The
probability to survive in the new environment to fertile age is therefore
smaller in the case of the mammoth soul.
The souls of mammals and birds are the souls of extinct species such as
saurian.
Search also for "rats" in Darwinism refuted by adverse selection experiments.
That's like assuming that my great great grandfather (or some other ancestor) would have to actually be a previous incarnation of me.
Charles Darwin is quite probably the reincarnation of his grandfather Erasmus.
Missing genetic information refutes neo-Darwinism
By wogoga in #H1:
I'm a consistent exponent of evolution. I do not only believe that our ancestors were apes, but I'm convinced that we ourselves were the monkeys we descend from.
By EHLO in #H52:
It's a lovely hypothesis, when do you intend to tackle the 'scientific' bit?
Actually
I'm not sure whether you are serious or not. In any case, I do not understand what
you mean by 'scientific'. I've presented my ideas in detail on the internet. If
you consider as 'scientific' only peer-reviewed articles, then most of the
scientific progress of the past was 'unscientific'. If you consider as
'scientific' only what is accepted by the officially dominating scientists,
then fundamental 'scientific' progress would have been impossible.
It has always been a pleasure for me to defend my theories from
counterarguments, for it is easy to defend something as correct as pandualism
and difficult for the other side to defend something as inconsistent and absurd
as pure materialism. (In principle I know that the best way to force others to
continue with their erroneous believes is to call these believes 'absurd',
'grotesque' and so on.)
The critics of the psychon concept essentially react in the same as the critics
of Kepler's new astronomy 400 years ago: "As
long as you cannot show the gravitational forces between objects in a visible
way, your theory as just an unfounded hypothesis".
Modern reductionism is simply a more sophisticated variant of naive
realism: souls cannot exist, because we cannot see them.
It is a fact that the information of the genetic make-up of a human is a far
cry from what is needed in order to transform a fertilized egg only into a
human body, let alone into a person with intelligence and consciousness.
There are two approaches to this problem:
1) The dogmatic approach either ignores (i.e. psychologically suppresses) the argument or assumes a miraculous (logically impossible) information increase during ontogenesis.
2) The logically consistent (i.e. scientific) approach leads to the simple conclusion that apart from the material information another kind of information must exist.
Nowadays, most personal computers have a primary storage (RAM) of around 1 gigabyte. I don't know what the information of the used parts of the human genome is, but I suppose that this information can be compressed to less than 0.1 gigabyte, or maybe even to less than 0.01 gigabyte. Does somebody know better figures?
#H63 2007-08-27
By Paul C. Anagnostopoulos in #H55:
First sentence from pandualism.com/z/E/psychon.html:
"The reductionist scientific world view as many religious world views is based on the premise that we humans are outside nature."
What the hell? Could you explain this before I bother reading any further?
Here the continuation (The Reductionist Scientific World View):
"It is admitted that human behavior depends on objectives,
values, intuition and a tendency towards order. However every attempt to admit analogous
principles of finality in nature is criticized as anthropomorphism.
Hardly anyone would seriously suggest that houses, tools, vehicles or computers
could evolve through blind chance and selection. Yet very effective housing for
animals, such as bird's nests or termites' mounds, are explained by just that
means.
(Individual) consciousness is denied on the one hand and regarded as essential
on the other hand, depending only on the context. It is denied when animal
behavior is explained solely by material processes in the brain. It is ignored
in Darwinism. It is essential when dealing with social behavior, religion or
human rights. Most scientists are not aware of this inconsistency."
Don't you understand what I want to say?
By wogoga in #H27:
It seems quite probable to me that Jörg Haider (an Austrian politician) is Hitler's reincarnation. In future it will be more problematic to escape one's responsibility by committing suicide.
By Ladewig in #45:
So, do you believe it is just and fair to punish the person animated by the reincarnated soul of someone as heinous as Hitler?
Why is this question so important to you? You probably cannot even
imagine that evolution actually works by reincarnation.
First I think that Hitler's last years already were a very embarrassing and
painful punishment for him. Second I do not believe that the whole catastrophe
of World War II with all its violations of human rights can be attributed to
Adolf Hitler. As we all, Hitler is the result of evolution and therefore he was
also a plaything of evolution. The Third Reich in Germany can be seen as an atavism.
I don't think that apart from technology, there have been principal
innovations. Mass murder of 'the others' has always been an important factor in
human evolution.
It was also the many failings in his live caused by bad luck, which made out of
this soul a person like Hitler still in the 20th century. In order to better
understand Hitler one should also deal with his previous life as Bernhard Förster (who committed suicide 44 days after the birth of Hitler).
In the time when the European monarchies got weaker and decomposed, many of the
souls of outstanding figures of these monarchies became born without the
accustomed privilege of noble birth.
Missing success and respect from the others then easily could result in hatred,
and this hatred (by the psychological mechanism of projection) was then easily
directed against a group (or rather against what they considered to be a
group).
The contrast between 'we, the good' and 'the others, the bad' is still a basic
principle of the psychological makeup of many humans. In the case of Jörg
Haider this contrast showed up in the form of native Austrians versus
foreigners. Before the rise of Haider, Austria was exemplary in the treatment
and integration of foreigners.
Demography of Japan - Evidence of Reincarnation (original postings)
Japan was for a long period a "closed country" and Japanese
society is still today quite homogeneous. Therefore Japan is an ideal country
to test 'demographic saturation', which is a logical consequence of
reincarnation according to the Psychon Theory (a pandualist evolution
theory). The proportion of migration, the most important factor confounding the
predictions of 'demographic saturation', has always been very low in Japan.
Population of Japan in million and percentage of 2005-population according to ipss.go.jp/p-info/e/PSJ2006.pdf:
1930 64.5 50.4% | 1965 98.3 76.9% | 2000 126.9 99.3%
1935 69.3 54.2% | 1970 103.7 81.2% |
1940 71.9 56.3% | 1975 111.9 87.6% | 2001 127.3 99.7%
1945 72.1 56.5% | 1980 117.1 91.6% | 2002 127.5 99.8%
1950 83.2 65.1% | 1985 121.0 94.7% | 2003 127.7 99.9%
1955 89.3 69.9% | 1990 123.6 96.8% | 2004 127.8 100.0%
1960 93.4 73.1% | 1995 125.6 98.3% | 2005 127.8 100.0%
Standard demography has been predicting for Japan in the same way
as for European low-fertility countries a population decline. But in the same
way as in Europe, the facts in Japan agree much better with 'demographic
saturation' and therefore with reincarnation than with standard demography,
which, originally based on Malthusianism, has become a wild conglomeration of
ad-hoc hypotheses.
According to stat.go.jp/english/data/jinsui/tsuki/zuhyou/15k2-1.xls the population of August 1, 2007 is
estimated to be again 127.8. So Japan elegantly shows that in saturated
populations where (almost) all souls are incarnated at the same time, for every
new child somebody must die, because children are not machine-like zombies but
beings animated by human souls having evolved over billions of years.
______
Increasing demographic saturation leads directly to lower fecundability.
At least under not too exceptional circumstances, this lower fecundability
entails lower fertility, irrespective of other causes (e.g. at the individual
choice-decision level), and actual fertility of a fully saturated population
cannot significantly exceed direct-replacement fertility. Thus infertility of some couples is an unavoidable
outcome, if more children are desired than direct-replacement fertility allows.
A substantial number of couples does not seek infertility treatment, despite
wishing for years for a first or a further child.
(pandualism.com/z/demography/critical_analysis.html)
Reincarnation as a trivial scientific fact (original postings)
In
the thread Demography of Japan - Evidence of Reincarnation I
showed that the demographic evolution of Japan constitutes strong evidence for demographic saturation and
therefore also for reincarnation. Because of the poor quality of most posts in
that thread I start here a new one.
Population of Japan in million and percentage of its current population (stat.go.jp/english/data/jinsui/tsuki/zuhyou/15k2-1.xls):
2000 126.9 99.3% | 2003 127.7 99.9% | 2006 127.8 100.0%
2001 127.3 99.7% | 2004 127.8 100.0% | 2007 127.8 100.0%
2002 127.5 99.8% | 2005 127.8 100.0% | 2008 127.8 100.0%
Whereas
the population of Japan e.g. increased from 1970 to 1975 by 8.2 million, the
increase from 2003 to 2008 is only 0.1 million. Japan is the best example to
test the saturation-thesis because migration is very low, and migration is the
most important factor confounding demographic saturation. In a saturated
population, the number of births is limited by the number of deaths, because
all souls are alive and no child can be born without a soul.
Isn't it a pity that such a simple, fundamental and far-reaching insight as the
empirical reality of souls is ignored, and this only because of the
quasi-religious prejudices of the currently prevailing reductionist
materialism? The effects of saturation will become even stronger in the coming
years, and not only in the case of human population and fertility, but also in
the food production. If for example the worldwide pig population is already
saturated, then an increase in the number of pigs in the developing countries
is only possible at the expense of pigs in the developed countries. Such a
decrease in the developed countries has already become reality in the case of honey bees. No species
can grow beyond a saturation of 100% (in the short term).
Also the spread of diseases such as diabetes can result from a shortage of
corresponding psychons
(enzyme-souls). There have never been so many humans living all at the same
time. In addition to that, the average body size of our species has also been
increasing in recent times (a body of 100 kg needs obviously more enzymes than
a body of 50 kg). Never in human evolution so many enzymes have been needed in
order to perform all the many biochemical tasks of the corresponding world
population.
It is easy to ridicule the notion that enzymes can only efficiently work if
they are animated by psychons (souls) having learned their tasks over millions
of years of biological evolution. But from the point of view of pure reason
(Immanuel Kant) the hypothesis that dead particles are able to perform such
complicated tasks as e.g. DNA wrapping and
replication is simply untenable.
Psychon-deficit diseases
By wogoga in #1:
Also the spread of diseases such as diabetes can result from a shortage of corresponding psychons (enzyme-souls). There have never been so many humans living all at the same time.
By Meadmaker in #3:
I seem to recall that life expectancy today is greater than in previous ages. That would suggest to me that diseases killed people even faster back in those days than today. So, when there were plenty of surplus psychons to go around, there was more disease, on a per capita basis. How does that fit in with the theory of diseases being caused by psychon shortage?
Psychon shortage is only a problem in what we can call psychon-deficit
diseases. And only future research can show how widespread such diseases actually
are. In many degenerative diseases such a psychon deficit could be involved. A
sine-qua-non prerequisite for classifying a disease as a psychon-deficit
disease is an increase in the relative incidence of the disease with increasing
population figures.
If
it is actually true that "the first historical
account of muscular dystrophy appeared in 1830, when Sir Charles Bell wrote an
essay about an illness that caused progressive weakness in boys" (source), then it stands to reason to
consider muscular dystrophy a psychon-deficit disease. The biochemistry of muscles
resp. the work of the involved enzymes (proteins) is astonishingly complex.
The fact that the corresponding "conditions
are inherited, and the different muscular dystrophies follow various
inheritance patterns" is consistent with the psychon thesis,
because to different alleles of a given gene locus can correspond different
psychon variants (i.e. related psychon species). If e.g. allele-x psychons of a
given enzyme (gene locus) are already saturated (i.e. they all are already
incarnated resp. working somewhere), but the human population with two copies of
this allele-x (homozygosity) is
still increasing in number, then a shortage of working enzymes (for the
corresponding gene locus) in this population is an unavoidable outcome, leading
to health problems in at least some members of this population.
A person, having only one such allele-x and in the second chromosome set an
allele-y, does not risk such psychon-deficit problems, if the allele-y
psychon-population is not yet saturated, because there are still free allele-y
psychons around, being able to do the work.
_____
Isn't
it strange that people believing in all the many animals (epicycles) of the
current particle zoo of orthodox physics (e.g. neutrinos, quarks, gravitons, gluons)
invoke Occam's razor against the wonderfully simple and elegant psychon
concept, having explicative power from biochemistry to one of the oldest
philosophical problems, the body-mind problem?
By quarky in #9:
Does the total bio-mass of the planet remain fairly stable?
That could well be the case. Maybe the main reason of the spreading of deserts
(e.g. Sahara) after the last ice age is primarily caused be a lack of enough
bio-mass. If the vegetation spreads to regions near the poles, then a shortage
of needed psychons can be the result in regions near the equator, where
survival conditions have become more difficult. Only 18'000 years ago, the
location I sit now (Vaduz, Liechtenstein, Europe) was covered by hundreds of
meters of ice.
BTW, the always changing climate on Earth has been a main driving force of
evolution in general, and the last glacial period of around 100,000 years a
main driving force of our evolution in special.
"The last glacial period was the most recent glacial period
within the current ice age, occurring in the Pleistocene epoch. It began about
110,000 years ago and ended between 10,000 and 15,000 BP. During this period
there were several changes between glacier advance and retreat." (Wikipedia)
"Unlike the psychons of atoms and
simple molecules, the more complex psychons of enzymes, cells and animals
evolved over billions of years on earth. Because of the limits in space and
other resources, only a limited number of every kind of psychons could evolve.
This limitation is empirically relevant. Unlike the output of chemical
production processes, the output of biotechnological production processes
cannot always be increased just as one likes." (Empirical Relevance of Psychons)
"The saturation thesis is relevant not only to humans but
to all organisms. It can hardly be denied that many animal populations remain
rather constant in size without Malthusian struggles for survival. There are
also limits on animal breeding and plant cultivation. There is even a saturation for pathogens like bacteria and viruses. A
pathogen of a local epidemic cannot be a threat to mankind, nor can genetically
engineered pathogens." (The Demographic Saturation Theory)
By Gord_in_Toronto in #10:
So is the number of souls limited by "race", by geographic location, or globally? The OP claims all three. They can't all be correct. How are the new born children of "mixed race" or who's parents move to another country...
Probability theory can easily resolve such questions.
"According to the saturation model, the endpoint of
demographic transition is a fertility oscillating near direct-replacement
fertility, resulting in a rather constant population. In reality, however, the
effect of direct-replacement fertility after demographic transition can
interfere with other effects. Despite being already saturated, populations of
child-oriented countries or groups, having lower prevalence of contraception
and abortion, can still increase at the expense of evolutionarily related less
child-oriented countries or groups. The reason is simple: evolutionarily
related countries or groups can be seen as subpopulations of a unit, having as
a whole a maximum potential population. So if something hinders one
subpopulation from replacing its deaths by births then another subpopulation
can further grow at the expense of the first. The more evolutionarily-related
subpopulations are, the easier they can grow at the expense of each
other." (Classification in subpopulations and
evolutionary relatedness)
"The most important long-ranging factor
confounding the demographic saturation model is migration." (The effect of migration on
direct-replacement fertility)
Epistemology
At
first we must ask whether the premises of panpsychistic evolution are logically
consistent. Apriori there is no reason to assume that panpsychism and
reincarnation are worse as a foundation of a scientific theory than reductionist
materialism, at least if we accept an epistemology (see) similar to the one of Occam or
Einstein. And some of the most influential thinkers of the past were panpsychists
(see).
As long as we do not detect logical contradictions, we must take panpsychism as
seriously as reductionist materialism. So we have these two alternatives:
1. Darwinian evolution --> Malthusianism --> predictions of standard demography
2. Panpsychistic evolution--> demographic saturation --> demographic predictions
And every halfway intelligent and honest person must admit that
the predictions of demographic saturation agree much better with the facts than
the predictions of standard demography do. ("With
respect to actual fertility, for decades population forecasters have assumed that
it would not fall below replacement only to find that already more than half of
the world's population today is below replacement (LUSKTE).") I predicted extremely low fertility
before the fact, because it is a simple logical consequence of a saturated
population pyramid with many persons in fertile ages, few persons in the old
ages and low mortality in general. Imagine, total fertility rate fell
to 0.41 children per woman in the Xiangyang district of
Jiamusi city in China, which is only 20% of the generation-replacement fertility
of 2.1! However, I suppose that the number of births is not far away from the
number of deaths and that the population in this district remains rather
constant (without migration).
I wrote in 1999: "The
psychon theory has very concrete consequences, for instance there must be a
limit to the number of human souls, which according to the latest demographic
data could be even less than 7 billion."
If the current world population actually is already around 6.7 billion, then
the upper limit is rather 7.5 than 7 billion. Yet there is a big uncertainty in
population figures. A good example is Bhutan:
"The Royal Government of Bhutan lists their country's population as 752,700 (2003). The CIA Factbook estimates the population at 2,327,849. What accounts for this discrepancy? One explanation given inside Bhutan is that the higher CIA numbers ultimately trace back to an inflated population number the Bhutanese government supplied to the United Nations in the early 1970s in order to gain entry into that body (the UN reportedly had a cutoff population of one million at that time -- see micronation for justifications in support of such a minimum). According to this theory the CIA population experts have retained this original inflated number year after year while adjusting it each year for normal population growth." (Wikipedia)
And what about 'demographic smoothing' transforming Figure 1 into Figure 2 in The Future Population of India?
The difference between Figure 2 and Figure 1 is quite fundamental in the light of:
"An indicator of near saturation of a population is a decline in birth number despite an increase in women in reproductive age." (Source)
Are there actually plausible facts making reasonable such a big transformation of 'unsmoothed' data?
By jsfisher in #31:
If reincarnation is a trivial scientific fact, as you hypothesize, please provide a falsifiable prediction.
If reductionist materialism is such a self-evident fact, as you
assume, please provide a falsifiable prediction.
The predictive power of The Psychon Theory is much stronger than the predictive power of Darwinism. The
reason is simple: the number of psychons having evolved on earth is limited.
And isn't it obvious that the claim that only around 7 or 7.5 billion human
souls have evolved is a falsifiable prediction? If the current demographic
projections of UN come true, then my theory is simply wrong.
The relationship between quanta and psychons
By wogoga in #13:
Isn't it strange that people believing in all the many animals (epicycles) of the current particle zoo of orthodox physics (e.g. neutrinos, quarks, gravitons, gluons) invoke Occam's razor against the wonderfully simple and elegant psychon concept, having explicative power from biochemistry to one of the oldest philosophical problems, the body-mind problem?
By Gord_in_Toronto in #15:
... But he did not actually say the word "quantum".
Is it difficult to recognize that the psychon concept is related to the concept
of quanta as conceived by Einstein?
Albert Einstein named Spinoza as the philosopher who exerted the most influence on his world view (Weltanschauung). (Wikipedia)
As far as I know, Einstein even acknowledged an influence from
Spinoza on his concept of quanta.
Spinoza uses a concept 'individuum', which can be translated as 'individual
unit' or 'individual part'. Such 'individual units' of matter are e.g.
molecules and atoms.
Two quotes from
Ethics, PART II:
By
particular things, I mean things which are finite and have a conditioned existence;
but if several individual things concur in one action, so as to be all
simultaneously the effect of one cause, I consider them all, so far, as one
particular thing.
The human body is composed of a number of individual parts, of diverse nature, each
one of which is in itself extremely complex.
The first who recognized that even electromagnetic radiation
consists of such 'individuals' was Einstein. Max Planck had assumed that due to
some not yet understood mechanism, radiation is emitted and absorbed as quanta,
but that the radiation itself is a continuous phenomenon. (In a similar way one
can decrease or increase the continuous quantity of a soup by quantized values
of soup-spoons.)
According to Spinoza, the universe (i.e. Deus sive Natura, God or Nature) has
two aspects we can recognize: the material aspect (res extensa) and the psychic
aspect (res cogitans). In taking seriously the mind aspect of Spinoza's
'individua', one directly arrives at the psychon concept. In doing that, I
consider myself a consistent and straightforward follower of Einstein.
Nevertheless, the additional quantization of interactions between (real) quanta
(e.g. repulsive forces between two electrons) is primarily a consequence of
Planck's original error of attributing the origin of the light-quanta effects
not to the light-quanta themselves but to the processes of emission and
absorption. Only this additional quantization leads to such concepts as
'virtual photons', 'gravitons' and 'gluons'. Thus the concept virtual
photon (see) is completely
different from Einstein's light quanta.
"In some respect, QM was an attempt not
to admit that Einstein was right after experiments (Compton 1923, Bothe and
Geiger 1925) had shown that Bohr was wrong (e.g. Bohr, Kramers and Slater) and
Einstein right. The fathers of QM tried to save as much as possible from their
previously advocated but now experimentally refuted positions, taking refuge
with obscure mathematics." (from)
By bruto in #37:
Doesn't that kind of thing happen at the level of other living things, such as algae? Insects?
Yes, if that kind of thing is valid for us, then it is also valid for our fellow animals, for insects, for algae and so on.
You appear to be suggesting that all living things are ensouled, but is there a finite number of souls to go around there too?
Yes.
If so, what is that number?
Around 7 or 7.5 million in the case of human souls. Maybe two trillion in the
case of honeybee souls (see Bee death: the true
explanation).
Is it even calculable, and if calculable is it useful?
In principle at least the order of magnitude should be calculable in all cases.
I'm sure it will be useful to calculate the soul numbers of e.g. farm animals,
of honey bees or of tuna stocks. In any case, statements such as
"aquaculture is a way of overcoming the problem of diminishing tuna
stocks" must be reassessed, because the souls of farmed tuna are of the
souls of former wild tuna. The one-egg-one-fish-hypothesis, a rather
obvious and direct prediction of reductionist materialism, obviously does
not work.
... if reincarnation exists across the boundaries of species (even if we exclude plants), how could the human population be limited in any practical way? There are probably more mosquitoes in my back yard on a summer day than there are people in Tokyo. A shift in the relative numbers that doubled the human population on earth would be trivial if all living things have souls.
Reincarnation (according to Panpsychist Evolution)
does not exist across the boundaries of species.
Demographic data strongly suggests that it is now quite improbable for a
typical Japanese soul be born outside Japan. So we can exclude that a mosquito
is reborn as something different from a mosquito. A
soul represents a huge amount of information concerning species and individual
characteristics.
______
Still
four centuries ago heliocentrism seemed as ridiculous as reincarnation today
By jsfisher in #31:
If reincarnation is a trivial scientific fact, as you hypothesize, please provide a falsifiable prediction.
By wogoga in #33:
If reductionist materialism is such a self-evident fact, as you assume, please provide a falsifiable prediction.
By jsfisher in #34:
Evasion attempt noted. Straw man noted.
This is the typical behavior of a believer. The own religion or belief system
is so self-evident that arguments or facts supporting it are not necessary. The
religions or belief systems of the others however have to provide arguments and
facts.
Consciousness, i.e. the mental aspect of the world is the first we experience
in our life. Or do you claim that thirst, hunger, tiredness and pain are
material things? Matter however is a rather complex concept, created by
ordering our sensory input. So the belief in the primacy of matter in all
respects is quite questionable, at least from the logical point of view.
BTW,
panpsychist evolution,
in marked contrast to purely materialist evolution, is full of falsifiable
predictions.
Let us deal with this concrete experiment: One creates a constant environment
for 200 rats where the rats have to learn a given task. One always breeds a new
generation of 200 rats from the slowest learners, i.e. from the least
intelligent rats. In such cases, purely materialist evolution (neo-Darwininism)
actually is able to make a prediction: the rats of later generations should
learn the task less efficiently than the first generation.
Experiments of this kind have been performed. However, the results of such
adverse selection experiments (see) have been a complete refutation of
neo-Darwinism: the learning ability increases despite selection of the
slowest learners, i.e. selection of the least intelligent rats. So from a
purely scientific point of view we must conclude: the learning capacity is not
transmitted by the genes, because genetic transmission would entail a decrease
in learning capacity and not an increase as found in the experiments.
By wogoga in #67:
Let us deal with this concrete experiment: One creates a constant environment for 200 rats where the rats have to learn a given task. One always breeds a new generation of 200 rates from the slowest learners, i.e. from the least intelligent rats. In such cases, purely materialist evolution (neo-Darwininism) actually is able to make a prediction: the rats of later generations should learn the task less efficiently than the first generation.
By jsfisher in #69:
Either provide the appropriate evidence to support your claim or retract it. And evasion attempts aren't evidence.
Don't
you recognize that the rat experiment itself is a falsifiable prediction?
Because souls are reborn with increased probability in a similar environment by
related souls (environment continuity),
the souls of later-generation rats are at least partially the souls of rats
having learned the task in previous lives. So they already have an instinctive
predisposition to learn the task.
Or do you claim that this is not prediction but a postdiction because I
explained existing experiments after the fact? In this case you should take
into consideration that until now such adverse selection experiments (see) are simply ignored
by mainstream science because they are counter to expectations.
And you are profoundly mistaken if you believe that my request to you as an
answer to your request to me is an "evasion attempt".
Hypothesis of purely materialist biology:
· A healthy egg cell, healthy sperm and an adequate environment (e.g. womb) is enough to give birth to an animal
Hypothesis of panpsychist biology:
· In addition to egg cell, semen and environment, an animal soul and lots of other psychons are needed
Apriori (i.e. from a purely epistemological point of view) both
hypotheses are possible. But they lead to different predictions. In the case of
purely materialist biology, the only limitation on the number of a species is
food and habitat. In the case of panpsychist biology we have a further
empirically relevant limitation: the number psychons/souls having emerged
during biological evolution.
Aristotle could have said: "The sphericity of the earth is a trivial
scientific fact". Those, who requested him to provide evidence so simple
that they could understand it without effort, didn't recognize that the
non-sphericity of the earth is also hypothesis which is not self-evident and
therefore dependent on concrete evidence.
But in the same way as a spherical earth has become a trivial scientific fact
for everybody, reincarnation will become a trivial scientific fact in the near
future because it will influence our living in at least as many respects as the
sphericity of the earth does.
By wogoga in #33:
The predictive power of The Psychon Theory is much stronger than the predictive power of Darwinism. The reason is simple: the number of psychons having evolved on earth is limited. And isn't it obvious that the claim that only around 7 or 7.5 billion human souls have evolved is a falsifiable prediction? If the current demographic projections of UN come true, then my theory is simply wrong.
By jsfisher #34:
From where in your psychon hypothesis does the 7-7.5 billion number come from? It sure looks like you simply pulled a number out of the air that was a little bigger than the current world population. As such, that does not qualify as a falsifiable prediction of your psychon hypothesis.
When in 1988 I took for the first time reincarnation seriously as a possible
scientific hypothesis, demography seemed to me a strong counterargument. In the
meanwhile, the demographic evolution of mankind has become the most obvious
evidence in favor of reincarnation.
As a first guess I wrote 1996 in The Psychon Theory:
The number of human souls is in the order of 10 to the power 10.
After having dealt intensively with demography I wrote in The Demographic Saturation Theory:
If one knows the respective saturation values for all regions of the world, it is possible to calculate the limit, up to which world population can grow (in the short and medium term). The saturation values can be estimated by considering population pyramids and other demographic data in comparison with the data of yet saturated populations. If the calculations resulted in a saturation value of 77% for the 1997 world population, it would follow a maximum number of 7.5 billion humans.
Then The 1998 Revision of the United Nations Population Projections was published and I wrote:
The psychon theory has very concrete consequences, for instance there must be a limit to the number of human souls, which according to the latest demographic data could be even less than 7 billion.
Now I think that a number of around 7 or 7.5 billion is correct.
Europe,
North America, Australia, Japan and most other developed regions of East Asia
are essentially saturated, i.e. their population cannot grow further from
within. So any relevant increase in North America or Australia will be
compensated by a smaller increase (e.g. South America) or a decrease (e.g.
Eastern Europe) elsewhere.
Fertility decline has spread all over the world in the meanwhile. Everywhere
happens the same, only the ad-hoc-explanations are different. Look at the U.S. Census Bureau population pyramid
of Hong Kong. The demographic situation in the more developed regions of China
(e.g. Shanghai, Beijing) is quite similar to Hong Kong.
"The lowest TotalFertilityRate recorded anywhere in the world in recorded history is for Xiangyang district of Jiamusi city (Heilongjiang, China) which had a TFR of 0.41." (Wikipedia)
Such extremely low fertility rates are not the result of an increasing aversion against children, but of low fecundability due to fast population growth in the past. The past increase has led to a situation of demographic saturation where a big number of persons in fertile age is confronted with low mortality. The same will happen to all other fast growing countries or sub-populations.
"At one point in the 1980s estimates showed that Iran's population would reach 108 million by the year 2006. But, in fact, through a variety of measures, Iran has managed to check its population growth with the population projected to only be 70 million in 2006." (Wikipedia)
In
any case, for the big demographic institutions (e.g. CIA, US Census, UN) it
would be easily possible to make correct and detailed demographic predictions.
But human nature is such that they very probably will continue to make
completely wrong predictions instead of accepting a Copernican reversal.
______
It is simply naive to mock a scientific hypothesis only because it does not agree with one's own prejudices
By krelnik in #70:
People still have free
will in your world view, do they not? A given couple's decision to reproduce
should be unaffected by whether the country they live in is
"saturated", correct?
If that is so, then there should be many unexplainable (by so-called
"materialist" means) fertility problems in Japan. I.e. there should
be a marked increase in couples who want to have children, but cannot for
reasons that medical science seemingly cannot explain. Said increase should
have occurred during the exact same period that Japan's population growth
slowed.
Infertility is a problem in low-fertility countries, and at least a small part
is "unexplained infertility". However, there are many properties or
parameters involved in reproduction, and if one of these parameters is outside
the norm, then such a case can be declared "explained infertility",
despite the fact that it is actually caused by the unavailability of a
(related) human soul.
Many families are founded because of a pregnancy. So a lower fecundability
entails a higher proportion of singles. Also, the correlation between fertility
and contraception is rather poor, and in many countries or populations, people
would like to have more children than they actually have:
"Personal ideal family size tends to be markedly higher than actual fertility, but it seems to be on the decline in several European countries." (The Low Fertility Trap Hypothesis, Lutz, Skirbekk & Testa)
A further quote from my Critical Analysis of Standard Demography:
Increasing demographic saturation leads directly to lower fecundability. At least under not too exceptional circumstances, this lower fecundability entails lower fertility, irrespective of other causes (e.g. at the individual choice-decision level), and actual fertility of a fully saturated population cannot significantly exceed direct-replacement fertility. Thus infertility of some couples is an unavoidable outcome, if more children are desired than direct-replacement fertility allows. A substantial number of couples does not seek infertility treatment, despite wishing for years for a first or a further child.
From the demographic saturation model we conclude:
· Fertility of e.g. Iran will fall below 1.5, and it is impossible to keep fertility above 1.5 (apart from decreasing life expectancy in Iran or huge mass mortality in the rest of the world).
· The countries the fertility of which never fell (and never will fall) below 1.5 had a rather continuous and long lasting fertility decline.
· The period of below-generation-replacement fertility (i.e. below 2.1) is in general the shorter, the faster fertility declines (and the lower fertility falls).
· From the population pyramid of Hong Kong we can conclude that fertility will again be higher than 2.1 around 20 years in the future.
By krelnik in #95:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I read this to mean that anything evidence at all, as long as it results in lower population growth, supports your theory.
My
theory is only supported by a convergence of the birth numbers to the death
numbers. Depending on population pyramid, this can also entail an increasing
fertility. Please read the short chapter Direct-replacement versus
generation-replacement fertility.
Already in 1994 (Fertility Decline in East Asia, Science, Vol. 266, page 1521)
one could read:
"... and there is no obvious reason why families should adjust their behavior to achieve long-term population replacement. It might be considered remarkable that total fertility in developed countries has remained as close to replacement level as it has."
So for instance, do you claim that China actually instituted its laws regarding number of children per family as a result of the lack of souls?
I simply do not believe that fertility rates far below one child per woman are the result of China's one-child policy. Look at Table 4 (Policy Fertility and Recorded Fertility of China's Provinces) of Low Fertility in China: Trends, Policy and Impact. The provinces Jilin, Shandong and Jangxi all had (circa 2000) a policy fertility of around 1.45. Nevertheless actual fertility ranged from 1.0 in Jilin to 2.0 in Jiangxi.
Are you saying that Japanese couples don't want to have children, not because they are making careful choices based on economics and social trends, but because on some level they sense that they can't?
For me it's not necessary to explain the hypothesis "that Japanese couples don't want to have children". You start with the premise the every child is the result of a conscious decision. I do not. I'm sure that the majority of people do not exactly plan each child and that they do not choose to undergo infertility diagnosis if they would like to get a first, second or a third child but don't succeed.
If you're going to take this path, then your theory is fundamentally unfalsifiable. Therefore it is not science. It is a belief system.
Demographic saturation predicts direct-replacement fertility, and actual fertility is converging to direct-replacement all over the world. A fertility of 1.3 in Japan or of around 0.7 in Shanghai and Beijing already is the prediction of my theory. So the problem is only on the side of standard demography which must explain such low and extremely low fertilities by "careful choices" or by infertility.
As I predicted, you are now confusing the issue of 'fertility' (as demographers use it to mean the overall population growth rate) and 'fecundability' which is the ability of a given couple (should they choose to) to become pregnant.
I'm rather careful in distinguishing between fertility and fecundability (often called fecundity or even fertility).
I asked you a simple question. Where are the numbers to support that fecundability dropped in Japan at the same time that 'fertility' dropped?
I explain the current fertility in Japan by the obvious fact that
the number of births is equal to the number of deaths. No other explanation is
needed.
Have you any evidence showing that extremely low fertility is caused by
individual choices or by 'materialist' infertility?
And how do you explain the fact that fertility has started to rise again in
many European Countries, in the U.S. and in Japan?
Whereas substantial population decline (not caused by emigration) as predicted
several times by standard demography would refute the demographic saturation
theory, a scenario being able to refute
standard demography simply does not exist.
I'm going to keep asking. Where is the data on fecundability that your theory predicts? If this data doesn't reside in existing databases, why aren't you in Japan trying to gather it directly?
Let us find a sponsor. But a region in China where fertility is substantially below 1.0 would be more promising for that kind of research. In the meanwhile you can try an internet search with e.g. "infertility China", "unexplained infertility" or similar.
By wogoga in #96:
I simply do not believe that fertility rates far below one child per woman are the result of China's one-child policy. Look at Table 4 (Policy Fertility and Recorded Fertility of China's Provinces) of Low Fertility in China: Trends, Policy and Impact. The provinces Jilin, Shandong and Jangxi all had (circa 2000) a policy fertility of around 1.45. Nevertheless actual fertility ranged from 1.0 in Jilin to 2.0 in Jiangxi.
By wollery in #101:
There are many reasons for differences in birth rates. But of course, that's pretty irrelevant, since you're cherry-picking results from that paper.
I only presented a good example from Table 4.
If in two provinces the allowed fertility is almost identical (1.45 and 1.46),
but in one province actual fertility is substantially lower (Jilin with 1.0)
and in the other substantially higher (Jiangxi with 2.0), then we must conclude
that fertility policy is not decisive. And it is not astonishing at all that in
some provinces actual fertility is quite close to policy fertility. According
to US Census actual
fertility in 2000 was 0.94 in Hong Kong, 0.95 in Macao and an exceptional
year-2000-value of 1.68 in Taiwan, which rapidly fell to 1.115 in 2005. If we
calculated 'policy fertility' for these regions, they probably wouldn't correlate
worse with actual fertility than in the case of the provinces of mainland
China.
For instance, table 2 shows an increasing fertility rate, from 1.22 in 2000 to 1.44 in 2004.
A
quote from the paper:
"Fertility
is most commonly observed by total fertility rate (TFR). China's measurement of
its fertility once was claimed to be 'of very high quality' in the early
1980s (Coale, 1984), but turns to be a focus of debate over years, particularly
since the mid-1990s. It was expected to have an answer to the debate with the
results of the 2000 population census. Surprisingly, the 2000 census reports a
fertility level only at 1.22.* This result has been widely considered 'unacceptable',
and even for the National Statistics Bureau to see it as 'too low'. More
debates arise on China's fertility level in recent years, and the estimation
ranges from as low as 1.35 to as high as 2.3 (see in Chen and Guo 2006).
* NSB (2003) later adjusted the 2000 total fertility rate to 1.4 according to
the short form of the census."
So the apparent fertility increase from 1.22 to 1.44 in Table 2
results primarily from the use of different data sources for different years.
But why was the result of the 2000 population census considered so
"unacceptable" that the hypothesis became predominant that up to
almost 50% of the newborn are hidden from the authorities? Probably one simply could
not imagine that a fertility policy actually works.
Yet the primary reason for this fertility decline is obviously something very
different from a policy. As absurd as it may sound in the ears of many: Chinese
fertility decline is the direct consequence of an increasing shortage of unborn
Chinese souls.
You're confusing total female population with total female population that can have children.
It almost amuses me to see how everybody is desirous of thinking that I'm
confused.
Also, China's one child policy has led to a population with an increasingly large proportion of elderly people, ...
Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and other countries and regions
are in the same situation without a one-child-policy.
But the Chinese policy actually could have a
positive effect on childlessness: less parents with more than one child lead to
more parents with at least one child.
By Cuddles in #93:
Define "species". Are the Japanese now a separate species?
The
definition of 'species' is irrelevant.
Let us deal with something more concrete: the number of great-grandparents of
the total population of a country. Every person has exactly eight
great-grandparents. In Japan we have now a population of 127.8 million. To them
correspond 8 * 127.8 = 1022 million great-grandparents. Probably 98% or 99% of
these 1022 million great-grandparents were also born in Japan. Therefore Japan
can be considered a rather homogeneous sub-population of the human species.
Now let us do the same with the United States: To around 300 million people
correspond 2.4 billion great-grandparents. I do not know, but I suppose that
more than 50% of these great-grandparents were born outside the US, and maybe
more than 25% in Europe. Thus, the US have a much less homogeneous population
than Japan (in the sense of evolutionary relatedness).
And if apart from the reality of human souls, we also consider continuity as a basic
principle of nature, then logical (statistical) reasoning is enough to conclude
that under normal circumstances it is rather improbable that a 'typical
Japanese soul' is born outside Japan or that a soul never having lived in Japan
is born in Japan.
A quote from Psychons and their Evolution:
For a person to be born, what is required is a human soul which has evolved by reincarnation. Human souls are reborn with increased probability in a similar environment. This ENVIRONMENT CONTINUITY can easily be verified empirically (e.g. by examining persons with pronounced rare characteristics). A manifestation of this principle is that persons are often in contact with persons they have also been in contact with in former lives. Environment continuity is also valid for animal souls. It is essential when a species splits into subspecies. It stands to reason that environment continuity is valid not only for human and animal souls but for all psychons.
An example of speciation in the case of mammoth can be found in this post.
By quarky in #94:
less apes=more humans.
If souls evolved, this would make (slightly) more sense.
"The species of primates which has led to humans is directly or indirectly responsible for the extinction of all other species having evolved further than chimpanzees." (The Psychon Theory)
By Hokulele in #121:
If Japanese are a
separate species, how can I exist?
(For the record, I am half Japanese, half Scottish-American.)
When you deal with history, (ancient) literature, music, art, customs or similar of both cultures, you should analyze your reactions and associations. Or maybe you can revive memories from your childhood which help you to find out whether you were in the past a Japanese or a Western soul. I'd be interested in what you think about this approach.
By Hokulele in #136:
I can't think of anything from my childhood that would support the notion of a soul at all. I have never been one to feel like I had a past life, I do not remember anything from before age 3, ...
You cannot conclude from "not remembering anything from before age 3" that you were not the same experiencing subject you are today. In an analogous way, you cannot conclude from not remembering past lives that you did not existed as the same experiencing subject all over biological evolution.
By wogoga in #126:
Now let us do the same with the United States: To around 300 million people correspond 2.4 billion great-grandparents.
By Gravy in #137:
Please re-think those calculations.
I'm actually astonished to see how difficult it seems to correctly interpret what I've written. Isn't it obvious that in our discussion
To around 300 million people correspond 2.4 billion great-grandparents.
must be interpreted as
To around 300 million people correspond 2.4 billion not-necessarily-different-from-each-other great-grandparents.
Theses 2.4 billion great-grandparents
are probably around 100 or 200 million different persons. What is relevant
here, are percentages of provenance from the different countries/regions. And
the simplest way to do the calculation is the following: for every person in
the United States it is determined from which region of provenance their eight
great-grandparents (most likely) come from. For all regions we get a number of
great-grandparents, and the sum these numbers is again 2.4 billion. Is this so
complicated?
I introduced this reasoning only in order to show in a concrete way that from
the point of view of parentage, Japan is a much more homogenous country than
U.S. or European countries. Therefore Japan is an ideal case to test the predictions of demographic saturation.
By quarky in #113:
is it possible Obama is soulless?
For the sake of the United States and the rest of the world I hope that Barack Obama is Abraham Lincoln's reincarnation and that he will become the next president.
By quarky in #119:
It might be useful to think of 'souls' as having a certain mass ...
No. Souls are opposed to mass/energy. As an ordering principle, 'soul' is opposed to 'mass' in a similar way as 'form' is opposed to 'matter' in the philosophy of Aristotle. Whereas mass/energy is a continuous quantity, psychons are discrete entities representing information and subjective experience.
After death and before incarnation, souls do not actually but only potentially exist and therefore cannot be located in space. From Psychons and their Evolution:
If you switch on a torch, photons appear, but there are no photons in the torch in the way there are bullets in a gun. While the necessary energy exists 'actually' in the torch, the units capable of organizing energy quanta in the form of photons exist only 'potentially', before the torch is switched on. Such non-material units shall be called PSYCHONS. There is a continuity from primitive psychons, which are responsible for the behaviour of elementary particles, to human psychons (souls), which have evolved from primitive psychons over billions of years.
By Cuddles in #144:
Once again, you keep talking about human souls and how a shortage of them results in reduced fertility. However, all your actual "analysis" talks about specific sub-groups of humans, either genetically or geographically. How do you reconcile this? If it is human souls in general that matter, your focus on specifically the Japanese is irrelevant, since this will not say anything about humans in general. If it is the subgroup that matters, your talk about the total number of human souls is irrelevant. Which is it?
You may have missed my post #81.
The human species as a whole has a saturation value, which nowadays should be
around 90%. Nevertheless the human species is not homogeneous with respect to demography,
but consists of delimitable sub-populations having their own saturation values.
An ideal case of such a clearly definable sub-population of the human species
is Japan. Because Japan constitutes a clearly delimitable population (low
migration at present and in the past) and has become 100%-saturated a few years
ago, the number of births and fertility can be predicted from the number of
deaths.
If you actually want to understand (also in order to better oppose my
arguments), then you should read the four paragraphs of the chapter Classification in subpopulations and
evolutionary relatedness. Here the first paragraph and
an annotation:
A main problem
of demography in general consists in classifying the world population into
useful subpopulations, normally countries, geographic regions or socio-economic
groups, for which reasonable projections can be made. Brazil, for instance, is
considered as a unit in the 2006 revision, with a fertility slowly converging
to the assumed endpoint of demographic transition, namely the 1.85-fertility.
Nevertheless, in 2000, Brazil's fertility ranged from 1.02 in the highest
income-group of the south to 6.3 in the lowest income-group of the north (CENBRA, 'Tabela 15').
The mathematics of how the saturation values of subpopulations
contribute to the saturation of the whole population is very simple. Let us
assume a country with two clearly distinguishable subpopulations, one with 27
million and a saturation value of 90% and another with 15 million and a
saturation of 30%. The current population obviously is 27+15 = 42 million. The
first subpopulation, having exploited already 90% of its potential maximum (by
definition 100%), can only grow from 27 to 27 * (100%/90%) = 30 million. The
potential maximum of the smaller subpopulation is 15 * (100%/30%) = 50 million.
Thus the potential maximum population of the two subpopulations taken together
is 30 + 50 = 80 million. A current population of 42 million in the case of a
potential maximum of 80 million results in a saturation of 42/80 = 52.5%.
By PixyMisa in #152:
How do you distinguish between a population that has a declining growth rate because it's running out of souls, and a population that has a declining growth rate for any other reason?
The cornerstone of demographic saturation is not "a declining growth
rate" but a growth resp. decline rate of zero after a population is
saturated (see
my post #96).
And because "there is no obvious reason why
families should adjust their behavior to achieve long-term population
replacement", the fact that the
populations (corrected for migration) of many developed countries and regions have
remained rather constant over years or decades instead of exponentially
increasing or decreasing is not only astonishing from the viewpoint of
standard demography but also very improbable.
Population constancy is paralleled by fertilities ranging from far below one
child per woman (in some the most developed regions of East Asia) to almost two
children (the United States, several European countries).
Neither the decrease to extremely low fertility in East Asia nor the increase
in the 'demographically most developed' countries has been predicted by
standard demography. After the fact it is always possible to find some ad-hoc
explanations for completely unexpected developments. The next ten years will
refute the predictions made by standard demography even more blatantly than the
last ten years already did.
Johannes Kepler was the one
who replaced the epicycle edifice as an explanation of planetary motions by
modern physical laws. Kepler's approach seemed at first
so absurd to his contemporaries that even Galileo Galilei fought and ridiculed
Kepler.
Somebody could have asked Kepler: "How do you distinguish between a
planet's path that is close to an ellipse because it is following your laws,
and a planet's path that is close to an ellipse for any other reason?"
Think about what Kepler could have answered.
By wogoga in #154:
And because "there is no obvious reason why families should adjust their behavior to achieve long-term population replacement", the fact that the populations (corrected for migration) of many developed countries and regions have remained rather constant over years or decades instead of exponentially increasing or decreasing is not only astonishing from the viewpoint of standard demography but also very improbable.
By Cuddles in #156:
Evidence? ...
You invoke the continuous population increase of rich immigration countries in
order to refute demographic saturation. In an analogous way one could attempt
to refute universal gravitation by invoking the fact that bodies (i.e. a stone
and a grain of sand) do not fall at the same speed. What we observe is normally
the superposition of several forces or causes.
Apart
from Japan,
my best counterexpample is Europe as a whole:
Year 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑
Population 604 634 656 676 692 706 721 728 728 728
Change 30 22 20 16 14 15 7 0 0
Population of Europe in million and corresponding population change
The effect of migration on
direct-replacement fertility (2007):
The most important long-ranging factor confounding the demographic saturation model is migration. Economic immigrants, especially if they come from high-fertility countries tend to have higher fertility than non-migrants. But they affect fertility rates far less than natural increase rates. Because most economic migrants are young, their impact on absolute death figures in both the countries of origin and those of destination is small for many years. The children and grandchildren of migrants, however, are counted in the countries of destination, whereas they are missing in the countries of origin.
Ten years ago I had written in The Demographic Saturation Theory:
The
population decrease which was predicted for some European countries as Germany
did not take place. Instead the populations of the respective countries
increased because of migration.
In 1995, in the European Union the number of births surpassed the number of
deaths by just under 300'000 and the population grew by just under 0.1%
(without immigration). Despite this slight population increase the fertility
rate was only 1.4 births per woman.
The population of the USA increases because of immigration and an excess of
births over deaths. It increases at the expense of Latin American and East
European populations. As the Latin American population is not yet saturated,
the out-migration of a part of the population is not noticeable. But as the
East European population is saturated, the out-migration (of physical persons
and human souls) can be noticed by declining population figures.
The only real anomaly of my demographic theory I see is Germany with a regular natural increase below zero (i.e. more deaths than births) since the early 1970'ies despite not negligible immigration from high-fertility Turkey. The reason of this anomaly is very probably related to the Second World War.
By wollery in #155:
Demography is not an exact science, and it's very hard to predict trends in things that involve personal preferences.
If you start with the premise that the demographic evolution of the last decades is well explained by "personal preferences", then you obviously conclude that the hypothesis of limited soul numbers is superfluous. However, even demographers complain about the many mutually inconsistent ad-hoc-hypotheses introduced after-the-fact.
Kepler's laws don't offer a reason why the planets move in ellipses, just that they do.
The demographic saturation theory can be formulated without reference to either panpsychism or reincarnation, only as a model explaining and predicting with reasonable accuracy the process of demographic transition. Analogously, Kepler's laws offer a model explaining and predicting with reasonable accuracy the orbits of planets.
For the reason why they move in ellipses you have to wait until Newton comes on the scene, and he was born in the year Galileo died (1642), 12 years after Kepler died (1630).
Demographic saturation corresponds
to Kepler's laws, whereas panpsychistic evolution explaining
why demographic saturation occurs corresponds to classical gravitation theory.
By the way, Johannes Kepler (see also) had assumed that
· celestial matter is not fundamentally different from terrestrial matter;
· the physics of celestial motion is no different from that of terrestrial motion;
· momentum is conserved;
· weight arises from the mutual attraction between two bodies;
· planetary orbits result from forces between the celestial bodies.
However,
Kepler had not recognized and maybe could not even imagine that the solution is
so simple: Mutual attraction according to the inverse distance square law
together with momentum conservation is enough to derive the laws.
Whereas Galileo (1564-1642) only hesitantly adopted the epicycle-heliocentrism
of Copernicus (1473-1543), Kepler (1571-1630) already at school was an
enthusiastic apologist of heliocentrism. Why? The reason is simple: Kepler was
Copernicus' reincarnation. (Galilei presumably was the reincarnation of Michelangelo who died three days after
Galilei's birth at the age of 89. The next life of Galilei obviously was
Newton).
Besides, Kepler's laws, and those of Newton, are based on sound scientific principles, and were gleaned from clearly observable data.
You ignore the crucial point: not even Galilei was able or willing to admit
that Kepler's laws are based on sound scientific principles and that they
correspond to observable data. Galilei continued to advocate Copernicus' theory
still based on the epicycles.
They are the simplest explanations (look up Occam's razor) and require no undetectable outside agencies.
When
Kepler tried to explain the tides by gravitation, he was ridiculed by Galilei
and others, because they could not imagine that such "undetectable outside agencies"
as attractive forces from the moon could move the waters of the oceans.
The effects of psychons are easily detectable, in the same way as the effects
of universal gravitation are easily detectable. However, the validity of the
psychon hypothesis can only be deduced from such detectable effects by logical
reasoning, in the same way as the validity of universal gravitation can only be
deduced from the empirical effects now attributed to gravitation.
Lastly, comparing yourself to one of the great scientists of history hardly helps your case.
I think that your invocation of Occam's razor (the fewer hypotheses the better)
as a pure lip service does not help your case. I only made the comparison in
order to show the following: In the same way one needed Occam's razor in order
to give preference to Kepler's model over the epicycle model, one needs Occam's
razor in order to give preference to the demographic saturation model over the
wild conglomerate of ad-hoc-hypotheses presented by standard demography in
order to explain demographic transition.
If your argument doesn't stand without such a comparison then it doesn't stand at all. Such comparisons smack of hubris, and the fact that you get the comparison wrong (on many levels) just serves to make it laughable.
If you still think that I've gotten the comparison wrong, you should be able to
detail.
By wollery in #159:
You haven't found any logical inconsistency in my text, you only
enumerated what must be wrong if your world view is essentially right. And it
should be obvious that what you consider a "complete
misunderstanding" of "basic scientific principles", I consider
only a disagreement between panpsychism (acknowledging the reality of souls)
and the prejudices of your materialist world view.
By the way, I'm a consequent, consistent evolutionist, not admitting such
discontinuities as between abiogenesis and Darwinian evolution or between an
evolution without any form of consciousness and a sudden appearance of
consciousness (see also).
In cases where I do not believe in orthodox science (e.g. particle physics),
you simply conclude that I lack understanding. And that you consider the short chapter
Mechanical and Living Systems as
"thoroughly naive" is quite revealing.
You write: "A newly hatched chick is more
ordered than a raw egg, since the egg requires an input of energy to form the
chick, thus decreasing the entropy of the system."
What kind of energy input? In a previous post (Entropy,
order and life) I presented a more detailed variant of the paradox:
We can put the
just fertilized egg together with enough atmosphere of the right temperature in
a big enough box and consider the whole box as a closed system. The composition
of the air in the box will change during the development of the chick, but to
consider this change as a decrease in order seems quite absurd to me. Because
the box with the just hatched chick is considered a state resulting only from
blind downhill processes affecting previous higher-order states, we must
conclude:
The box with the just hatched chick is less ordered than the box with the just
fertilized egg.
Why do you think that the low fertility of the
Giant Panda cannot be
explained by the psychon theory? The more these pandas are protected, the lower
is their mortality and subsequently also their fertility. And that an increasing number of Giant Pandas in captivity
leads to a decreasing number in the wild, is also an elegant consequence
of the psychon theory. Because of the small population size of the Giant Panda
one could perform a crucial experiment: killing all individuals being old or
not 100% healthy in order to create a baby-boom.
In any case, if animals were essentially machines without souls, as you assume,
then it should be possible to relevantly increase the population size of the
Giant Panda, at least by artificial insemination or by cloning. According to
reductionist materialism, apart from food and habitat, nothing hinders a
species from exponential growth. In reality however, the population size of a
species is limited by the number of corresponding souls.
By Reality Check in 162:
Entropy can be defined in several ways. However the order/disorder interpretation is fraught with difficulties. The biggest one is actually defining what disorder is (read the Wikipedia entry on entropy).
My argument is essentially independent from such definitions. Blind downhill
processes lead from a state of lower probability to a state of higher
probability. A good example is decay in general or the decay of a bacterium after
death in special. Another example is the dilution by random movements of a
group of particles suspended in a liquid (Brownian motion).
Imagine that one autotroph bacterium starts replication in a corresponding
culture medium and that after some time the culture medium is full of bacteria.
According to common sense, the transformation of simple molecules into such
highly complex chemical factories constitutes not only a transformation from a
state of higher probability into a state of lower probability but also an
increase in order.
In the case of e.g. gravitation (of our planetary system) or Brownian motion,
computer simulations can easily be made, because what happens in nature can be
well explained by physical laws. In case of life however, simulations based on
physical or chemical laws do not exist. Why? Those believing in quantum
mechanics sometimes claim that such simulations are possible in principle, but
that the needed computing power exceeds all existing computers.
However, I'm convinced that every unprejudiced examination leads to the
conclusion, that no physical laws (as the basis of chemistry and biochemistry)
can be formulated and implemented as a computer simulation in order to explain
e.g. the construction of the Bacterial Flagellum, as shown in this animation (Bacterial
Flagellum - Evolution's Nightmare & Demise). The behavior of such enzymes must be explained by assuming
that they somehow are able to sense their environment and to perform
goal-directed movements. This only means that enzymes resemble rather insects
than the dead particles of Brownian motion.
That's not an argument from incredulity, but from common sense and from
consistent logical reasoning. By the way, the less one knows and understands,
the more seems possible.
By wogoga in #160:
Because the box with the just hatched chick is considered a state resulting only from blind downhill processes affecting previous higher-order states, we must conclude: The box with the just hatched chick is less ordered than the box with the just fertilized egg.
By wollery in #164:
If the system is closed then the total entropy of the system will not change.
"The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy in the combination of a system and its surroundings (or in an isolated system by itself) increases during all spontaneous chemical and physical processes." (Wikipedia)
The
second law is a logical consequence of the randomness of molecular motions.
That a big enough number of random motions can only transform a state of lower probability
into a state of higher probability is obvious. However, humans can transform
states of higher probability into states of lower probability, because we are
able to sense our environment and are able to purposefully move our bodies. The
same is valid also for animals and for bacteria.
But what about DNA polymerase enzymes which replicate DNA in vitro? The decay
of DNA is the normal reaction, leading to a state of higher probability.
Therefore, such enzymes doing the opposite create states of lower probability.
Because random motions only could create states of higher probability, we are
forced to admit: the motions of such enzymes are not random.
By wollery in #164:
If the air in the box is warm enough the chick will form in the egg, and the air in the box will cool down. The cooling is a loss of energy to the egg.
"It has been reported that during incubation, large eggs produce more heat than small eggs. Large eggs also face more difficulties to remove the surplus heat from the egg, as a result of the decreasing ratio between egg surface and egg content with increasing egg size and the reduced air velocity over the eggs in commercial incubators." (Source)
A decade ago, I wrote in a discussion with somebody who argued like you:
"Your comments show a further time that you do not understand at all the (original) second law. This law is equivalent to the impossibility of a perpetuum mobile of the second kind. What you write is exactly the contrary: thermal energy can be transformed into energy of chemical bonds. It would be possible to convert thermal energy without temperature differentials into chemical energy. If certain bonds are built up at a temperature of about 37° Celsius, there must be other bonds which can be built up at lower temperatures, e.g. 10° Celsius. In any container we could produce chemical energy by simply cooling down the environment!"
But now I had to learn:
"On the other hand, some reactions need to absorb heat from their surroundings to proceed. These reactions are called endothermic. A good example of an endothermic reaction is that which takes place inside of an instant 'cold pack.' Commercial cold packs usually consist of two compounds - urea and ammonium chloride in separate containers within a plastic bag. When the bag is bent and the inside containers are broken, the two compounds mix together and begin to react. Because the reaction is endothermic, it absorbs heat from the surrounding environment and the bag gets cold." (Source)
Yet this could be further evidence for what I wrote at that time:
"Most time of my life I have been sure that a perpetuum mobile of the second kind is not possible, but now I'm no longer sure."
By wogoga in #165:
In case of life however, simulations based on physical or chemical laws do not exist. Why? Those believing in quantum mechanics sometimes claim that such simulations are possible in principle, but that the needed computing power exceeds all existing computers.
By wollery in #167:
No, since the laws of QM are probabilistic, not deterministic, no such precise simulation is possible. It would be possible to produce a simulation that gave a probable outcome, but not a certain outcome, as is possible for Newtonian mechanics.
So you concede that the rather deterministic than probabilistic
construction of the bacterial flagellum
cannot even in principle by explained by quantum mechanics and
similar theories?
And
here
you can find a short refutation of the hypothesis that a bacterium-like Adam as
the result of purely materialist abiogenesis could have started Darwinian
evolution. By the way, one should not forget that the existence of a high
enough concentration of corresponding building blocks (simple organic
molecules) is a prerequisite for any materialist trial-and-error abiogenesis
process to start. The famous Miller–Urey experiment is strong evidence
against such a high concentration of the needed building blocks on the early
earth.
By bruto in #120:
I'm still confused about the localization of psychons.
Localization and spatial extension are attributes of matter. Whereas
mass/energy and space are divisible continuous quantities, psychons are
indivisible units. Yet psychons can only be active, insofar as they eventually
interact with mass/energy. Take for instance yourself as an acting and
experiencing subject:
When you move a finger you do not affect the finger but neurons
in your brain. A pain in your foot you do not perceive directly but only in
your brain. Optical effects, you perceive neither directly nor on the retina
but as neural states. These states are the result of a complex process,
starting with photoreceptor cells.
Brain research has shown that optical attributes such as form, movement and
color are processed in various regions of your brain, though an object appears
to you as a unity. It is you, i.e. your soul, which perceives the states of
different brain regions as a consistent picture of the object. (The Human Soul)
How do these psychons know what country to inhabit? Are they physical?
Primitive psychons are "physical" insofar, as e.g. the physical
behavior of photons, the catalytic properties of platinum or the very complex
and goal-directed movements of enzymes all depend on corresponding psychons.
Due to the continuous transition from primitive psychons to human souls, also
human souls must be considered physical resp. empirical entities. And if souls
are real, then also the relations between souls can be real, i.e. empirically
relevant. The more times souls of the same
species have been in contact with each other and the closer these contacts have
been, the more evolutionary related are such souls.
Are they sentient in and of themselves?
Psychons can only be sentient if they are active, i.e. if they ultimately have
an effect on mass/energy. The consciousness of enzyme psychons could maybe be
compared with the consciousness paralleling the instinctive behavior of a
newborn.
Some cults are of the opinion that souls choose their recipients. Are they right?
Souls without bodies cannot act in any way, so they cannot choose their
recipients. Our perception, feeling and thinking is so closely linked to the
human body and especially to the human brain, that the assumption of feeling,
thinking and acting without a brain is completely brainless.
It was Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued in such a way against bodiless ghosts or souls. Nevertheless
Feuerbach never adhered to militant atheism and was rather skeptical of pure
empiricism and pure materialism. He was also a great admirer of Spinoza's
philosophy, in the same way as later Albert Einstein, whose inborn atheism,
which became manifest in his youth, was essentially Feuerbachian.
If so, why can they not move from country to country as necessary? If that is so, wouldn't the soul distribution be unrelated to nationality or ethnicity?
The baby boom in the United States caused by the many deaths in
Europe during World War II is a good example showing that souls "move from
country to country". Where souls are
reborn can only be answered in a probabilistic way. This is essentially
the same probabilistic nature which can be found in the world of quanta (see
also #51).
The soul distribution actually is related to nationality and ethnicity, because
nationality and ethnicity are related to evolutionary relatedness
and environment continuity. The closer evolutionary
relatedness of a given soul to potential parents, the higher is the
probability of a conception with this soul. Evolutionary relatedness of a
given person having lived all recent lives in Japan is much higher with persons
living in Japan than with persons living elsewhere. So it is very probable that
this person will be reborn in Japan. But what is decisive is not the country as
a geographic region but the souls living in the country. If all Russians moved
to Japan and all Japanese to Russia, then a typical Japanese soul would be
reborn among the Japanese in Russia and not among the Russians in Japan.
By wogoga in #174:
So you concede that the rather deterministic than probabilistic construction of the bacterial flagellum cannot even in principle by explained by quantum mechanics and similar theories?
By wollery in #175:
Nope. I said that it's only possible to produce probabilistic models in QM. That doesn't mean that the actual evolution of the flagellum is impossible.
The problem we are dealing with is the goal-directed construction
of the flagellum by enzymes. The even more problematic evolution of such a
complex rotary engine (powered by the flow of protons across the bacterial cell
membrane) is a different question.
You wrote that "since the laws of QM
are probabilistic, not deterministic, no such precise simulation (of the construction of the bacterial flagellum) is possible".
But how can the purely probabilistic laws of QM or similar be responsible for
the very determined construction of such a complex rotary machine? How can the
probabilistic behavior of quanta lead to a rather deterministic behavior of
enzymes being capable of efficiently building such a complex machine?
If QM-based simulations of the deterministic happenings in living cells are in
fact impossible as a matter of principle, then it is a trivial logical
consequence that QM cannot explain the happenings in living cells.
However, the non-deterministic nature of quanta resp. elementary particles can
be seen in a new light: this non-determinism is a prerequisite that a psychon
of a higher organization level can have an effect [on lower-level parts],
because a fully deterministic nature of the parts would not allow any freedom
to the whole.
For instance, if a transcription factor
in a human cell were fully determined by its electrons, protons and neutrons,
then its movement as a whole would only resemble Brownian motion,
but the transcription factor would not be able to find its destination on the incredibly long DNA.
In order to do that, a transcription factor as a whole must be able to
purposefully move (similar to migratory animals), and this implies an effect on
the behavior of its parts.
By six7s in #180:
I might have missed some posts...
Try post #29 with links and maybe also #154 and #158.
Am I right in thinking that has he yet to answer the Q about how he knows (i.e. why we should accept) that souls (and therefore psychons and everything else that rides on this whacky concept) are anything other than a feature of popular fantasy-fiction?
Psychon
is a basic concept of a theory. Only by comparing the logical predictions of
the whole theory with reality we can decide whether such psychons do exist or
do not exist. A world with a limited number of human and other souls, all being
the result of evolution and representing a huge amount of information concerning
e.g. instinctive behavior and intelligence, cannot be identical to a world
where living beings are essentially soul-less machines.
So in order to decide whether psychons or reductionist materialism correspond
better to reality, it is enough to look at empirical (e.g. demographic) data.
Especially in demography it will become increasingly problematic to always
explain after the fact by mutually inconsistent ad-hoc hypotheses what has been
predicted before the fact by demographic saturation.
By the way, you seem to ignore the whole philosophical tradition, always having
opposed the concept soul to the concept matter. And why do so
many persons on such forums become angry or even feel personally attacked when
they are confronted with a purely scientific concept, similar to a religious
concept of the past. Even before the advent of Christianity, Aristotle
considered such concepts part of natural science. And do all the persons trying
to ridicule panpsychism actually consider themselves superior to the
outstanding panpsychists of the past such as e.g. Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano
Bruno, Kepler, Spinoza and Leibniz?
Could it be that such persons becoming angry when confronted with scientific
hypotheses not agreeing with the prejudices of their current world view are in
fact reincarnated religious zealots of the past? We should not forget that our
descent from Adam and Eve was once considered by the educated majority in the
same way a fact as today reductionist materialism is considered a fact.
______
Is
somebody, skeptical of all not agreeing with orthodoxy, skeptic or orthodox?
By wollery in #190:
You might start with the Giant Panda and the Australian rabbit population.
Concerning
the Giant Panda
you can find all what seems relevant to me in #160.
In #164 you objected:
"The population of Giant Pandas has been dropping steadily for a very long time, and the reason is ridiculously simple. At some point in the past, the Panda went from being a carnivore to being a vegetarian, eating a diet of little but bamboo."
However, this would only be relevant if it had happened in recent
times. If the Giant Panda population actually had substantially decreased in
the last centuries and fertility were nevertheless so low that the population
could not recover, then this actually would constitute strong evidence against
my evolution-by-reincarnation theory. The assumption that the population of a
related species*
has been growing in the recent past at the expense of the Giant Panda is not
plausible, because the only closely related species, the Red Panda
has a similarly small number. So only a few thousand panda souls exist, and the
populations of the two panda species are limited by their very low soul
numbers.
*Such a situation could have happened at the end of the last ice
age with elephant populations increasing at the expense of the mammoth
populations.
The exponential growth of European rabbits in Australia, at a time when these
animals seen as agricultural pests were losing more and more of their habitat
in Europe, isn't astonishing at all. Hundreds of millions of rabbit souls
exist. And the decision to ban all rabbit farming in Australia even increased
the problem.
"All rabbit farming for meat production was banned until 1987, when Western Australia changed its legislation to allow farming of rabbits in that state. New South Wales and Victoria followed suit in 1995 and 1997, respectively, and now farming for meat is allowed in all states with the exception of Queensland. Despite the ban on farming, Australia has had an established rabbit meat industry for many years, based on harvesting wild rabbits. In the early 1990s, over 2.7 million wild rabbits per annum were sold for meat. With the release, in 1996, of rabbit haemorrhagic disease as a biological control agent, the population of wild rabbits was dramatically reduced, with only 100,000 being harvested per annum in the late 1990s." (Farmed Rabbits in Australia, January 2003, RIRDC)
Instead of banning rabbit farming, they should have captured wild rabbits and used them for farming. It is an obvious fact that domestication and aquaculture is paralleled by a decrease in the corresponding wild populations. So the decline (having started already in 1950) of wild rabbit populations in the 1990s was simply caused by the spread of rabbit farming in Australia and the rest of the world.
"The center of world rabbit production is Europe, where demand is highest, accounting for 75 percent of world production. In 1990, total global production was estimated at 1.5 million tons." (Breeding rabbits for food and income)
To these 1.5 million tons rabbit meat of 1990 corresponded around 1 billion rabbits and at least 250 million rabbit souls, because rabbits are generally ready for slaughter at about 11-13 weeks of age when they weigh around 3 kg, and 50% of the weight at slaughter is meat (source).
The effect of aquaculture on corresponding wild stocks
By six7s in #197:
Effect of aquaculture on world fish supplies (PDF)
Thank you for the interesting paper from
June 2000. It may be true that "global
aquaculture production still adds to world fish supplies", because lower mortality rates in captivity lead to higher
saturation rates with more fish (souls) living and growing at the same time.
Yet the authors speak also of "an
underlying paradox: aquaculture is a possible solution, but also a contributing
factor to the collapse of fisheries stocks worldwide". And they even ask: "does aquaculture enhance – or diminish – the
available fish supply?". Two quotes from
the paper:
The use of wild
fish to feed farmed fish places direct pressure on fisheries resources.
Capture fisheries landings as a whole have plateaued at around 85-95 megatonnes
per year. Moreover, there has been a gradual shift in wild capture from large
and valuable carnivorous species to smaller, less valuable species that feed at
lower trophic levels.
This obviously implies a decline in large and valuable species and
a growth in less valuable species. We conclude that feeding valuable fish in
aquaculture with less valuable wild fish rather decreases the wild stocks of
the aquacultured species than the wild stocks used as food for them! This at least
suggests that the reason of wild stock declines lies not in the fishing
industry but in aquaculture.
The authors write that "Salmon catches worldwide
actually rose by 27% between 1988 and 1997"
and use this and cases of "relatively stable" catches in order to
conclude: "These examples show little obvious
effect of aquaculture production on capture rates of wild fish".
We must take into consideration that technological progress made it possible to
more efficiently detect and catch fish and shellfish. So we cannot necessarily
conclude from stable or increasing catches that the wild stocks themselves have
not declined.
However, it is easy to find evidence that aquaculture of salmon negatively
affects the wild populations, for instance:
Salmon are a
resource treasured and shared by all Indigenous Peoples within British
Columbia.
A Salmon Aquaculture Review was undertaken which gave a cautious
"okay" for fish farming to proceed. The Review did not fully
investigate the impact that fish farms have upon wild stocks and the
environmental damage they can create. For example, the Review overlooked the
fact that in some countries wild salmon have
been almost entirely wiped out as a result of fish farms.
On the decline of Pacific salmon and speculative links to salmon farming in British Columbia:
Pacific salmon
abundance along the West Coast of Canada has been in sharp decline since the
early 1990s.
The most likely reasons for the decline in Pacific salmon stocks include a
combination of climate change, overfishing, and freshwater habitat destruction.
There have also been suggestions that salmon farming in British Columbia has
contributed to the decline of salmon stocks. The hypothesized effects of salmon
farming include potential ecological interactions as well as disease concerns.
Although farmed salmon are also a potential source for these disease pathogens,
surveys of pathogens in wild and hatchery fish show no patterns that could be
attributed to salmon farming.
Aquaculture's Troubled Harvest:
Spurred by a
politically powerful commercial fishing industry, Alaska outlawed salmon
farming outright. British Columbia, on the other hand, welcomed the industry
with open arms.
Today, Alaska's wild salmon fishery ranks among the healthiest, best managed in
the world. But British Columbia's commercial fishing industry barely survives;
in 1999, the wild salmon harvest was the lowest in 50 years.
Or from a recent newsletter (The Perils to Wild Salmon from Farm Raised Fisheries and what you can do to help prevent sea lice in wild populations):
The study focused on Pink Salmon north of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, but when combined with the results of earlier studies, suggest that Salmon farming as practiced in the Pacific Canadian province poses an existential threat to some wild Salmon.
For shrimp, the situation is quite similar. Quotes from Disease: Shrimp Aquaculture's Biggest Problem:
One U.S. aquaculture
entrepreneur, Thomas Powell of Jacksonville, Florida, advises potential
investors that in a worst case scenario, exotic disease will wipe out 80
percent of the wild shrimp stocks, leaving the market open for aquaculture
products. "It's a guess, based on what we've seen in Mexico, " says
Powell, referring to an outbreak of IHHNV (infectious hypodermal and
hematopoietic necrosis virus), that originated in Mexican shrimp farms and
reduced the blue shrimp stocks in the northern Gulf of California to levels
that could not support a commercial fishery from 1987 until 1994.
"During the 1993 crash of the Chinese (shrimp aquaculture) system, there
was a 90 percent reduction in the (adjacent) wild stock."
This 1993 crash in China was probably at least partly caused by
aquaculture successes in other countries. For instance in Thailand, the annual
production of farmed shrimp increased from less than 50'000 tons in 1998 to
more than 250'000 tons in 1994 (see Figure 3 of Shrimp Farming in
Thailand's Chao Phraya River Delta).
By doing an internet search with e.g. aquaculture, wild, stock, collapse
or similar you can convince yourself whether my quotes are representative or
not.
By wogoga in #194:
The assumption that the population of a related species* has been growing in the recent past at the expense of the Giant Panda is not plausible, because the only closely related species, the Red Panda has a similarly small number.
By wollery in #196:
Such a shame that your argument is rendered moot by the fact that the Red Panda and the Giant Panda aren't related. The Giant Panda is a bear, of the family Ursidae, which are carnivores. The Red Panda (Ailurus fulgens) is in a family of its own, and is actually most closely related to raccoons. See this paper.
I don't understand your reasoning. You had claimed that an alleged population
decrease of the Giant Panda caused by low fertility is evidence against Giant
Panda reincarnation. I answered that if such a population implosion had
occurred in recent times, "then this actually would constitute strong
evidence against my evolution-by-reincarnation theory".
This conclusion is based on the premise that no closely related species has
been growing at the expense of the Giant Panda population in recent times.
However, if not even the Red Panda is relatively closely related to the Giant
Panda then my argument becomes even more straightforward, and you simply have
to provide evidence for your original claim in order to seriously attack
the Psychon Theory.
The question of the relatedness between the Giant and the Red Panda is very
interesting. Two quotes from Wikipedia:
"For many
decades the precise taxonomic classification of the panda was under debate as
both the giant panda and the distantly related red panda share characteristics
of both bears and raccoons."
"The red panda and the giant panda, although completely different in
appearance, share several features. They both live in the same habitat, they
both live on a similar bamboo diet and they both share a unique enlarged bone
called the pseudo thumb, which allows them to grip the bamboo shoots they eat."
If the conclusion of the paper mentioned by you is correct and
both Panda species are only very distantly related from the viewpoint of
genetics then this is an interesting case of convergent evolution.
Future research may be able to decide whether animal souls (of a soul-species)
can lead to convergent evolution in lineages drifting genetically apart, by
alternately incarnating in the different lines. In the concrete case of the
Giant and the Red Panda, such an assumption would imply that at least some of
the souls of the Red Panda lineage were born in the Giant Panda branch after
their separation from a common ancestor, and the other way round.
Such a propensity of their ancestors for incarnating in genetically quite
different species could maybe also help to explain the extremely low soul
number of the Red Panda (a few thousand), which is a rather small animal with a
weight of only 3-6 kg. For comparison: for every Red Panda soul more than one
million human souls exist.
As a possible scenario the following could have happened: Very difficult
conditions, under which only a small number of the strongest and most capable
individuals could survive and reproduce, lasted for a long period. Because at
the same time the conditions were much better for another related species, the
population size of this related species increased in the long run at the
expense of the population (of the ancestors) of the Red Panda.
Independently of whether such a scenario is possible or not, it is a logical
necessity for evolution-by-reincarnation that after a species has become
extinct the souls are born within related species: the closer related such a
destination species and the better its living conditions and reproduction, the
higher is the probability of being born there; and the more distant this
destination species from the extinct one, the more difficult it is for the soul
of the extinct species to learn to survive to fertile age in the destination
species.
By wollery in #201:
The Giant Panda has no natural enemies, plentiful food, and no particularly closely related species. If your psychon theory is true then there is no reason for their numbers to dwindle at all - they should have a high fertility rate.
We agree that the Giant Panda numbers should not decline, not from my point of view, and even less from a Darwinian point of view. Therefore I've put into question the reality of the alleged decline in Giant Panda populations and challenged you to provide evidence that it actually happened. Yet there seems to be counterevidence:
"In the 1990s, however, several laws (including gun controls and the removal of resident humans from the reserves) helped the chances of survival for pandas. With these renewed efforts and improved conservation methods, wild pandas have started to increase in numbers in some areas, even though they still are classified as a rare species." (Wikipedia)
But their numbers have been falling for a long time, and their fertility is still very low.
When
did the Giant Panda numbers fall, and how long?
According
to my Psychon Theory, it is quite plausible that the numbers could have fallen in times
when survival conditions were quite adverse (for instance during or after major
climate changes in the past), but it is very implausible that the numbers fell
after the Giant Panda became a more and more protected species.
This can, however be explained in evolutionary terms, because the Giant Panda moved from being a carnivore to being a herbivore, but its gut hasn't yet evolved properly to draw enough energy from its chosen food.
Explaining
the low fertility of the Giant Panda by its change from being carnivore to
herbivore is an excellent example of an ad-hoc-hypothesis where a simple
coincidence is taken for an explanation ("correlation instead of
causation").
Or does any halfway plausible mechanism exist which could explain how the Giant
Panda's inefficient gut affects its fertility? Without natural enemies, with
plentiful food, and even fostered by humans, these animals are far from being
undernourished. And their reproduction doesn't seem to consume all too much
energy:
· Copulation time is short, ranging from thirty seconds to five minutes, but the male may mount repeatedly to ensure successful fertilization.
If we further take into account
· The whole gestation period ranges from 83 to 163 days, with 135 days being the average.
· Usually, the female panda gives birth to one or two panda cubs.
· Growth is slow and pandas may not reach sexual maturity until five to seven years of age.
· Giant Pandas can usually live to be 20-30 years old in captivity.
then from the low actual fertility rate of the Giant Panda we must
conclude that this species does not participate in Darwinian evolution: Rooted in
Malthusianism, Darwinism is based on the premise that natural selection
chooses the fittest, because otherwise, the earth could not hold the offspring
of just a single pair.
According evolution-by-reincarnation however, the low actual fertility rate of
the Giant Panda simply means that the Giant Panda population currently has a
high saturation value. This implies that (almost) all panda souls are
incarnated and that a new panda can only be born if another panda dies.
And yet the Japanese can't get souls from the incredibly closely genetically related Europeans. Nope, if you're Japanese you have to have a Japanese soul. Doesn't the mental gymnastics required to hold these two opposed ideas make your brain hurt?
We must be careful to distinguish short-term developments from
long-term developments. In the same way as the short-term fixity of species
does not hinder species from changing in the long term, a short-term constancy
in soul-numbers of species or sub-species does not imply such constancy in the
long term.
Let us assume that the probability of a given soul being born outside a given
sub-population is very low under normal circumstances. Nevertheless, if
environmental or other pressures reduce the size of the sub-population, this
probability may increase, and it obviously reaches 100% if the sub-population
becomes extinct.
By wogoga in #176:
The baby boom in the United States caused by the many deaths in Europe during World War II is a good example showing that souls "move from country to country".
By PixyMisa in #177:
Why did those souls move from Europe to the US, when Europe was also going through a baby boom?
Many Europeans had moved to the United States, and the high death rate of their
relatives in Europe increased their fertility. A quote from your referenced
article:
"As is often the case after a major war, the end of World War II brought a baby boom to many countries, notably those in Europe, Asia, North America, and Australasia."
It is old wisdom that wars increase fertility and sometimes even the proportion of male births. However, it is astonishing that the simple explanation of such old wisdom was found only less than 20 years ago (by me).
Where did those spare souls come from, when, despite all the deaths in WWII, the population of Europe significantly increased between 1930 and 1950?
There was no significant population increase between 1930 and 1950 in the
Western countries leading the demographic transition. (The case of e.g. Japan
is different, see figures).
The figures of your source are affected by the fact
that "the borders of most countries have changed several times and that the
population statistics can therefore refer to either the country within its
present or its historical borders."
Fertility between the two world wars became so low in some Western countries
that for the first time predictions of population decline became popular. For
instance:
"In 1938, in a chapter to Hogben's Political Arithmetic, Charles produced population projections for England and Wales showing the population falling from 41 million in 1935 to either 29 or 18 million in 2000 (in reality it was to be 52 million)."
The above is a quote from The Western Fertility Decline:
Reflections from a Chronological Perspective dealing among others
with "the very low fertility in the Depression of the 1930s" in
Western countries (Northern, Western, Southern Europe, USA, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand).
The actual reason of this low fertility between the two world wars lies in the
socioeconomic progress having led to a further substantial mortality decline.
Public Health and Mortality:
What Can We Learn from the Past?:
"City life in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was dirty and dangerous. … But, by 1940, the urban mortality penalty had disappeared and life in a city was in many ways healthier than life in the countryside. Between 1902 and 1929, the urban waterborne death rate had fallen by 88%. This paper focuses on this mortality transition in American city life between 1910 and 1930, a change that was only possible because of the expensive investments in city infrastructure."
With demographic saturation, it is easy to answer the three questions raised at the beginning of The Western Fertility Decline: Reflections from a Chronological Perspective.
"What was the nature of very low fertility in the Depression of 1930s?"
The reason of the low fertility in 1930s was the normal demographic transition, in which due to continuously decreasing mortality and increasing life expectancy, a population is converging to saturation. A saturated population has reached its potential maximum and cannot grow further from within, as all or almost all corresponding souls are already incarnated.
"How can we include the 'baby boom' in any theory of demographic transition?"
The baby boom was an exceptional event caused by the deaths and prevented births during World War II. Without this war, a second demographic transition would not have occurred, and fertility rates would not have fallen as low as they have in the second transition, because Western population pyramids would have been more balanced with more persons in old age groups and less persons in fertile age groups.
"Where does the transition go from now?"
Birth numbers will remain close to death numbers (i.e. actual fertility will remain close to direct-replacement fertility), and this will further lead to an increasing fertility due to population-aging and decreasing numbers of fertile-age cohorts.
By wogoga in #182:
For instance, if a transcription factor in a human cell were fully determined by its electrons, protons and neutrons, then its movement as a whole would only resemble Brownian motion, but the transcription factor would not be able to find its destination on the incredibly long DNA. In order to do that, a transcription factor as a whole must be able to purposefully move (similar to migratory animals), and this implies an effect on the behavior of its parts.
By wollery in #184:
Nope. The motion is determined by attractive and repulsive forces (those would be the electrons and protons at work). You're anthropomorphizing, yet again.
Is
this a suggestion that the transcription factor has e.g. positive charge
whereas its destination on the DNA has negative charge. An illustration of a
transcription factor bound to DNA can be found here.
A quote from the Psychon Theory in
order to get an imagination of the spatial proportions:
How impossible it is that random thermal motions determine the happenings in living cells would become obvious, if one created an enlarged model of the DNA helix with a helix diameter of 50 cm, and if persons had to take over the functions of the many enzymes which are involved in the DNA replication. The whole human DNA (of one single cell), which normally is tightly packed, would be at such an enlargement about 500'000 km long. This model would also show how improbable it is that transcription factors could find a given DNA position, if there were only random motions and if recognition of the position were possible only by direct contact. Because of the enzyme size, this improbability cannot be hidden behind the Heisenberg uncertainty relations.
Also this animation can help to get an imagination of the vast spatial extent of DNA: Molecular Biology's Central Dogma.
#165: In the case of e.g. gravitation (of our planetary system)
or Brownian motion, computer simulations can easily be made, because what
happens in nature can be well explained by physical laws. In case of life
however, simulations based on physical or chemical laws do not exist. Why?
Those believing in quantum mechanics sometimes claim that such simulations are
possible in principle, but that the needed computing power exceeds all existing
computers.
#167: No,
since the laws of QM are probabilistic, not deterministic, no such precise
simulation is possible. It would be possible to produce a simulation that gave
a probable outcome, but not a certain outcome, as is possible for Newtonian
mechanics.
#174: So you concede that the rather deterministic than
probabilistic construction of the bacterial flagellum cannot even in principle
by explained by quantum mechanics and similar theories?
#175: Nope. I said that it's only possible to produce probabilistic
models in QM. That doesn't mean that the actual evolution of the
flagellum is impossible.
#182: The problem we are
dealing with is the goal-directed construction of the flagellum by enzymes.
#184: Anthropomorphism.
How do you know that the flagellum was the goal?
My expression "construction of the
bacterial flagellum by enzymes" relates
to ontogeny and not to phylogeny. We must clearly distinguish between
development of an individual organism (ontogeny) and evolutionary development
of a species (phylogeny). So my conclusion remains correct: Goal-directed
work of biological molecules defies the probabilistic nature of Quantum
Mechanics and similar theories.
In the intransigent antagonism between proponents of neo-Darwinism and
proponents of Intelligent-Design (ID), both sides are sure that the other side
is wrong or even dishonest. In fact however, both sides are partly right and
partly wrong. ID proponents start with reasonable basic
probability-considerations suggesting the impossibility of macro-evolution.
Neo-Darwinians start more or less unconsciously with reasonings of this kind:
if the laws of matter can transform a fertilized egg without difficulty into a
human then such laws must in the long term also be able to transform monkeys
into humans. Or: if a special mixture of biological molecules is enough for a
bacterial flagellum to emerge, then such a seemingly complex rotary machine is
in some respect so simple that also its evolutionary development by selection
must be possible.
The common basic error of both neo-Darwinism and ID is the belief that physical
and chemical laws as conceived by modern science are enough to explain life. We
are told that panpsychism (not to be confused with animism) and vitalism have
been refuted by scientific progress. In fact however, the victory of
reductionist materialism over panpsychism and vitalism was rather an accidental
result (for instance of scientific power politics) than the result of its
superiority.
To sum up: Both neo-Darwinians and ID proponents start with the wrong premise
of reductionist materialism. But whereas ID proponents conclude in a logical
correct way from probability calculations to the impossibility of
macro-evolution, neo-Darwinians conclude in a logically correct way from
ontogenetic development to the possibility of phylogenetic evolution and
further to the defectiveness of ID probability calculations.
---
Dawkinsism
rendered sane: The Selfish Psychon
By wogoga in #211:
Goal-directed work of biological molecules defies the probabilistic nature of Quantum Mechanics and similar theories.
By wollery in #212:
And you're still wrong, because QM works on the subatomic scale, not the atomic or molecular scale, and so is irrelevant to the actions of enzymes.
If
we replace "Quantum Mechanics and similar theories" by "the
fundamental physical laws of particles respective of matter", then your
statement implies that the laws of biochemistry are independent from these
fundamental physical laws. So what you say is in fact: Biochemistry cannot
be reduced to or explained by physics. We agree on this.
However, the reductionist materialism you adhere to is based on the premise
that the laws of biochemistry are fully determined by the underlying laws of
physics. How can physical laws on the one hand fully determine the behaviour of
enzymes, and on the other hand be "irrelevant"?
And you are still talking about goal-directed work of biological molecules, which is anthropomorphism.
Keeping quoting myself:
"The reductionist scientific world view as many religious world views is based on the premise that we humans are outside nature. It is admitted that human behavior depends on objectives, values, intuition and a tendency towards order. However every attempt to admit analogous principles of finality in nature is criticized as anthropomorphism." (…)
Enzymes blindly do whatever job they do in any situation where they can do it.
Bees blindly do whatever job they do in any situation where they can do it. And also you blindly do whatever job you do in any situation where you can do it.
That's how DNA replication works too.
Look
at this animation. I'm
sorry, but the belief that general physical laws are able to produce such a
complex and coordinated collaboration of so many different participants is more
than absurd and grotesque (at least from the Kantian viewpoint of pure-reason
judgements).
And take also into consideration (from Wikipedia):
"Some DNA polymerases may also have some proofreading ability, removing nucleotides from the end of a strand in order to remove any mismatched bases. DNA polymerases are generally extremely accurate, making less than one error for every million nucleotides added."
By wogoga in #214:
So what you say is in fact: Biochemistry cannot be reduced to or explained by physics. We agree on this.
By wollery in #216:
No we don't, because that isn't what I said. That's the second time you've said that I claimed that. Please stop changing the meaning of what I say to suit your own ends.
Read again #211. In #212 you
answered:
"QM works on the subatomic scale, not the atomic or molecular scale, and so is irrelevant to the actions of enzymes."
From your statement
"QM is irrelevant to the actions of enzymes"
I deduce
QM is irrelevant to at least essential parts of biochemistry
and further:
Biochemistry cannot be reduced to or explained by QM
As PixyMisa pointed out, the properties of atoms can be derived from QM, and are. Chemical interactions can be derived from the properties of atoms. And biochemistry can be derived from the chemical interactions of atoms. So, biochemistry can be derived from QM. But the QM is 3 steps removed from the biochemistry, and is therefore irrelevant for the purposes of your argument.
Congratulations on your excellent rhetoric. On the one hand, biochemistry can be derived from QM,
and on the other hand, QM is irrelevant for
the purposes of my argument.
Here once again my original argument
"In the case of e.g. gravitation (of our planetary system) or Brownian motion, computer simulations can easily be made, because what happens in nature can be well explained by physical laws. In case of life however, simulations based on physical or chemical laws do not exist. Why? Those believing in quantum mechanics sometimes claim that such simulations are possible in principle, but that the needed computing power exceeds all existing computers." (see #211)
and your objection:
"No, since the laws of QM are probabilistic, not deterministic, no such precise simulation is possible. It would be possible to produce a simulation that gave a probable outcome, but not a certain outcome, as is possible for Newtonian mechanics." (see #211)
The duplication time of Escherichia coli is 15-20 minutes in the
laboratory. So we can predict that one healthy bacterium in an appropriate
culture medium will create a second bacterium. Whether we call this duplication
a goal or an unavoidable outcome (like the free fall of a stone), whether we
call it purposeful or purposeless, is not important. Important however is that
the highly complex process progresses in an efficient and quite deterministic
way. E.g. before fission, the whole genome of around 4.6 million base pairs
must have been doubled.
Even if one accepts the lame excuse that it is much too complicated to actually
calculate biochemical behavior from QM, one nevertheless should request at least
an explanation of the principle by which the probabilistic nature of QM could
result in the rather deterministic duplication of bacteria. If such an
explanation is impossible, and I'm sure it is, then the psychon concept becomes
a reasonable hypothesis at least for unprejudiced persons.
By wogoga in #214:
The reductionist scientific world view as many religious world views is based on the premise that we humans are outside nature. It is admitted that human behaviour depends on objectives, values, intuition and a tendency towards order. However every attempt to admit analogous principles of finality in nature is criticized as anthropomorphism.
By wollery in #216:
That's just hilariously funny. A large part of the criticism that scientists receive from the religious community is precisely because science places humans squarely within nature. You're the one trying to provide a supernatural explanation here.
I already have answered to this question on 12-Mar-1999. An
extract:
In this context
it may be interesting to look at the history of 'naturalism'. A certainly
questionable and maybe subjective simplification is the assumption that there was
an evolution from animism to polytheism, to monotheism with God outside the
world, to monotheism with God inside the world, to pantheism and finally to
atheism. The difference between atheism and pantheism is not big, because in
pantheism 'God' is only a synonym for 'world' and 'nature', or means a special
aspect of the world.
The basis of modern science was built in the 17th century. One of the first
consistent naturalists was Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), who explained the world
in a panpsychist and panmaterialist way: space or matter is one aspect of the
world (or of God or of nature), and thinking or consciousness a second.
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) had explained the world in a quite similar way,
based on a monotheism with God inside the world.
Both Kepler and Spinoza were fought and ridiculed especially by theologians but
also by scientists. The alternative was the philosophy of Descartes: on the one
hand was the material world and on the other human souls and God. Animals were
considered pure machines without consciousness. The current scientific world
view is based on the philosophy of Descartes. The big inconsistency of
Cartesianism (animals as pure machines, humans having souls) was removed by
removing the concept 'soul' (and 'God').
So why do you consider panpsychism as something supernatural? One main reason
for its defeat was that it was a naturalistic explanation of the world not in
agreement with theology.
A quote on Spinoza's psychology from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Despite his debts, Spinoza expressed deep dissatisfaction with the views of those who had preceded him. His dissatisfaction reflects the naturalistic orientation that he wished to bring to the subject:
"Most of those who have written about the affects, and men's way of living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of Nature, but of things which are outside Nature. Indeed they seem to conceive man in Nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of Nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself." (III Preface)
In opposition to what he saw as a tendency on the part of previous philosophers to treat humans as exceptions to the natural order, Spinoza proposes to treat them as subject to the same laws and causal determinants as everything else. What emerges can best be described as a mechanistic theory of the affects.
How can the probabilistic nature of QM result in the rather deterministic duplication of bacteria?
By ben m in #221:
Such an explanation is not impossible, but in fact very simple. Individual quantum events have a probabilistic nature, but the average behavior over many events approaches being deterministic.
That's obvious. A good example is radioactive decay, where
the huge number of involved atoms results in a very deterministic half-life
period of radioactive matter.
However, the case we are dealing with is completely different. The genome of a
harmless laboratory strain of E. coli was reported in 1997 to consist of a
single DNA molecule containing 4,639,221 base pairs coding for 4288 proteins
and 89 RNAs. It is possible to label in a unique way every single atom of the
around 110 million atoms of this highly complex DNA molecule (resulting in a
few hundreds of millions of clearly specified chemical bonds). Before cell
fission, a copy consisting of the same or almost the same number of atoms
bonded in exactly the same way is created.
Whereas in the case of radioactive decay, a huge number of different but
equivalent configurations all result in the same percentage of decayed atoms,
the objective of DNA replication is one single, highly specified and clearly
determined configuration.
If I put a sodium atom and a chlorine atom next to one another for 1 femtosecond, will they form a bond? That's a quantum event, say, with 50% probability. If I put them together for 1 nanosecond, will they form a bond? With 10^6 chances to "try again" if it doesn't work the first time, yes it's dead certain that they will form a bond.
In the same way we could explain crocodile behavior by the probabilistic nature
of QM:
If I put a hungry crocodile and a dead rabbit next to one another for 1 second, will they form a unity? That's a quantum event, say, with 50% probability. If I put them together for 1 day, will they form a unity? With 86400 chances to "try again" if it doesn't work the first time, yes it's dead certain that the rabbit will end up in the crocodile.
A biochemist can tell you how often DNA-DNA copying makes a mistake, how often RNA is transcribed wrong, how often the tRNA picks up the wrong amino acid, how often the ribosome picks up the wrong tRNA, etc.
The
mutation rate of DNA copying depends on
many factors, e.g. on polymerase proofreading ability. Both highly variable DNA
regions with high mutation rates and highly conserved regions with almost no
mutations exist. A relevant quote from the Psychon Theory:
DNA mutations do not occur everywhere with the same frequency. Otherwise a fatal mutation in a vital protein would be much more probable than a mutation e.g. having an effect on the length of the neck. Moreover, evolutionarily older sequences (e.g. ubiquitin) are less susceptible to mutations. However, according to reductionism the probability of mutations should not depend on the evolutionary age or on the effects of the mutations. If one explains the different susceptibility to mutations by repair enzymes, the question arises how these enzymes can know which mutations they should tolerate and which they should not.
By the way, that fact that we speak about mistakes implies that there is an objective, a goal. Only a deviation from such a goal can be called a mistake. In the case of radioactive decay or Brownian motion it obviously doesn't make sense to speak of mistakes.
By Whack01 in #217:
Your psychon 'theory' should be called a hypothesis as it is only a guess and cannot be verified by experiment.
In the case of fundamental scientific progress, there can be a continuous
transition from an absurd hypothesis to a scientific fact. And
what still seems as an absurdity to the majority can have become a scientific
fact to someone else. From my own experience I know that it can be very difficult
to change one's position e.g. from believing in the impossibility of
reincarnation to believing in its reality.
However, the impression of you and others that my Psychon Theory
has no predictive power and that it cannot be verified by experiments is so
obviously wrong that such an impression can only be explained by a kind of
psychological repression.
You start with the premise that I cannot be right. Under this premise you conclude
that relevant arguments for panpsychism and reincarnation are impossible, and
thus you feel entitled to simply discard and ignore them. That's your right.
However, if one makes arguments disappear for oneself by ignoring them, one
should not claim to others that such arguments do not exist.
Apart from counterarguments like 'I cannot imagine the existence of psychons'
or 'only material things can exist', not one single substantial argument
against the psychon concept has been brought forward in the whole discussion.
If you know such an argument, let me know.
In my posts and other texts I've presented several experiments ranging from
physics over biochemistry and biology to demography.
Word War II was a huge and (as cynical as it may sound) very successful
experiment (see #206)
of increasing fertility by increasing mortality.
Also the much higher mortality of men with respect to women in e.g. China
leading to a higher proportion of male newborns can be considered an experiment.
Another example:
"The Paraguayan war at the end of the 19th century, for example, destroyed most of the male population and was followed by a spontaneous increase in male births". (See)
Domestication and aquaculture (see #198) represent experiments by which the predictions of evolution
by reincarnation can be verified.
By the way, a decline in the number of domesticated animals leads to a
fertility increase in the corresponding wild populations. Because horses more
and more have been replaced by modern means of transport, "the wild horses' extraordinary reproductive potential,
which can sometimes exceed 20% growth in a single year" (source) becomes understandable.
We can reduce pests in the wild by breeding
them in special places and use them e.g. in order to create biological fuels.
Normally only useful species are bred by humans, leading to a dwindling of the
corresponding wild stocks (e.g. in the case of bees).
If the experiment of a worldwide ban on codfish aquaculture is performed then
the wild stocks which have "never recovered from the
overfishing of over three decades ago"
will recover quickly.
Or let us find an animal species with a very low number of individuals and a
low fertility. Then let us kill two thirds of its male population. A male baby
boom will be the result. Then let us also kill two thirds of the female
population and thereafter reduce mortality as much as possible. Fertility will
become extremely low when the last baby boomers reach fertile age.
The actual very rapid mortality decline in many regions of the world also
represents such an experiment, leading by logical necessity to extremely low
fertility.
A quote from Mideast fertility rates plunge
from January 2008:
Something dramatic is happening to fertility rates in the Middle East. For many years, most analysts and observers have focused on the remarkably high proportion of young people in Arab countries; those under the age of 25. This has provoked some crude commentary on the implications for birth rates and thus for the role of women in those countries. A great deal of that commentary now appears to be wrong-headed, according to new data from the Demographic and Social Statistics unit of the U.N. Statistical Division. Released last month, its findings were largely ignored in the holiday season.
---
Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464): "When we say that the earth does not move, we mean simply that the earth is the point with reference to which man makes his observations of celestial phenomena."
By wogoga in #227:
If the experiment of a worldwide ban on codfish aquaculture is performed then the wild stocks which have "never recovered from the overfishing of over three decades ago" will recover quickly.
By PixyMisa in #229:
Two points: This does not confirm the existence of "psychons" in any way. Second, are you saying that if we ban cod fishing and cod numbers do not quickly recover, this falsifies your theory?
At first, we must distinguish between fishing and aquaculture.
That a ban on cod fishing entails a recovery of cod numbers agrees with
neo-Darwinian biology. Evolution-by-reincarnation however, assuming a limited
number of codfish souls, leads to this conclusion: Despite a ban on cod
fishing, the numbers of wild codfish cannot fully recover as long as a
substantial amount of codfish is harvested in aquaculture.
If we ban aquaculture however, all the cod souls detained in such artificial
environments again will be born as wild codfish, leading to a full recovery of
the wild codfish population. If such a ban does not lead to a recovery in the
absence of obvious other reasons (such as overfishing or disappearance
of food or habitat), then such a non-recovery falsifies my theory.
With the question of how empirical data can confirm or refute the existence of
psychons I've dealt in #189.
By zosima in #230:
It is a trivial scientific fact that resource saturation always places a fundamental upper limit on population growth, even if we take your spurious cherry picking of statistics as fact, how would we distinguish the depletion of tangible resources from the depletion of soul resources?
The simplest way to test the predictions of a gravitation theory is to choose
empirical or experimental situations where other (e.g. electromagnetic) effects
are not relevant. So the simplest way to test the effect of limited soul
numbers on population growth is to choose empirical and experimental
situations, where apart from the limited soul number no other effects prevent
the population from growing (e.g. #202).
It is obvious that every population is limited by the availability of
resources. Nevertheless, the lower the percentage of souls incarnated at the
same time, the higher is fertility (of the strong healthy individuals) and as a
consequence also mortality. In the long run, a decrease in resources can also
lead to dwarfism instead of a lower proportion of souls incarnated at the same time.
By bruto in #231:
I am curious about your take on male-female birthrates in China.
Read the chapter
China's missing girls.
An extract:
According to the
2006 revision data, the sex
ratio at death (SRD) of China has been continuously increasing from 104
(males per 100 females) in 1975-1980 to 123 in 2000-2005.
According to the same source, China's sex ratio at birth was 115 in
2000-2005, thus substantially lower than the SRD of 123. In light of the
homeostatic link between deaths and births, even this question arises: why is
the proportion of girls at birth higher than the proportion of females at
death?
So if the UN data are correct, then a dwindling in the female proportion in China simply does not occur.
China has long had a reputation for female infanticide, and more recently for abortion of females.
At least in the poorer social groups and in remote regions, antenatal sex
determination should not have been very widespread.
Infanticide has a long tradition, not only in East Asia. An example from
Infanticide - Changing views of the nature of the
child:
"However, as a result of hard times and a high illegitimacy rate, infanticide was the most common crime in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century."
If we assume that a sex ratio at birth of around 105 boys per 100 girls is a natural law, then in the case of a sex ratio of registered newborns of around 115 we have no other choice than to assume that almost 10% of the females have been liquidated. And the hypothesis of killing innocent little girls is certainly suitable for headlines. (Maybe the spread of the whole story has even been fostered by anti-Chinese political interests.)
According to at least some sources, this practice has increased in recent years, as a result of the "one child" policy.
On the efficiency of the one child policy in general see #104.
The highest SRB of China in 2000 was in Hainan with 138 boys per 100 girls. However, if you
look at table 4 of Low Fertility in China, UN, 2006,
you will find that policy fertility of this province in 2000 was as high as
2.14 and actual fertility was 1.8 children per woman. Yet Shanghai with the
lowest policy fertility (1.06) had a SRB of 'only' 116 boys per 100 girls.
So the decisive question is: Does any evidence of female mass infanticide and
abortion in China exist which is not logically deduced from seemingly
impossible sex ratios of children? And here we must not confuse single cases
with a systematic killing of millions of 'missing girls' before or after birth.
Imbalances in sex ratios exist in both directions (e.g. substantially
more women than men in Russia and Ukraine) and do not represent a new
phenomenon. Case, Kinship and Sex Ratios in India, 2008:
"In India and probably elsewhere in Asia, however, the case of 'missing woman' has deep historical roots. While it is difficult to identify when the problem of 'missing woman' first arose in India, British officials were well aware of the problem in North India during the mid-nineteenth century."
By ben m in #234:
Can I ask for a prediction? I'm thinking of a small, isolated population of trees, of a genus with no close relatives. The population was apparently small and static for millennia upon millennia---it's possible you would have called it "saturated". After an encounter with humans, can you predict whether the population of this tree species went up or down? Does demographic saturation forbid one or the other?
I assume that a tree is different from an animal insofar as a tree as a whole
has no psychon, in the same way as a living and growing city has no city-soul.
This entails that in the case of plant species in general, what remains
constant should rather be the weight of the whole species or subspecies than
the number of individuals. The question of how easily one tree species can grow
at the expense of related tree species can only be decided by empirical
research. Because the complexity of trees is smaller than the complexity of
animals, it should be easier for tree species than for animal species to grow
at the expense of related species.
Whether the population of your tree species went up or down, depends on the
interaction with the humans and on other factors. If such a tree species
actually is so different from all other tree species that it represents a
distinct genus, then a growth at the expense of other tree species is
improbable.
But how can we know that a population of trees was constant over many thousand
years? At least in times of extreme climatic conditions (e.g. droughts) a
decline in the population is very probable. And I actually do not know whether
saturation values near 100% or much lower values are more widespread. Despite a
huge population growth in the recent past, mankind for instance is still a not
yet saturated species.
In general, plants and trees bred or fostered by humans tend to grow at the
expense of related strains. And at least in principle, it should be possible to
exterminate any species.
I do not know whether since the advent of agriculture the quantity of e.g.
cultivated wheat has grown only at the expense of wild wheat strains or also at
the expense of other related species. Nevertheless, I'm quite optimistic that
future research will be able to clear up such questions.
By wogoga in #236:
According to the 2006 revision data, the sex ratio at death (SRD) of China has been continuously increasing from 104 (males per 100 females) in 1975-1980 to 123 in 2000-2005.
By bruto in #239:
All that does not seem to answer my question, or to reinforce your idea that more boys are born in china because of the higher mortality of men.
So I cannot help.
In addition, of course, we have yet to see any other evidence to suggest that there is any aspect of gender that is not physical and that psychons, if they exist at all, are sexed.
A substantial part of the information needed for the ontogenetic
development of a men or a woman comes from the soul. It is reasonable to assume
that human souls being able to change gender have appeared during biological
evolution. Yet such a gender change entails a tendency to hermaphroditism,
non-heterosexuality, transvestism and similar.
Could the threads Reincarnation Is A FACT!!!!!!!! of Space_Ed and Reincarnation is going to happen to you be an
attempt of guilt by association?
By wogoga in #21:
There is even a saturation for pathogens like bacteria and viruses. A pathogen of a local epidemic cannot be a threat to mankind, nor can genetically engineered pathogens.
By bruto in #47:
How does any epidemic begin if not locally?
As a local epidemic I consider in this context e.g. Ebola in opposition to influenza. Because
pathogenic germs are animated by psychons and the number of such psychons is
limited, the number of germs is also limited.
From this point of view, instead of killing all animals having come into
contact with a pathogen, as it is regularly done in our days, in the long run
it would make more sense to infect as many animals as possible, and to apply
the efficient principle of natural selection. This leads on the one side to
farm animals with stronger immunity and on the other side to less virulent
viruses, because those viral strains tending not to kill their hosts can
survive whereas those related strains killing their hosts perish together with
their hosts.
Even after immunity, harmlessly
small amounts of pathogens can survive. This has the advantage that also the
corresponding antibodies do not become extinct in the host organism.
The immune systems, in the same way as many other properties of the animals of
factory farming are degenerating. Over generations, serious negative effects
can emerge.
In any case, we must take into consideration that pathogenic germs (in the same
way as the many non-pathogenic germs) which use us or other living beings as
hosts have emerged on earth and co-evolved with their hosts over millions of
years.
The increase in world population has a positive effect on our health insofar as
the numbers of all the germs using humans as hosts are limited by corresponding
psychon numbers. So the more humans are alive at the same time, the lower are
the proportions of such germs per human.
Big epidemics have always also been the result
of weakened immunity due to bad living conditions, e.g. at the end of the First
World War (the 1918 flu pandemic). In such cases, in which a virulent
pathogen meets a weakened population, the rapid dying of the ones can lead to a
further increase in the virus load of the others, because the virus psychons
having lost their habitat in the deceased can become active in the infected
surviving. Virus particles without corresponding psychons are as harmless as a
destroyer without crew and energy.
In any case, it does not serve the interest of the germs that they sometimes
kill their hosts. So instead of trying to exterminate such pathogens, we should
rather try to transform them into harmless symbionts.
As long as there are enough birds and related species as hosts for the avian influenza virus, there is absolutely
no risk that this virus suddenly could start using humans as hosts. Why should
it? The corresponding psychons have co-evolved with birds and are optimally
adapted to birds. Without necessity psychons do not like to change their
environment, in a similar way as educated human souls do not like the change
their world view.
By Space_Ed in #246-258:
...
Space_Ed,
when I first saw your thread Reincarnation Is A FACT I soon supposed
that your ultimate goal could be to fight me. I cannot prevent you from doing
that. I must admit that you have quoted some good examples, but please do
not spam this thread, which has reached a high proportion of arguments and
counterarguments with actual content.
By the way, either reincarnation is valid for all men and animals or for
nobody, at least if we accept a naturalistic explanation of the world. And if
we assume reincarnation, then, due to the fact of biological evolution, it is a
quite obvious logical consequence that only a limited number of souls can have
evolved on Earth.
Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) showed by careful measurements that a growing
plant did not derive its increased mass principally from the soil, but rather
from the air. Nicholas of Cusa
also recognized that plants do not grow from dead matter but are built by
invisibly small animated entities. Advocating the equivalence of all movements
and considering stars as distant suns, Cusa was far ahead of his time. The
panpsychism my views are based on can be traced back to Cusa's panpsychism (Kepler and Spinoza had similar views). So panpsychism
is a fully legitimate and fruitful scientific hypothesis.
When confronted with the thesis that we
ourselves were the monkeys we descend from, many persons react in a similar
way as those in the past who were confronted with the thesis that our ancestors
were apes.
By zosima in #230:
Can you please put present some sort of formal model, with equations or some geometry, something that we can plug numbers/data into, and independently verify your results?
If
somebody is unable or unwilling to understand the Demographic Saturation Theory and Critical Analysis of Standard Demography
then this person is also unable or unwilling to understand "some sort of
formal model" with the same content.
If you do not want to understand the simple example of Japan, where the population
converged to 127.8 million (corresponding to a saturation value of 100%), or
are unable to understand the premises and limitations of a statement like
· In a saturated population, a sex ratio at death of 120 men per 100 women leads to a sex rate at birth of around 120 boys per 100 girls.
then
why should you accept the same information in the form of a formal system?
If you are unable or unwilling to understand the fundamental concept of evolutionary
relatedness, then why should you take seriously a formal system containing
formal variables representing evolutionary relatedness?
By the way, a formalized system is rather an endpoint, a recapitulation or a
summary of a field of knowledge. Only after hundreds of years of geometric
insights and the creation of lots of concepts, a first so-called axiomatic
foundation of geometry could be created. The situation with
Newton's axioms is quite similar.
And in many cases, obscure formal systems only serve as an argument from
authority. However, as an argument from authority a formal system only works,
if it comes from the right side. If e.g. a famous neo-Darwinian presented a
formal model, you probably would accept it. However, if an outsider like me
presented a more concise formal model with much more predictive power, you
still would dismiss it, because you ultimately rely on the authority of
official peer-reviewed science, don't you?
If you actually are interested in how a reincarnation theory can be used in
order to predict demographic numbers and how it is possible to
"independently verify" such results, then I'm glad to answer your
questions. However, you should a first spend a few hours to read what I've
written until now.
By examining the reasons/ roots/ premises of fundamental disagreements, one can
learn a lot, even if the disagreements cannot be removed.
By six7s in #242:
Please describe and provide evidence for 'the soul'
I ask with Albert Einstein:
"Why do the individual concepts that occur in a theory require any separate justification after all, if they are indispensable only within the framework of the logical structure of the theory, and if it is the theory as a whole that stands the test?"
Further quotes from Einstein:
"The
reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy kind. They
are dependent upon each other. Epistemology without contact with science
becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is -- insofar as it is
thinkable at all -- primitive and muddled."
"Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such
an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as
unalterable givens. … The path of scientific advance is often made
impassable for a long time through such errors."
"A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind
of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists
are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is -- in my
opinion -- the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a
real seeker after truth."
By wollery in #271:
Japan's population converged on 127.8 million? There must be 127.8 million Japanese souls (just ignore the numbers of ethnic Japanese living in the rest of the world).
Among all countries having reached a fully saturated population, Japan is the most homogenous with the lowest proportion of migration. Therefore Japan is an ideal case to test the predictions of demographic saturation. See also post #126.
The Giant Panda is dying out? Their souls must be going to their nearest relative, the Red Panda. What? The Giant and Red Pandas aren't actually closely related? Well, there must be another reason for the decline in the Giant Panda population.
You haven't provided evidence that the Giant Panda population declined in the recent past. See post #202.
The wild rabbit population in Australia increases at an exponential rate? There must be billions of rabbit souls lying around spare.
If you start with a low number then exponential growth is not astonishing at all. When the population of European rabbits increased in Australia, these animals seen as agricultural pests were losing more and more of their habitat in Europe. Yet with the spread of rabbit farming, the number of wild rabbits decreased. See post #194.
China's reported population is levelling off? Must be reaching saturation level (ignore the one child policy and the consequent under-reporting of births).
And what about a fertility as low as 0.41 in the Xiangyang district of Jiamusi city (Heilongjiang)? What about other East Asian counties having on average a lower fertility than China without a one-child policy? On the efficiency of the one child policy in general see post #104.
The US population boomed after WW2? They obviously gained souls from the Europeans from whom most of them descended (ignore the fact that the population of Europe boomed at the same time).
There simply were enough deaths and prevented births for baby booms in many regions of the world. See post #206.
By zosima in #272:
If evolutionary relatedness is what determines whether your claims about saturation apply to a given person, why don't fertility rates of Japanese Americans match those of Japanese.
You don't know that fertility of immigrants in general correlates much
more with the country of origin than with the country of destination? A recent
example from Mideast fertility rates plunge:
"Demographers in France have already refuted some of the wilder predictions of high birth rates among Muslim immigrants leading to the cathedral of Notre Dame becoming a mosque by the end of this century. The birthrate of mothers of North African origin drops to the local norm within two generations. Now it seems that the birthrate of Muslim and Arab women who did not emigrate is plummeting in a similar fashion."
Psychon-deficit diseases
By wogoga in #13:
If it is actually true that "the first historical account of muscular dystrophy appeared in 1830, when Sir Charles Bell wrote an essay about an illness that caused progressive weakness in boys" (source), then it stands to reason to consider muscular dystrophy a psychon-deficit disease.
By ben m in #20:
The Earth's population in 1820 was about 1,000,000,000 people, some of whom had MD. Today it's about 6,000,000,000 people. Why aren't there 1,000,000,000 healthy people today---sharing the original stockpile of anti-MS psychons---and 5,000,000,000 with muscular dystrophy?
I assume that the word population increased from 1830 (when
"the first historical account of muscular dystrophy appeared") to
today not by a factor of six, but rather by a factor of three, yet that's not
relevant to your argument.
Your argument is correct under the premise, that the whole world population is
dependent on the alleles (gene variants coding for enzymes with corresponding
psychon-populations) involved in these first cases of muscular dystrophy. If
that premise were true, then the human population of 1830 would actually
somehow be relevant as an upper limit of people not suffering from MD.
Yet because "conditions are inherited, and the
different muscular dystrophies follow various inheritance patterns"
(WP), your argument only entails
that the sub-population(s) with the genetic disposition(s) of the first cases
could not have significantly increased since 1830.
To the genetic disposition of the first cases correspond alleles with limited
numbers of psychons, and enzymes can only work if they are animated by
psychons. Let us call the allele-psychons whose shortage caused the first
muscular dystrophy cases first-MD-psychons. So we get this chronology:
1. Before 1830, first-MD-psychons had a saturation lower than 100%, and people with the corresponding genetic disposition did not suffer from MD.
2. When the first-MD-psychons became saturated around 1830, the first MD cases appeared.
3. Since then, the genetic disposition of the first MD cases has remained a risk factor and the corresponding population of (healthy) persons has not significantly increased.
If
there is a shortage of psychons, then they will survive or emerge at a high
enough quantity in those humans whose bodies give them the most familiar
environment. The reason simply is: environment continuity (see #126, #176).
The most widespread psychon-deficit disease obviously is type-2 diabetes. See
e.g. First cases of type 2 diabetes
found in white UK teenagers. A quote from Genetics of Type II Diabetes:
"Some ethnic groups, such as most Native Americans and Hispanics, have a definite genetic susceptibility to diabetes, while some groups, including Caucasians, Melanesians, and Eskimos, are at low risk. Since Type II diabetes essentially did not exist 100 years ago, it's obvious that a change in the environment has created the disease, but there is genetic susceptibility on top of that."
Because mankind is still increasing in number, the disease cases
will increase, even if overweight and other life-style factors seen as causes
of diabetes-2 should become less widespread. The faster a population increases,
the higher is the probability of psychon-deficit diseases in the corresponding
races or sub-populations, because a psychon species can increase in number only
in the long run at the expense of other related psychon species.
In any case, if we humans want to remain healthy
individuals in the long term, we must again increase our mortality in a
reasonable way. Doesn't it make more sense for us to care for our fellow
souls in the form of healthy little children than to care for the same souls in
the form of sick old people?
By wogoga in #276:
I assume that the word population increased from 1830 (when "the first historical account of muscular dystrophy appeared") to today not by a factor of six, but rather by a factor of three, yet that's not relevant to your argument.
By Cuddles in #279:
It may not be relevant to his argument, but your bizarre need to ignore reality at every opportunity is rather relevant to yours. Why would you assume that the world's population has only increased by a factor of three? Why assume anything at all when you could have simply looked it up? I don't know the exact value in 1830, but in 1800 the population was about 0.98 billion and in 1850 it was about 1.2 billion. One billion seems close enough for 1830. The world population currently stands at about 6.6 billion. So, not a factor of three.
Before
having dealt myself with demography, I believed like you that population
figures of the present and the past are essentially empirical data. But still
in 2008 it is not clear whether the population of such a small country as
Bhutan is less than 0.8 as assumed by the Bhutan government or more than 2.3
million as assumed by the CIA (see #29).
So, official world population figures of 1830 cannot be more than estimates
respective calculations dependent on hypotheses. The further back in time one
gets, the more and more such figures are just guesswork.
For a country as organized as China, fertility estimates for the year 2000
range from as low as 1.35 to as high as 2.3. (see #104). In the case of India of the year
2000, two very different populations pyramids exist, one corresponding to raw
census data, and a second official one which has been smoothed according
to the prejudices of standard demography (see pyramids in #29).
Some quotes from the Demographic Saturation Theory:
The last fifty
years show on the one hand that an annual rate of population growth of 3% is
not exceptional, if surviving conditions are favorable. They show on the other
hand, how fast growth rates can change by increasing or decreasing. An annual
growth rate of about 3% leads to a population 20 times as large in one century
and to a population 3 million times as large in only 5 centuries.
For this reason it is, in principle, impossible to find the past evolution of
world population by means of projections. (Such projections have to assume
average rates of growth close to zero, which is not very realistic.) The
argument that only agriculture and other technological progress made possible
an earth's carrying capacity of more than for example 100 million people, has
no scientific basis at all.
Bangladesh, for example, with less than 0.1% of the Earth's land surface has a
population of more than 100 million. Thousands of years ago the Sahara was
fertile. A very fertile Sahara could feed the current world population.
There are no methods to calculate the population densities using archaeological
data such as bones, manufactured objects or other traces.
The population figures of the recent past which are thought as valid are often
based on figures of historic documents, whose reliability cannot be out of
question, considering the problems of census even in the age of computers and
modern means of transport.
If the proportion of the registered population raises from 65% to 95%, this
alone seems to be a population increase of almost 50%. After registration of
births and deaths became compulsory in many countries, certainly births were
more likely reported than the deaths of not registered persons.
In the same way as the temporarily strong increase in 'HIV-positiveness' in
many regions also has been caused by an increase in HIV-testing, a major part
of the 'increase in world population' before 1950 and a smaller part after 1950
only has been the result of better census and estimates.
It is much more likely to underestimate than to overestimate the size of a
population. Because too low figures of past estimates can always be explained
by the expected population growth, there has never been any reason to doubt
theses figures.
Even if in Africa the registered population of conurbations grows very fast,
one must not overlook that the not registered population of the huge hinterland
can decrease at the same time.
By six7s in #284:
Your persistence in posting whilst avoiding requests that you at least make an attempt to substantiate the fundamental claim in your argument (the existence of a soul) …
I have honestly tried to answer your requests with previous posts (e.g. #189 and #270).
It may be true that what I've written concerns rather an implicit definition. If you are interested in an explicit definition (of the human soul), maybe the following from The End of Reductionism could help:
A large
proportion of your body's matter is regularly replaced. Your body as well as
your feelings, thinking and behavior change a lot in the course of your life.
Your psychological properties which are accessible to empirical research would
have had a different development under different circumstances.
Nevertheless you probably are convinced that you yourself were the baby with
your name and that you would still be you yourself, if you had been kidnapped
as a baby and brought up in an exotic culture.
The assumption that every one of us remains the same experiencing subject
during one's whole life is deeply rooted in our thinking. Otherwise the
following reasoning would make sense: for the old miser who will develop out of
me I don't save a single penny. It would also be incomprehensible that people
try to trace missing persons even for decades.
Trillions of egg cells have been successfully fertilized during the transition
from ape-like ancestors to us. In principle all these fertilizations can be
numbered and we can attribute the number n to one having led to a
reductionist R. R believes that the currently accepted physical
and chemical laws are enough to transform a fertilized egg cell into a
self-conscious person.
Nevertheless, the fundamental distinction between the fertilization n
(and the body emerging from it) and trillions other ones remains a complete
mystery to R. A reductionist explanation is impossible, because it would
have to deduce this distinction from a material difference in the fertilized
egg cells and such a difference is incompatible with the fact that for every
reductionist another fertilization distinguishes itself.
A most impressive refutation of reductionism represents a thought experiment.
We assume a machine capable of producing copies of everything which do not
differ physically and chemically from the original. According to consequent
reductionism such a copy of you would be capable of surviving, and more
importantly, it would not be distinguishable from you at all. The copy would
have all your memories and properties and would believe like you that it is
you. Not even the question whether you are the original or the copy would make
any sense.
For what follows I assume that every one of us remains independently of the
circumstances of one's life the same experiencing subject. This subject I call
soul. The concept 'soul' abstains from age and current physical and
psychological states.
Can you imagine a science-fiction world in which souls (i.e. experiencing subjects) are real entities, entailing possession, reincarnation or similar? And if yes, could you formulate a definition of such a soul concept of an imaginary world, meeting your own requirements?
By wogoga in #29:
"The Royal Government of Bhutan lists their country's population as 752,700 (2003). The CIA Factbook estimates the population at 2,327,849. What accounts for this discrepancy? ... According to this theory the CIA population experts have retained this original inflated number year after year while adjusting it each year for normal population growth." (WP)
According to recently updated data from the US Census, the 2008 population of Bhutan seems to be only 682,000.
Diabetes-2 as the most widespread psychon-deficit disease
By wogoga in #276:
Because mankind is still increasing in number, the disease cases will increase, even if overweight and other life-style factors seen as causes of diabetes-2 should become less widespread. The faster a population increases, the higher is the probability of psychon-deficit diseases in the corresponding races or sub-populations, because a psychon species can increase in number only in the long run at the expense of other related psychon species.
An
interesting quote in this context from Diabetes in India:
Over 30 million
have now been diagnosed with diabetes in India. ... This means that India
actually has the highest number of diabetics of any one country in the entire
world. ... In India, the type of diabetes differs considerably from that in the
Western world.
Type 1 is considerably more rare, and only about 1/3 of type II diabetics
are overweight or obese. Diabetes is also beginning to appear much earlier
in life in India, meaning that chronic long-term complications are becoming
more common. The implications for the Indian healthcare system are enormous.
By Iconoclast08 in #305:
I found this gentleman's exchange here a real hoot: Immanuel Kant and Evolution ("creation or rather development")
What is it that you find so amusing?
Do you deny that Immanuel Kant
presented a quite consistent hypothesis of biological evolution decades before
Charles Darwin?
If you think that I simply cooked up the claims concerning Kant and evolution,
then you should also read the two messages I wrote before the above one. The first
one contains the corresponding original quotations from Kant, and the second
one a short defense of my claims.
That Kant quite consistently advocated biological evolution can also be
recognized from quotes like this:
In the 1770s,
Immanuel Kant expressed his thoughts upon differing human physical traits: ...
He subscribed to the theory of "hybridization, or the invariable
inheritance by offspring of the differing characteristics of both
parents...", but had difficulty reconciling it with the vast variety of
physical traits in the human species.
He rejected the multiple origin hypothesis of the human species because humans
could interbreed and produce fertile offspring with each other. This made him
arrive at the conclusion that human "parents descend from common, original
stock in which different, invariably inherited characteristics subsequently
developed." ...
Or do you consider "a real hoot" my logical conclusion that Charles Darwin essentially explained biological evolution by differential mortality (which is quite similar to explaining life by death)?
By dafydd in #309:
With regard to the OP, where is the proof that reincarnation is a fact?
A 'proof' (as opposed to 'unquestionable evidence') is essentially an argument
from authority. So it is only relevant to those submitting themselves to the
corresponding authority.
I've presented a lot of evidence for reincarnation in this thread. And only
such concrete evidence can in the end decide whether reincarnation as a
scientific hypothesis is in agreement with reality or not.
So read my contributions of this thread, and let me know why you don't consider
my arguments in favor of reincarnation as valid evidence.
Whether all biological species (from enzymes to
humans) are limited in number or not, makes a huge difference in the real
world, or don't you think so?
Can you imagine a science fiction world, where reincarnation actually exists?
If yes, what kind of evidence would you consider a proof that reincarnation is
actually a fact in this science fiction word?
By wogoga [in other thread]:
What is wrong in #285 [of this thread]?
By Jack by the hedge [in #115 of other thread]:
Well, since you ask, it appears to me to be a string of non sequitur arguments:
I'll add my corresponding statements before your comments.
"A large proportion of your body's matter is regularly replaced. Your body as well as your feelings, thinking and behavior change a lot in the course of your life. Your psychological properties which are accessible to empirical research would have had a different development under different circumstances. Nevertheless you probably are convinced that you yourself were the baby with your name and that you would still be you yourself, if you had been kidnapped as a baby and brought up in an exotic culture."
It begins by arguing that much of the physical matter in our bodies is regularly replaced, yet we "feel" we are the same person, therefore souls. Uh, why? If I replace every brick in my house, one at a time, it will always "feel" like my house. So what?
Your logical comparison is quite revealing. You assume
· a constant person ("I", "my")
and consider equivalent the relationships of this person
· to a changing house belonging to this person and
· to the person's body (changing from birth to death).
By the way, do you claim here that a house "feels" in a similar
way as we (and other animals) do?
You haven't answered this question: Would you still be you yourself (i.e. the
same experiencing subject), if you had been kidnapped as a baby and brought up
in an exotic culture, yes or no?
It has obviously been possible to transform the consciousness of 'you' as a
child, to the consciousness of 'you' as an adult, by continuous (small)
changes. Do you assume that it would in principle also be possible to transform
'you' as a conscious subject, to 'me' as a conscious subject, by continuous
changes? (A continuous transformation of your body, to a body identical to my
body, by gradual changes is logically conceivable.)
"Trillions
of egg cells have been successfully fertilized during the transition from
ape-like ancestors to us. In principle all these fertilizations can be numbered
and we can attribute the number n to one having led to a reductionist R. R
believes that the currently accepted physical and chemical laws are enough to
transform a fertilized egg cell into a self-conscious person.
Nevertheless, the fundamental distinction between the fertilization n (and the
body emerging from it) and trillions other ones remains a complete mystery to
R. A reductionist explanation is impossible, because it would have to deduce
this distinction from a material difference in the fertilized egg cells and
such a difference is incompatible with the fact that for every reductionist
another fertilization distinguishes itself."
Then it says the consciousness which emerges from each fertilized egg somehow distinguishes itself from all other near-identical fertilized eggs, therefore souls (at least I think it says so, it's rather long-winded). Again - why does this present any kind of puzzle needing souls to explain it?
Without
understanding and accepting the puzzle, an explanation obviously seems
superfluous.
From a purely materialist point of view, it makes absolutely no sense that you
experience the world from your body and not from one of the many other bodies
of the present, past and future.
"The
attempt to deduce individual consciousness from the fertilized egg cell leads
to further problems. What I show here in the case of DNA is by analogy valid
for the whole fertilized egg cell. In principle the DNA of one person can be
continuously transformed into the DNA of another by small changes. Individual
consciousness, however, is discrete insofar as it is impossible to imagine that
the consciousness of one person can be transformed by continuous changes into
the one of another.
Also the example of monozygous twins shows that a fertilized egg cell cannot be
enough to determine individual consciousness. The twins originate from the same
cell, but they experience the world as separate individuals."
Next it declares that since identical twins are born as two different consciousnesses, but have genetically identical bodies, therefore souls. That makes no sense at all unless you assume that consciousness does not arise from a brain's function but directly from an individual's genes. Who thinks that?
Try to understand the fundamental difference between continuity
and discreteness (discontinuity).
You didn't comment on this:
"A most impressive refutation of reductionism represents a thought experiment. We assume a machine capable of producing copies of everything which do not differ physically and chemically from the original. According to consequent reductionism such a copy of you would be capable of surviving, and more importantly, it would not be distinguishable from you at all. The copy would have all your memories and properties and would believe like you that it is you. Not even the question whether you are the original or the copy would make any sense."
If we created such a copy of you, who would be 'you', you or your copy?
"For what follows I assume that every one of us remains independently of the circumstances of one's life the same experiencing subject. This subject I call soul. The concept 'soul' abstains from age and current physical and psychological states."
Then it declares the author's definition of soul = consciousness (as far as I can tell). Unhelpful added confusion.
Maybe, instead of "This subject I call soul." I should have written:
"For such individually experiencing subjects to be possible, I postulate the existence of discrete indivisible entities, which we can call 'souls' (or 'psychons'). To each individually experiencing subject corresponds one soul."
What is the Purpose of this Thread?
By Fnord in #322:
I saw this thread long after it was originally started, and after having read through the first few pages, I have become quite confused as to its purpose.
My
problem is that I know that reincarnation is a scientific fact, having
far-reaching consequences on our life.
In principle every unprejudiced person with certain intelligence would be able
to recognize this fact. Yet there is an evolutionary obstacle: our species has
evolved in such a way that it hasn't normally been necessary to change one's
world view radically within one life.
Max Planck phrased it that way: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by
convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its
opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with
it."
The reason that I started posting here was the Million Dollar Challenge.
But on the other hand, it makes no sense to post on a forum haunted primarily
by rather tenacious followers of orthodox mainstream science. So your wondering
concerning the purpose of this thread is actually justified.
Maybe for me it's just a sort of game, where I'm always in the winning
position, at least from a logical and rational perspective.
If you find one single substantial rebuttal of one of my many claims concerning biological evolution, reincarnation, genetic information, demography, psychon-deficit diseases and so on, please let me know.
The demographic transition goes into reverse
In A link between wealth and breeding - The demographic transition goes into reverse we learn that an inverse correlation between fertility and wealth originally constituted a paradox:
"One of the paradoxes of human biology is that the rich world has fewer children than the poor world. In most species, improved circumstances are expected to increase reproductive effort, not reduce it, yet as economic development gets going, country after country has experienced what is known as the demographic transition: fertility (defined as the number of children borne by a woman over her lifetime) drops from around eight to near one and a half."
One paragraph of the Demographic Saturation Theory is enough to resolve the paradox:
"The relationship between poverty and fertility (which is no longer well established) is not direct but indirect. The poorer and less educated populations are, the higher is their mortality and the lower their saturation value. Because they are the last who get the benefit of the technological and medical progress, they are the last who reach saturation. Also in Europe, fertility among the poorest groups was the last to decline."
And the next paragraph explains why "at advanced HDI levels, further development can reverse the declining trend in fertility"*:
The population of a country is composed of groups which have different saturation values or have reached saturation at different times. The groups having reached saturation at first, are the first with very low (sub-replacement) fertility, but they will also be the first whose fertility will increase again because of population aging. For this reason, in some countries with low fertility, more educated groups with higher incomes should have higher fertility than less educated groups with lower incomes."
Once again: good science makes predictions before the fact. So the
steady increase in fertility in most countries of the developed world is strong
evidence
for evolution by reincarnation.
Further* quotes from Advances in development reverse
fertility declines:
The negative association of fertility with economic and social development has therefore become one of the most solidly established and generally accepted empirical regularities in the social sciences. ... In many highly developed countries, the trend towards low fertility has also been deemed irreversible. ... Here we show, using new cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of the total fertility rate and the human development index (HDI), a fundamental change in the well-established negative relationship between fertility and development as the global population entered the twenty-first century. Although development continues to promote fertility decline at low and medium HDI levels, our analyses show that at advanced HDI levels, further development can reverse the declining trend in fertility. The previously negative development–fertility relationship has become J-shaped, with the HDI being positively associated with fertility among highly developed countries." (See also)
By Jack by the hedge in #336 (to #321):
Do I think I would still have had a continuous sense of being the same individual, even if I'd had a dramatically different range of life experiences? What, just like every other human being in history? Uhh, yes.
…
Do you mean if I happened (by accident or design) to develop into an exact copy of you, would my consciousness suddenly jump into your body? Uhh, no.
Answering the question "If we
created such a copy of you, who would be 'you', you or your copy?":
<Sigh> I would be me.
So at least in this respect we start from the same or similar premises.
You have criticized me for naming a constant "experiencing subject" soul
(or psychon). In order to express something similar to what I call human
soul, you used the following expressions:
· "the same person"
· "the consciousness (emerging from a fertilised egg)"
· "different consciousnesses (of identical twins)"
· "each (or my) consciousness"
· "specific individual"
· "particular individual"
The puzzle consisting in the antagonism of
· an always changing body/brain
· an unchanging subject
you explain away by assuming that
· "a particular consciousness arises in a particular brain"
From a superficial point of view, this seems convincing. However,
there is a relevant difference between particular and particular.
Particular means: one (arbitrarily
given) out of a countable quantity of individuals. This is because we abstain
from the subject's particular conscious states, which parallel corresponding changes in the brain.
(Mathematically speaking, we have one dimension of something denumerable, i.e.
one integer dimension.)
In the second case, particular depends on two dimensions. One dimension is similar to the first
case: countable brains of humans (or animals). Yet a second dimension results
from the fact that a material brain can only be given at a particular time. And this second dimension does not even constitute a
countable quantity, because time and brain changes in time are continuous.
(Mathematically speaking we have one integer dimension allowing particular choices,
and one float dimension allowing particular choices.)
Thus the central question remains unsolved: How do you derive the same
sentient individual from brains as diverse as the one of a baby and of an age
demented person?
The brain of a five-year-old boy has much more in common with the brain of his
genetically identical twin than with the "same" brain at the age of
50. Nevertheless, the two sentient subjects of the five-year-old twins are as
different from each other as the sentient subject of your body from the
sentient subject of my body.
The only solution you have, is to assume that during the (ontogenetic)
development of a brain, a unique pattern (or something similar) arises within
its material constituents, and this unique pattern, once established, remains
not only unchanged until death, but even becomes sentient.
Assuming that a material pattern becomes
sentient, is not only invoking strange magic, but is also preposterous to
common sense.
As such a pattern (by definition) can only depend on material parts of the
brain, an exact copy of your living body would result in a pattern, identical
to the pattern in your brain. So the copy would be the same sentient subject as
you are.
Another puzzle within reductionist materialism: how can such emerging patterns
become so individual, that they are separated from each other by unbridgeable
distances?
By Jack by the hedge in #339:
I don't see any problem with a consciousness, arising from a brain's function, remaining the "same" consciousness throughout that "same" brain's development.
Three variations of this statement:
1. I don't see any problem with a consciousness, arising from a plant's function, remaining the "same" consciousness throughout that "same" plant's development.
2. I don't see any problem with a consciousness, arising from an orchestra's function, remaining the "same" consciousness throughout that "same" orchestra's development.
3. I don't see any problem with a consciousness, arising from a city's function, remaining the "same" consciousness throughout that "same" city's development.
Are Italy's capital and Ancient Rome the "same" city?
Are Istanbul, Byzantium and Constantinople the "same" city?
Are the Vienna Philharmonic of today and the Vienna Philharmonic of Gustav
Mahler (around 1900) the "same" orchestra?
We have no problem with the idea that the brain remains the same brain, although it develops, just as we have no problem with a river remaining the same river as its course gradually varies.
The river is a good example in order to make explicit the fundamental
difference between the "sameness" of the soul (the experiencing
subject) and the "sameness" of its brain corresponding to the
"sameness" of a river.
· Two or more rivers can become one river.
· Two or more sentient subjects cannot become one subject.
· One river can split into two or more rivers.
· A subject cannot split into two or more subjects.
· Whether we call the waters flowing at different times or different locations the "same" or a different river is in many cases an arbitrary decision.
· There are no arbitrary decisions whether experiencing subjects at different times or locations are the same subject or different subjects.
· A river can completely disappear by drying up, yet a new river emerging near the old one will probably be called the "same" river.
So the essence of the "same river" roughly is "the
river with the same name".
If we consider people like Richard Dawkins (who ignore the old wisdom that
divisible matter is confronted to indivisible souls) as the
philosophical-scientific elite of today, then philosophy and fundamental
science (as opposed to technology) has reached a low point of at least 23
centuries.
---
The hallmark of genuine science are explicit quantitative predictions
By dafydd in #346:
Still no proof of reincarnation?
Have
you read #189, #270 and #317? Do you have a
minimal knowledge of epistemology?
Can you give me the corresponding proof that the Earth is a sphere, which would
have convinced somebody like you 1000 years ago?
According to you, did such a definitive proof of the year 1000 exist, or was
there only a lot of (more or less trustworthy) evidence suggesting the sphericity
of the Earth?
If one does not trample on logics and common sense by invoking the magic
emergence of huge amounts of information out of nothing, then ontogeny is
enough to definitively conclude that besides material information carriers,
additional information carriers do exist (see).
In any case, reincarnation remains a scientific fact, even if
I'm still the only one being able to recognize this fact.
In the same way, the movement of the Earth around the Sun was a scientific fact
even at the time when the young Johannes Kepler (Copernicus' reincarnation) was
the only one being able to recognize this fact.
---
One billion malnourished humans and all the focus on climate change!
Perverted!
By wogoga in #353:
Can you give me the corresponding proof that the Earth is a sphere, which would have convinced somebody like you 1000 years ago?
By Jack by the hedge in #354:
Yes. Eratosthenes demonstrated Earth's curvature and calculated its circumference 2,200 years ago.
Eratosthenes started with the premise that the earth is a sphere, and estimated
the earth's circumference. He correctly assumed that the difference in the
sun's daily maximum position (between locations at different latitudes) is
caused by the earth's sphericity.
So Eratosthenes' calculation is definitively not a proof of the earth's
sphericity, and it certainly did not convince the skeptics of his or even of
much later times.
By the way, I have also made estimations not only for the number of human souls
but even for bee souls (see #60).
Why do you consider Eratosthenes' calculations which are based on the premise that the earth is a sphere, as proof of the earth's sphericity?
And why don't you consider my calculations of soul numbers, based on the premise that souls exist, as proof of the existence of souls?
By the way, Aristarchus of Samos had already some decades before Eratosthenes made
estimations of the sizes of moon and sun, and the proportion of their distances
from earth. Already his poor assumption (of 87° instead of 89° 50') for
the angle between sun and moon at half moon, led to the logically correct
conclusion that the volume of the Sun is around 300 times greater than the
earth's volume.
And the better the value assumed for the angle between sun and moon at half
moon, the better the result of Aristarchus calculation, and the bigger the
difference in size between sun and earth. And isn't it apriori quite implausible
that the much greater surrounds the smaller?
But in the same way as Aristarchus' calculation was not considered evidence for
heliocentrism for a long time, Eratosthenes' calculation had no impact on
those, unable or unwilling to believe in the sphericity of the earth.
---
To
judge from an inferior viewpoint the superior one is impossible
By wogoga in #379:
Why do you consider Eratosthenes' calculations which are based on the premise that the earth is a sphere, as proof of the earth's sphericity?
By Jack by the hedge in #381:
You are conflating the observation that the inclination of the sun varies with lattitude with the calculation of Earth's radius from those observations. Eratosthenes calculations are not proof that the earth is a sphere. Rather it's the observation which is evidence that the earth is curved and not flat.
"The observation that the inclination of the sun varies with
latitude" obviously is "evidence that the earth is curved and not
flat" from our perspective.
Yet you probably deny the fact that birth figures after demographic transition
primarily depend on death figures (under not too anomalous conditions), or that
an increase in male mortality leads to an increase in the male/female sex ratio
at birth. So, 2000 years ago, you simply could have put into question the fact
that the sun (in Egypt) stands generally higher in the south than in the north.
You also could have argued that it is well known that light can deviate from a
straight line, e.g. when entering or leaving water, or in the case of a mirage.
The hypothesis that the sun is not always where we see it, might have been much
easier to digest than the logical consequence that things fall upwards on an
opposite side of the ground.
You even could have argued that the sun is not at an infinite distance, and
therefore different angles are observed from a flat earth. So instead of
deriving an Earth's circumference of around 40'000 km, you could have used the
same data to calculate the distance of the sun from a flat earth:
On the summer solstice at noon, the sun was directly overhead around 800 km south of Alexandria. In Alexandria at the same time, the sun deviated from this zenith by an angle of around 7 degree. Because we have a right-angled triangle, we can easily calculate the sun's height to around 6500 km.
By dafydd in #385:
I suppose that I'll have to wait until my next reincarnation for an answer to the Kepler/Copernicus question [#356: Prove that Kepler was the reincarnation of Copernicus].
Let us assume, a person of the past already knowing that the Earth is a sphere
would have claimed that two locations exist, where a half a year is
"day" and the other half is "night".
What could this person have done, if a skeptic, not being able to imagine that
the Earth is a sphere and therefore dismissing the demonstration of the Earth's
sphericity, would have requested a proof?
Nothing! The insight of the existence of the two poles depends on the insight
that the Earth is a sphere.
Only within a theoretical framework such as pandualist evolution it becomes possible to demonstrate (or rather: to make
plausible) special cases of reincarnation chains.
---
Galileo dismissed as a "useless fiction" the idea,
held by his contemporary Johannes Kepler, that the moon caused the tides.
Galileo also refused to accept Kepler's elliptical orbits of the planets,
considering the circle the "perfect" shape for planetary orbits. WP
By wogoga in #386:
Galileo dismissed as a "useless fiction" the idea, held by his contemporary Johannes Kepler, that the moon caused the tides. Galileo also refused to accept Kepler's elliptical orbits of the planets, considering the circle the "perfect" shape for planetary orbits. WP
By Cuddles in #390:
And as we all know, they laughed at Galileo and he turned out to be right. Except in this example where he was completely wrong. Therefore any insane idea that gets laughed at must also be right. Or wrong. In conclusion, they also laughed at Bozo the clown, therefore he must have been the reincarnation of Galileo.
You miss the decisive point:
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), represented the scientific elite of his time.
Nevertheless, he was completely unable (or only unwilling?) to judge Kepler's
work, insofar as Kepler's work essentially surpassed the heliocentrism which
for the first time had been proposed by Aristarchus of Samos, 310 BC – ca. 230 BC
(see also #158).
An
informative quote (dead link):
"Kepler's insistence on the reality of heliocentrism was unusual in the context of late sixteenth-century astronomy. … Copernicus's planetary theories were admired and studied by mathematical astronomers while his cosmological proposal of heliocentrism, as we have seen, was largely disregarded. Kepler's enthusiasm for Copernican astronomy defied this conventional division of astronomy."
So, simply from an evolutionary point of view, I cannot expect
more approval from the current scientific elite than Kepler received from his
fellow scientists.
And if at all true, then it was not Galilei, but Copernicus and Kepler who were
considered a "Bozo the clown" by the scientific elite of his time.
In any case, Galilei, "the Father of Modern Science" is the genuine
representative of the "skeptic" movement:
· Fighting the real scientific progress (Kepler's replacement of the epicycle theory of the old Greeks by physical laws, panpsychism and the impact of souls in biological evolution in our days)
· Defending what already has become or is becoming mainstream among the mainstream elite (Copernicus' theory, continuous creation resp. evolution of life in our days)
· Quarreling with the most conservative (e.g. reactionary theologians), in order to present oneself as progressive
By the way, Galilei would not have published his most famous work Dialogue Concerning the Two
Chief World Systems, 1632, at least in the
way he has, if Kepler (1571 – 1630) had been still alive.
---
What
you believe depends much more on what you believed in the past than on what
actually is true
By Jack by the hedge in #398:
So what if Galileo rejected Kepler's heliocentric model? Who appointed Galileo spokesman for the "scientific elite"? You would expect people to require evidence to convince them that an alternative model of the solar system was better than the existing one, wouldn't you? And that's what happened, according to Wikipedia's entry on Kepler: Some scientists just ignored him, some raised objections to particular aspects of his argument, but others set out to test it against observations. No sign there of a unified "elite" closing ranks against a misunderstood genius. People put his ideas to the test, and they proved to be good predictors of real observations.
As to your "Some scientists just ignored him" your reference says:
"Kepler's laws were not immediately accepted. Several major figures such as Galileo and René Descartes completely ignored Kepler's Astronomia nova."
Especially in the case of Descartes (1596-1650), it seems to me
rather a silence on Kepler (1571-1630) than an actual ignorance.
As to "some raised objections":
"Many astronomers, including Kepler's teacher, Michael Maestlin [1550-1631], objected to Kepler's introduction of physics into his astronomy. Some adopted compromise positions. Ismael Boulliau [1605-1694] … while Seth Ward [1617-1689] …"
As to "others set out to test it against observations":
"Several astronomers tested Kepler's theory, and its various modifications, against astronomical observations. … In the case of the transit of Mercury in 1632, … Jeremiah Horrocks, who observed the 1639 Venus transit, …"
By then Kepler already had bitten the dust.
As contrast, a quote from Introduction of Kepler's Somnium, by Edward
Rosen, Dover:
"When
Kepler was enrolled at Tübingen University, the students there were
required to compose a number of dissertations or disputations. One such
composition, written by Kepler in 1593, dealt with the following
question: How would the phenomena occurring in the heavens appear to an observer
stationed on the moon? Kepler had hit upon this ingenious device in an effort
to overcome the deep-rooted hostility to the Copernican astronomy.
According to Copernicus, the earth moves very swiftly. But the people who live
on the earth do not see or hear or feel this movement. Yet they can watch the
moon perform various motions. These lunar motions, however, would escape
detection by an observer located on the moon, for the simple reason that he
would be participating in those motions. ...
It was never presented at a Tübingen disputation, however, because Veit
Müller, the professor in charge of those academic exercises, was so
unalterably opposed to Copernicanism that he refused to permit Kepler's theses
to be heard."
From both a scientific and a psychological point of view, your
deep-rooted hostility to panpsychism (also advocated by Kepler) and
reincarnation is essentially comparable with the deep-rooted hostility of
Kepler's professor to heliocentrism.
And wouldn't you also like to "refuse to permit" such utter nonsense
as evidence for evolution by reincarnation "to be heard", would you?
---
Native
genius is not the result of a lucky genetic mixture, but of hard work in
previous lives
By Iconoclast08 in #400:
At what point do these souls ensoul? Conception?
I've already answered this question here.
[There is some evidence suggesting that the soul of a still living person can start a new incarnation.]
From personal experience (resulting from "lucky
coincidences") I further conclude that conception (meiosis, recombination)
and the embryonic development cost a lot of psychic energy. In the fetal
development it could be rather growth spurts which cost relevant amounts of such
energy.
Psychic energy is what living beings refresh during inactivity such
sleep (machines and artificial intelligence don't get tired).
Depressions can be caused by lack of psychic energy. Such energy is completely
different from material mass/energy.
In the case of identical twins the only question which seems unclear to me is
the following: Are both souls in the same way implicated in recombination, or
can the selection of the genetic makeup of both essentially be
"supervised" by one of the two souls alone?
The (start of the) birth process, if induced by the fetus, may also need a lot
of psychic energy.
After birth, more and more psychic energy is transferred from the old to the
new incarnation. So it is not rare that persons die shortly after the birth of
a new incarnation. Reasonably plausible examples seem to me:
· Michelangelo died three days after Galileo's birth
· Bernhard Förster committed suicide a month and a half after Hitler's birth
· The grandfather of my father drank himself to death a month after the birth of my father
Suggestive
of continuous ensoulment are also animals which die shortly after reproduction
(semelparity).
Such a strategy makes especially sense for migratory animals which come back to
their birth grounds after huge journeys. The more often an animal has come back
to the same place in previous lives, the easier to find this place, because instinctive behavior
is essentially stored in the animal soul. Animals
are reborn as their own offspring, and during the incarnation process of the
offspring the parents die.
An interesting quote from Eel life history:
"How the adults make the 6,000 km (4,000 mile) open ocean journey back to their spawning grounds north of the Antilles, Haiti, and Puerto Rico remains unknown. By the time they leave the continent their gut dissolves making feeding impossible, so they have to rely on stored energy alone."
---
The
peer review system is also an ingenious reinvention of censorship
By wogoga in #406:
Psychic energy is what living beings refresh during inactivity such sleep (machines and artificial intelligence don't get tired).
By dafydd in #408:
Take a look in a dictionary and check out the definition of the word energy. There is no such thing as "pyschic energy", you're off into the realms of fantasy now.
A Google search:
· 203,000 entries for "psychic energy"
· 315,000 entries for "mental energy"
· 307,000 entries for "spiritual energy"
· 333,000 entries for "physical energy"
A quote which seems representative to me:
Scientists
have never found brain cells (neurons) that lack energy and "need" to
sleep. Nor have they found neurons that run-out of neurotransmitters
during the awake state and need to sleep to replenish them.
There is no universal decline in firing rate during sleep. Neurons in some
areas decrease their activity during sleep while neurons in other areas
actually increase their firing. This is valid both for NREM as well as REM
period sleep. Furthermore, this has been observed both electrophysiologically
and by functional imaging studies of the human brain.
It's not the absence of sensory stimulation that causes sleep. The body sensory
stimulation can be severed and the animal still shows wake-sleep cycles.
Another interesting quote:
The
purpose of sleep remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science. Although we spend roughly one-third of life asleep, researchers
still do not know why.
While sleep is often thought to have evolved to play an unknown but vital role
inside the body, a new theory now suggests it actually developed as a method to
better deal with the outside world.
Sleep is often seen as bad for survival. Sleeping animals might be vulnerable
to predators and cannot eat, mate, scout for prey, care for relatives or
perform other behaviors key to getting by.
By Iconoclast08 in #416:
To be perfectly frank, I used to believe in a lot of this stuff during my pre-college days...
I was a very religious child until the age of around 10. But already at the age of 13, I had reached a scientific and atheistic world view, which remained essentially the same until the age of 25. Both religiousness in childhood and critical thinking in adolescence had come primarily from within me.
concepts like "souls" and "psychic energy" carried an odd albeit comforting appeal for me,
Even if the world view of reductionist materialism were well-founded, the use of "soul" and "psychic energy" is still fully reasonable, except if one denies the obvious:
· an identity in the whole life of a person which can be called soul by trivial concept formation
· such subjective states, where people simply may say "I have no energy"
and it made me think that yes, there could be something "beyond" the material world that waited for us after death.
At least since the age of 13, I have never assumed that there is
something "beyond" the physical world.
Death has always seemed to me something essentially positive, a final relief,
because it can end any suffering. Yet I had to give up the belief in this
relief when I realized that reincarnation is a fact.
By the way, some of the biggest crimes of our
times consist in preventing people forcefully from dying, e.g. persons fully
paralyzed or crippled.
... the sheer awe and beauty that I found in naturalistic explanations of the world ...
You
confuse "naturalistic explanation" with
"reductionist-materialist explanation".
As soon as you recognize that your premises
· enzymes can build plants and animals without some primitive form of perception and goal-directed movements
· around 10 megabyte of genetic information are enough to transform a cell in a human person
· chance events can create humans out of dead matter
· complex patterns of machines can develop an ego out of themselves
are untenable, you can no longer dismiss pandualism by means of Occam's razor.
By shuttlt in #420:
Google hit counts are a poor indicator of things being real or not.
However, Google counts can be an indicator of whether concepts are
widespread or not.
In the same way as for "physical energy", normally "energy"
alone is used for "psychic energy". And there are 1,340,000 Google
entries for the expression "I have no energy", versus 662,000 for
"I have no appetite".
Checking a dictionary definition of the word "energy", as suggested, would probably be a lot more reliable.
The use of "energy" in the sense of "psychic
energy" is so widespread and its meaning so obvious that we can ignore the
authority of dictionary definition writers in this case.
---
In
many cases people recover from illnesses not because of, but despite medical
treatments
Whose reincarnation is James Randi?
By wogoga in #3 of "Clone Randi" on 2010-04-20:
From the perspective of pure reason, the
assumption that James Randi is essentially only the result of a ridiculously
small quantity of DNA information in the order of 10 megabyte is completely
absurd.
James Randi as a personality, as everyone else, is primarily the product of his
previous lives.
And because it is impossible to become a good magician within one life, we can
be quite sure that Randi also in at least some previous lives was a successful
magician having left marks.
Does anybody know magicians (or maybe debunkers of magicians) having died
before or around the time of Randi’s birth with similar characteristics?
After
having asked for hypotheses on Randi's previous lives, I have dealt myself with
the question. I actually got very surprised to see how simple it is to find a
very obvious hypothesis: Randi (1928-08-07)
as the reincarnation of Houdini (1874-03-24
– 1926-10-31), and of Robert-Houdin (1805-12-07
– 1871-06-13).
Because of the many agreements in characteristics such as talents, the
Houdini-Randi transition seems especially convincing to me. In the
"Houdin"-Houdini case, the following quoteWP
might be relevant:
"American magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss) was so impressed by Robert-Houdin that after reading his autobiography in 1890, Ehrich adopted the stage name of "Houdini" in honor of Robert-Houdin. He incorrectly believed that "i" on the end of a name meant "like" in French. But Houdini, his own career and reputation established by that time, later lost his youthful respect for Robert-Houdin, believing that he took undue credit for other magicians's innovations, and wrote The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin in 1908."
In the meantime I've ordered Houdini's The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin
and three of Randi's books. In any case, I must admit that until now I've
underestimated James Randi.
Except if in the end it should turn out that Randi isn't Houdini's
reincarnation, I think I merit The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. And wouldn't it be an irony of destiny, if the James Randi
anti-supernatural prize were gained for the only seemingly supernatural, but
otherwise fully natural and trivial fact that Houdini was Randi's previous
incarnation?
Today I've received HOUDINI, HIS LIFE AND ART. A short reading was enough to increase my personal rating of the Houdini-Randi-transition probability from around 90% to around 99% percent. Here the quotes (written by Randi) which convinced me the most:
"His actual
deeds and the stories that have been fabricated about him are almost
indistinguishable this half-century since his death, and I am sure that
no one could enjoy that situation more than Houdini himself." (p.11)
"I am personally very satisfied to have been called in to coauthor this
book, for I have for many years wanted to be able to tell a modern audience
what I feel Houdini went through in the moments when the chips were down
and the wheel was spinning. …
The shadow of Harry Houdini hangs over me constantly, like a strange,
burdensome cloud. …" (p. 12)
"In discussing the art of the man called Harry Houdini, I find it
necessary to depend upon … parallels that might have occurred
between his career and my own. …
It will be necessary from time to time for me to refer to actual events that
have occurred to me, simply because they frequently bear a striking
resemblance to events in Houdini's life. And before we begin, I must make
it very clear that aside from a few early years of my somewhat unwise
youth, there has not been a time when I have sought to borrow on the strength
of Houdini's name. …
"But I feel that my analysis of the personality behind the name Houdini
is quite possibly more accurate than other interpretations by
psychiatrists, historians, and magicians, who have not been as deeply involved
as I have been in the business of escape. I
cannot help but believe that the thoughts that have passed through my mind in
moments of stress and great challenge also passed through the mind of Harry
Houdini. I think I may be forgiven for that presumption." (p. 158)
By Jack by the hedge in #428:
That's hilarious. You were 90% convinced by your pet theory that the similarities between Randi's and Houdini's careers "prove" Randi is the literal reincarnation of Houdini. Now merely because you've read a book by Randi which remarks on those same similarities, your conviction has risen to 99%.
Isn't it obvious that what Randi writes on Houdini adds a new dimension to the
question whether Randi is Houdini's reincarnation, different from what others
write on them?
In my evaluation of the Houdini-Randi-transition probability, also Randi's
assessments of persons close to Houdini are important, such as his assessment
of Houdini's wife (p. 160):
"One thing is very evident – his love, admiration, and devotion for little Beatrice Rahner, who made a momentous decision that was to both thrill and grieve her over the years: she married young Ehrlich Weiss. As Houdini himself was to declare many times during their years together, nothing better ever happened to him in his life. That was probably quite true."
Randi on Houdini's brother (p. 160):
"Even after Houdini's death in 1926, his shadow still fell far enough to compel Hardeen to advertise himself as 'the brother of Houdini.' To be born into near fame is a dreadful fate indeed."
On both (p. 161):
"I've singled out Bess and Hardeen because I believe them to be very much the victims of his bright star."
By paximperium in #427:
Sorry. Your incoherent random delusional spam is not worth reading.
The post you responded to consists primarily of quotes written by James Randi.
Do you consider Randi's writings on Houdini as spam, or only my quotes? Let us
deal with a new quote (p. 184):
"I was born two years after Houdini departed this world, but I feel very much as if we have shared it together."
This
statement can be interpreted as a vacuous truism, because we all share this
world together. Yet I don't think that such an interpretation really makes
sense.
Interesting are also the last three sentences of HOUDINI, HIS LIFE AND ART:
"For me, Harry Houdini is very much alive. And I am sure that if you could ask him if that is so, he would agree heartily and give you a huge wink. And in that wink is everything."
---
The
biggest conspiracy crimes have regularly been committed by the most powerful
establishments. Many of these conspiracies could not have been accomplished, if
it were not so easy to discredit the debunkers (together with the fake
debunkers participating in the conspiracies) as "conspiracy nuts" in
the eyes of the majority.
By wogoga in #429:
Isn't it obvious that what Randi writes on Houdini adds a new dimension to the question whether Randi is Houdini's reincarnation, different from what others write on them?
By Pup in #430:
It seems to me more like a tautology. It illustrates the feelings which people have, which might lead some to believe that they're another person reincarnated, if they were inclined to think along those lines.
Very interesting remark! As far as I understand you, what you consider
tautological is something like "feelings or other things suggesting
reincarnation lead to the belief in reincarnation".
And such a tautology interpretation of my
statements implies that the parallels between Randi and Houdini can only be
evidence for the belief in reincarnation, but not for reincarnation as a fact.
But why should we restrict ourselves to such a tautological interpretation?
The
fact that those kinds of feelings exist isn't in question. If they didn't
exist, no one would bring up the issue of whether reincarnation is real,
because no one would even wonder about it.
But the fact that such feelings exist does nothing to prove the actual
existence of reincarnation. They're merely what opened the speculation about
reincarnation in the first place.
This reasoning could well be a main root of Aristotle' (384 BC – 322 BC)
removal of reincarnation from Western philosophy/ science. I assume that
Aristotle's feelings with respect to Socrates (469 BC–399 BC) were
similar to those of Randi with respect to Houdini. So for Aristotle there were
two reasonable alternatives:
· Reincarnation does exist, and he was Socrates' reincarnation
· Reincarnation does not exist
And the idea of actually being the reincarnation of the highly
esteemed teacher of his own teacher Plato, seemed to Aristotle too unlikely and
maybe also too presumptuous to be true.
I also assume that already Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-07-28 – 1872) would
have proposed reincarnation at least as a hypothesis, if he had been born a few
months later. In a way similar to Randi experiencing the shadow of Houdini,
Feuerbach felt the shadow of Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804-02-12), having
died when Feuerbach was a three four month old embryo. Feuerbach tried (in some
respects) to be an Anti-Kant, in fact however he was Kant's direct
reincarnation. But the idea that one and the same soul had animated himself as
an embryo and the dying Kant, seemed too unlikely to be true.
One thing is obvious: if reincarnation is a main principle of biological
evolution, and character and talents are stored in the soul, then such
parallels as e.g. between Randi and Houdini occur much more frequently than in
a purely materialist world. So the question whether reincarnation exists can be
decided by statistical means.
By Pup in #432:
Take
another example: We know there's a biological condition called sleep paralysis
that causes an inability to move when awakening. It's a common human condition
and gave rise to the myth of the "old hag" as an explanation.
But one can't point to sleep paralysis as proof that an old hag exists, since
people clearly invented the old hag because they experienced sleep
paralysis and wanted an explanation.
Around hundred years ago some may have argued in a similar way against the
existence of photons:
We know that
energy in electromagnetic waves can only be released in packets of energy. It's
a common electromagnetic property and gave rise to the myth of
"photons" as an explanation.
But one can't point to these energy packets as proof that photons exist, since
people clearly invented the photons because they wanted an explanation
for such energy packets.
I remain convinced that souls (resp. psychons) are as real as photons are. (And photons I consider far more real than conceded by orthodox modern physics.)
Whose reincarnation was Harry Houdini?
But I must admit: It is not so easy to convincingly demonstrate that the
hypothesis of Robert-Houdin (1805-1871) as the previous incarnation of Harry
Houdini (1874-1926) makes sufficiently more sense than the hypotheses of
Bartolomeo Bosco (1793-1863), Robin (1811-1874) or of John Henry Anderson
(1814–1874), all of whom Houdini defends from Robert-Houdin's
"gentle art of innuendo and belittling", wherein Houdini considers
the latter a master.
In the case of Bosco, Houdini writes that he visited Bosco's grave in Germany,
and then he continues: "The history of
this clever conjurer, with all its lights and shadows, sweeps before me like a
mental panorama." (The Unmasking, p. 307)
In the case of Anderson, Randi writes: "The
site [where Anderson was buried] was visited by Harry Houdini, who ... had been
born just thirty days after Anderson's death."
(Conjuring, p. 45)
Nevertheless I think there is a lot more evidence suggesting that Houdini was
the reincarnation of the one whose successor he wanted to become as an
adolescent, and of whom be became over-critical in later years.
From Evita Peron to Christina Kirchner?
By dafydd in #434:
You have an idiosyncratic interpretation of the word evidence.
My interpretation of evidence may seem eccentric or peculiar to you. De
facto, it simply results from unprejudiced thinking.
Today
I've read that the President of Argentina, Christina Fernández de
Kirchner (b. Feb. 19, 1953) gave to Greece the advice to reject the
IMF conditions. For the first time, I bothered to check the almost too obvious
hypothesis of Christina being the reincarnation of Evita Peron (7 May 1919 – 26 July
1952).
And the hypothesis actually turns out to be quite convincing:
For instance Christina Fernández "started her political career in
the Peronist Youth movement of the Justicialist Party in the 1970s and her 'highly'
combative speech style polarized Argentine politics, recalling the style of Eva
Perón".
An interesting quote:
With her
passionate public speeches, elaborate dressing and cosmopolitan glamour,
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner evokes memories of Eva "Evita"
Perón, who captured the world's attention more than half a century ago.
But although both played a considerable influence over their presidential
husbands and enjoyed considerable support from Argentina's poor working
communities, the comparisons are limited. Evita, an actress who entered
politics shortly after marrying Juan Perón, died in her early 30s, only
to be reincarnated by an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.
Mrs Kirchner, though never far from her husband whom she met at law school in
her youth, is seen by supporters as having built a career largely on her own
merit.
"I don't want to inherit anything from Eva, or from [my husband] Kirchner.
Everything I've got is a result of my own achievements, and my own defects
too," she has said.
---
By
closing one's eyes one can make disappear evidence for oneself; but then one
should not complain of absence of evidence
Quotes from the thread "Life or no-life after death - Is it an Objective reality?":
By Blackened Cat:
I could quote many famous scientists who had a belief in Angels...
By Resume :
Could you do that please?
By Hokulele [#76]:
Johannes Kepler.
Using the by far most (scientifically and philosophically)
progressive man of his time as an example of a belief in angels seems quite
absurd to me.
Can somebody back up this claim that Kepler believed in angels with quotes from
Kepler himself (as an adult)? There has always been a lot of misrepresentation
and disparagement of Kepler.
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was the reincarnation
of Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464) and Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), and the
previous incarnation of Baruch Spinoza
(1632–1677).
Spinoza's pantheism remained quite similar to Cusanus' pantheism. (The panpsychism
implied in pantheism must not be confused with animism or a
belief in matter-less ghosts or angels.)
Further constants during these incarnations: The knowledge that the earth moves
around a huge sun, and strong adherence to what is called Occam's razor.
On the other hand, the evolution of this soul from Cusanus to Spinoza is a good
example of emancipation from a dominating belief system (ideology, religion):
· Nicolaus Cusanus was a cardinal of the Catholic Church. (I assume that he must have passed through terrible experiences in his previous life in order to become obedient enough to reach such a high position within the hierarchy).
· Copernicus all his life lived and worked within the Catholic Church.
· Kepler, a Protestant (Lutheran), was despite being very religious quite critical towards religion and "was excluded from Eucharist by his Lutheran church over his theological scruples".
· Baruch Spinoza, a born Jew, was excommunicated by his religious community, and despite not renouncing his Judaism, this pantheist can be considered one of the first modern secularists and atheists (with respect to a personal god).
---
1. Define the problem as apocalyptic because apocalypse sells.
2. Present the apocalytic vision as mainstream view, and dissenters as crackpots or in the pay of evil giant corporations.
3. Build massive financial support.
4. Use that lobbying support to fight the dissenters and to expand the political, economical and scientific power of the new ideology.
(adapted from)
Transporter clones
Recently
several threads have been dealing with the transporter paradox (see for instance). An
excellent and entertaining summary of the problem represents a 10 minute video
(here).
A more exhaustive summary of the underlying philosophical problem
represents my text The End of Reductionism (see also
posts #285, #321, #338, and #343).
On the one hand, consistent reductionist-materialist reasoning leads to
conclusions such as:
If you think there is an experiencing self and that this will die in the transporter, you are inconsistent. You are just suffering from delusion. (adapted from)
One is not consistent if one thinks that something essential about one's identity (or experiencing self) would be lost if one stepped into the transporter. (adapted from)
On the other hand, such conclusions are simply absurd with respect
to real life, as efficiently demonstrated in the above referenced video.
Let us imagine that nanotechnology and information technology has made enough
progress to create more or less viable transporter-clones of animals, and that
the first experiments involving humans are starting.
Then in a real world (where souls are as real as matter) this could happen:
After the
technology of scanning bodies and creating identical copies has sufficiently
advanced, somebody volunteers for such a human transporter project. His body is
scanned at one place and this information is used to create clones at a nearby
place.
The technology is continuously improved, and when sufficiently viable clones
can be created, first incarnation attempts make sense. Then, at daytime the
(body of the) volunteer undergoes deep anesthesia, and all participants can
only hope (i.e. invest psychic energy) that the clone can be animated by the
soul of the volunteer.
Only after several incarnations of clones and re-incarnations of the original
body, the volunteer may feel completely comfortable in a cloned body. Then the
project team together with the volunteer can decide that this time, the old
body will be liquidated instead of being reanimated.
And in a hypothetical monistically materialist world:
Also here, many
attempts will be necessary for the first clone to be an unmistakable clone. Let
us call the first human volunteering for developing such a transporter-cloning
technology Nick.
The technology of scanning and creating copies of Nick is continuously
improving. The first clones may not even start to breathe, and from the first
breathing clone (e.g. clone #87) to clones resembling handicapped forms of
Nick, still a long way must be gone. An important task of Nick will consist in
helping to check whether the clones are not somehow defective (e.g. by lacking
memories).
Now let us assume that clone 226 is the first 100%-success clone. Until now all
clones have been liquidated, but this time the project leaders decide that
original Nick finally can be liquidated instead of the clone.
Nick, after having dealt with so many near-clones, probably would no longer
agree to commit suicide (with the poor consolation that clone 226 will
perfectly well fill the gap created by Nick's death), and would propose that
once again the clone should be liquidated instead of himself.
---
From
a logical point of view, (reductionist, atheist) materialism may be considered
the most absurd religion (belief system of a relevant majority concerning
origin and destination of life) of all times of human history
By wogoga in #441:
... in a real world (where souls are as real as matter) ...
By Jack by the hedge in #442:
This is hypothetical, right? After all, there is evidence for the existence of matter. So for souls to be "as real as matter", you would have to be talking about a world very different from this one, yes?
One has to recognize that the world one perceives is only a projection of
"the real world" on one's experiencing subject. And such experiencing
subjects obviously are indivisible, discrete entities. Without experiencing
subjects, there are no feelings, desires, pain sensations, perceptions, and
concepts such as matter and materialism.
One could compare the experiencing subject with a computer screen, and the
things we are conscious of with the things presented on the screen. Here it is obviously
nonsensical to attribute more reality to the things presented on the screen
than to the screen itself.
In the same way, it is illogical to consider the things we experience as more
real than our experiencing selves.
The currently prevailing "scientific" materialism is essentially only
a more sophisticated variant of naïve realism. Only what we can see (with
or without the help of technology) is considered real.
Whereas materialist monism (reductionist materialism) is logically impossible,
psychic monism (idealism) is logically consistent in the form of solipsism.
By the way, I have been playing time and again with the hypothesis that the
world I experience is only my own imagination, because the role I play in my
world seems to me a priori almost too unlikely to be true.
---
That
we are unable to agree on whether the three 9-11 sky scrapers collapsed due to
their own weight, or were pulverized by lots of explosives is a damning shame
of modern society. A priori, there is a huge difference between collapsing due
to potential energy as during earth quakes, or
due to the energy of explosives as during controlled demolition. (The potential
energy of a building is much less than the explosive energy used in controlled
demolition.)
The main objective of the Patriot Act was not
to fight terrorists (the orchestration of post-9-11 was in fact rather a PR
project to stimulate terrorism), but to fight those trying to uncover the
criminal practices of the secret services.
The number of political decisions of democratic institutions caused by blackmailing
could be far underestimated.
Censorship on demographymatters.blogspot.com?
It
seems that the concept of missing women has become a dogma, and is
defended by the demographic establishment even by censorship.
From a blog dealing with the
extremely low fertility in Taiwan (0.95 children/woman):
One major theme of my Taiwan posts here has been the very low fertility rate, for the main the standard combination of patriarchal cultural norms with the substantial emancipation of women. Another theme has been the sex ratio strongly biased towards men, producing a deficit of marriageable women.
The article ended with "thoughts?", and I wrote:
A "sex
ratio strongly biased towards men" at birth is a natural consequence of a
"sex ratio strongly biased towards men" at death.
One must not confuse "missing girls" with "missing women",
as missing girls generally correlate with missing old men.
What exactly is the sex ratio at death in Taiwan in the recent past?
The author of the blog responded:
The sex ratio at birth in Taiwan was 1.09 boys per girl, decidedly in excess of norms and consistent with reports of sex-selective abortion in Taiwan (and elsewhere). The sex ratio for over 65s is 0.95 men per woman, a decided shift from the 1.03:1 ratio of 2003.
Then I clarified my position with something similar to (the answer has been removed from the blog, and I have no copy):
According to Taiwan Demographics Profile 2010,
sex ratio of both the total population and the 15-64 age group is 1.02
male/female.
So the missing girls of the under 15 age group (1.08 male/female) have roughly
the same number as the missing men of the 65+ age group (0.92 male/female).
And according to Summary of Census Population,
in South Korea of 2005, only 66 men were confronted to 100 women in the 65+ age
group. Nevertheless, despite this huge number of missing old men, the number of
all women (23,575,784) was only slightly higher than the number of all men
(23,465,650).
Is there any reasonable reason for removing such an on-topic answer from a demographic blog?
Louis XV of France & Silvio Berlusconi
Quote from Louis XV of France, Betrothal and marriage:
In 1721, Louis
XV [15 Feb. 1710 – 10 May 1774] was betrothed to his first cousin,
Infanta Maria Anna Victoria of Spain. The eleven-year-old king was not interested
in the arrival of his future wife, the three-year-old Spanish Infanta.
… The Spanish infanta was too young to produce an heir. Thus, the Duke of
Bourbon set about choosing a European princess old enough to produce an heir.
Eventually, the twenty-one year old Marie Leszczyńska, … was chosen.
… The marriage was celebrated in September 1725.
Louis's marriage to Marie Leszczyńska produced many children, but the king
was persistently (and notoriously) unfaithful. Some of his mistresses, such as
Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, are as well-known as the king himself,
and his affairs with three Mailly-Nesle sisters are documented by the formal
agreements into which he entered. In his later years, Louis developed a
penchant for young girls, keeping several at a time in a personal seraglio
known as the Parc aux Cerfs ("Deer Park"), one of whose inhabitants,
Marie-Louise O'Murphy, was immortalised in a painting by Boucher. …
If it is actually true, that Silvio Berlusconi has "a penchant for young girls" and that he is
maintaining a harem, then this Italian politician may be a serious candidate
for being the current reincarnation of Louis XV of France.
Unlike many other leading politicians who primarily can only follow those
controlling the mass media, "il Cavaliere" Berlusconi has his own
mass media and therefore has real power (at least until now).
---
The
huge psychological spectrum of current mankind can only be understood by studying
the past of mankind
By Olowkow in #5:
Well,
this is "wogoga": Immanuel Kant and Evolution ("creation or rather
development").
Really nifty video at the bottom.
I've
just found a working link to this wonderful animation: Inner Life Of A Cell.
---
Without
self-control one tends to believe one likes to believe
By mike3 in #454 (to #444):
Even if perceptions did not exist, and concepts did not exist, the things that were perceived and conceptualized would still exist.
The sun, our galaxy and the rest of the universe will still exist, even if all
(higher forms of) life has been wiped out. Nevertheless without conceptualization
there are no stars, no galaxies and no universe.
We can imagine a world without life, but we
cannot imagine a world independent from our perception and conceptualization.
The world without human perception and conceptualization is Immanuel Kant's
(in)famous thing-in-itself
("Ding an sich").
However, if "solipsism" is taken as an actual reality, then only one mind can exist by definition, and all the others must not. Who's mind is that?
Either I am an imagination of your world-dream, or you are an imagination of my
world-dream. By definition it makes no sense to take someone else's solipsism
serious.
By WhatRoughBeast in #455 (to #441):
Finally, if you persist in calling the video "real life", you should consider that you have just shot down your psychon hypothesis.
Why do you assume that I consider the video more than an interesting thought
experiment? Is what I've written and referenced in #441 not clear enough?
The interesting point in the video is where two copies of the
transporter-machine inventor are confronted with each other.
Choose your arguments more carefully.
Even if I advocate ideas you are prejudiced against, you should not carelessly
assume that I must have committed logical errors.
---
Consequential
evolutionary thinking leads to the hypothesis that amino acid sequences folding
today into proteins did not fold in the past, and that stable elements of today
were once unstable (isotopes). Only in neutron stars, protons and electrons got
accustomed to live together in very confined areas and to form unions called
neutrons.
By WhatRoughBeast in #457 (to #456):
... PAY ATTENTION!
1) Consistent, consequential materialism entails that a fundamental difference between two materially identical humans cannot exist.
2) The video shows in a very simple and comprehensible way that two identically cloned humans would consider themselves as fundamentally different from each other (and would not be willing to commit suicide, even if the other clone could replace them in a 100-percent perfect way).
3) So with respect to real life, there is a fundamental difference between you (or the transporter-machine inventor) and an identical clone.
That's all what I've said in the part you replied to.
---
Spamming
with and replying to off-topic nonsense may be considered an insidious way of
combatting the content of a thread (if not intended as humorous diversion, or
as a way to keep the thread alive)
Logical consistency
By wogoga in #465:
1) Consistent, consequential materialism entails that a fundamental difference between two materially identical humans cannot exist.
By WhatRoughBeast in #467:
Trivially untrue. A materialist believes that memory is stored via a physical process. Since distinct persons have different experiences, their different memories make them fundamentally distinguishable.
"Different memories" for "materially identical humans"?
There is no inconvenient original left hanging around. Therefore, both of your adaptations are irrelevant to the video.
Ever
watched the video? Ever seriously dealt with
philosophical problems?
A daring conjecture
Finally
I've found a (hopefully) not too unreasonable hypothesis for J.F. Kennedy: Nine and half months after
JFK's death, Anthony David Weiner
emitted his first cry.
---
From
Cagliostro (via Houdin and Houdini) to Randi - an interesting question!
Revised until here. Revision will be continued in the next days or weeks.
Indications of errors or other suggestions: info@pandualism.com
By yomero in #479:
On August, 1916, Irish nationalist Roger Casement was executed by the English. That was 9 months before JFK's birth. Besides his patriotic activities for Irish independence, Casement is remembered for his struggles against human rights abuses in Congo and Peru. There were imputations of homosexuality and pedophilia aimed to disarm those advocating commutation of Casement's death sentence.
It's obvious, all 3 are or were left-leaning, involved in politics, and had scandalous sex lives. It's the same soul from Casement, to JFK, to Weiner.
ETA: 9 months before Casement was born, Sam Houston died .on Jul. 26, 1863. There's also some nice gossip about Sam's first wife.
By yomero in #481:
Congressman Weiner received his soul from JFK in 1963, who got it from Roger Casement in 1916, from Sam Houston in 1863, from American Revolution naval hero John Paul Jones in 1793 (Had to leave Russia when he was charged with molesting a 10 year old girl.), from Philip V of Spain in 1746, from Tsar Feodor III of Russia in 1682, from Charles X Gustav of Sweden in 1660, from Sultan Osman II of the Ottoman Empire in 1622 and from Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1603.
The reincarnation chain, as presented in your second post, elegantly
demonstrates the difference between reasonable and unreasonable hypotheses.
At first the unreasonable-hypotheses part:
· Elizabeth I (7 September 1533 – 24 March 1603)
· Sultan Osman II (November 3, 1604 – May 20, 1622)
· Charles X Gustav of Sweden (8 November 1622 – 13 February 1660)
· Feodor III of Russia (9 June 1661 – 7 May 1682)
· Philip V of Spain (19 December 1683 - 9 July 1746)
· John Paul Jones (July 6, 1747 – July 18, 1792)
And here the reasonable part:
· John Paul (Jones) (July 6, 1747 – July 18, 1792)
· Sam Houston (March 2, 1793 – July 26, 1863)
· Roger David Casement (September 1, 1864 – August 3, 1916)
· John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963)
· Anthony David Weiner (September 4, 1964)
From the death of John Paul Jones to the birth of Sam Houston only
six and a half months passed. So the conception of Sam would have taken place
when Paul was still alive. As conception and embryonic development of a new
incarnation cost a lot of psychic energy to the old incarnation, this could
explain why John could not recover from his interstitial nephritis and died at
the age of 45 (see
also #406 and #435).
John Paul was born on the southwest coast of Scotland:
"For several
years John sailed aboard a number of different British merchant and slaver
ships, including the King George in 1764 as third mate, and the Two Friends as
first mate in 1766. After a short time in this business, he became disgusted
with the cruelty in the slave trade, and in 1768 he abandoned his prestigious
position on the profitable Two Friends while docked in Jamaica."
"During his second voyage in 1770, John Paul viciously flogged one of his
sailors, leading to accusations that his discipline was "unnecessarily
cruel." While these claims were initially dismissed, his favorable
reputation was destroyed when the disciplined sailor died a few weeks later.
Sources disagree on whether he was arrested for his involvement in the man's
death, but the negative effect on his reputation is indisputable."
"Sources struggle with this period of Jones's life, especially the
specifics of his family situation, making it difficult to historically pinpoint
Jones's exact motivations for emigrating to America."
Sam Houston, of Scots-Irish descent, was born in Virginia:
"His
earlier life included migration to Tennessee from Virginia, time spent with the
Cherokee Nation (into which he later was adopted as a citizen and took a wife),
military service in the War of 1812, and successful participation in Tennessee
politics. Houston is the only person in U.S. history to have been the governor
of two different states (…)."
"In 1830 and again in 1832 Houston visited Washington, DC to expose the
frauds which government agents committed against the Cherokee. "
"To avoid bloodshed, he refused an offer of a Union army to put down the
Confederate rebellion. Instead, he retired to Huntsville, Texas, where he died
before the end of the Civil War."
Roger Casement was born in Dublin:
"He was a British consul by profession, famous for his reports and activities against human rights abuses in the Congo and Peru but better known for his dealings with Germany before Ireland's Easter Rising in 1916. An Irish nationalist and Parnellite in his youth, he worked in Africa for commercial interests and latterly in the service of Britain. However, the Boer War and his consular investigation into atrocities in the Congo led Casement to anti-Imperialist and ultimately to Irish Republican and separatist political opinions. He sought to obtain German support for a rebellion in Ireland against British rule. Shortly after the Easter Rising, he was arrested, convicted, and executed by the British for treason."
---
The
difference between learning something new and mastered in previous life is
substantial
A further, a priori rather improbable coincidence: Exactly nine months passed from the death of Roman Emperor Tiberius (Nov. 16, 42 BC – March 16, AD 37)
Tiberius was one of Rome's greatest generals, conquering Pannonia, Dalmatia, Raetia, and temporarily Germania; laying the foundations for the northern frontier. But he came to be remembered as a dark, reclusive, and sombre ruler who never really desired to be emperor; Pliny the Elder called him tristissimus hominum, "the gloomiest of men." Tiberius is considered to have lacked the political ability of his predecessor Augustus and was a jealous emperor; particularly distrustful of his popular general Germanicus. After the death of Tiberius' son Drusus Julius Caesar in 23, the quality of his rule declined and ended in terror.
to the birth of Nero (15 Dec. 37 – 9 June 68):
Nero's rule is often associated with tyranny and extravagance. He is known for many executions, including those of his mother and the probable murder by poison of his stepbrother, Britannicus.
Thus a major short-term reason of Tiberius' death could have been Nero's
conception, diverting a lot of psychic energy from Tiberius' incarnation to the
new one
(see #406).
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The
more, the longer scientific insights are ignored, ridiculed and fought, the
more revolutionary they are
China's missing girls and demographic inconsistencies
Previous
related posts:
#236 and #446
Quotes from China Releases First 2010 Census
Results:
For mainland
China, the count was 1,339,724,852. Mainland China is the entity normally
listed in population statistics, …. A post-enumeration survey estimated a
census undercount of 0.12 percent. The count was 73,899,804 higher than the
2000 Census figure, an increase of 5.8 percent.
The overall sex ratio of the population, which was 106.7 [male per female] in
2000, decreased to 105.2 in 2010 despite the fact that the reported sex ratio
at birth is quite high at about 119 males to 100 female births (…).
In 2000, this results in a male population of 653.4 million versus 612.4 (female), and in 2010, 686.8 versus 652.9.
Thus, from 2000 to 2010, the male population
increase was 33.4 million whereas the female population increase was as high as
40.5 million.
The sex ratio of the Chinese population increase between 2000 and 2010 turns
out to be as low as 0.825 (males per females) versus 1.19 in the case of
newborns, who are the main factor of this population increase.
Another interesting quote from the same source:
The share in the age group 65 and over rose from 7 percent in 2000 to 9 percent in 2010.
Nine percent of 1.34 billion results in around 120 million. Those
120 million people were born at the latest in 1945. Then total population is
assumed to have been around 538 million (source).
This means that more than 20 percent of the whole population of 1945 survived
over 65 years, despite civil war, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and
other natural and human-made disasters!
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In
the same way as the appearance of so-called "new" pathogenic germs is
only a consequence of new techniques to detect them or to differentiate them
from related germs, the absurdly low world population figures attributed to the
historic past are a result of the confusion of reality with census (and a
remnant of the belief in Adam and Eve).