Reincarnation as a trivial scientific fact

wogoga said:
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)





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)

Cheers, Wolfgang
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You know, I'm almost sorry I asked. But with a reply that concise, so elegant and explanatory . . . No, I am sorry I asked. :jaw-dropp
 
wogoga said:
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.
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I know I'm late to the party but WTF?

God can reincarnate souls but he can't move them out of Japan?

What about Japanese people who die while on vacation? Do they reincarnate back in Japan or do they reincarnate in San Francisco? And who are the builders of Riverworld? Will the fabulous riverboat finally tell us the answers?
 
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Loss Leader said:
I know I'm late to the party but WTF?

God can reincarnate souls but he can't move them out of Japan?
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No wonder all those Japanese ghosts are so angry!

sadako.jpg
 
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bruto said:
How does any epidemic begin if not locally?
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They are borne in the Psychon nebula and ride in the slipstream of Occam's razor as it cuts a swathe through the Panpsychistic belt, dropping the Trousertron field shielding Uranus
 
six7s said:
They are borne in the Psychon nebula and ride in the slipstream of Occam's razor as it cuts a swathe through the Panpsychistic belt, dropping the Trousertron field shielding Uranus
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not damn likely.
that would create a quantum non-singularity in the morphic field.

epidemics, like every thing else, begin locally...as long as the big bang remains big.
 
The relationship between quanta and psychons

wogoga said:
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?
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Gord_in_Toronto said:
... But he did not actually say the word "quantum".
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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 received 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 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 reception. Only this additional quantization leads to such concepts as 'virtual photons', 'gravitons' and 'gluons'. Thus the concept 'virtual photon' 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." (...)

Cheers, Wolfgang
 
And now he has said the word "quanta." And it looks like the officials are going to drop the cow. Yes, yes, they've dropped the cow. They've dropped the cow.
 
wogoga said:
Is it difficult to recognize that the psychon concept is related to the concept of quanta as conceived by Einstein?

<< SNIPPITY SNIP SNIP SNIPPITY >>

Cheers, Wolfgang
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Well, at least you didn't use the word "eigenvector".

{Gord waits patiently}


:eye-poppi
 


wogoga said:
Is it difficult to recognize that the psychon concept is related to the concept of quanta as conceived by Einstein?

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.

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 received 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 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 reception. Only this additional quantization leads to such concepts as 'virtual photons', 'gravitons' and 'gluons'. Thus the concept 'virtual photon' is completely different from Einstein's light quanta.

Cheers, Wolfgang
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Wog, how do you discern between souled people and folks like SilentKnight and myself who have none?
 
bruto said:
...
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"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).

"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.

Cheers, Wolfgang

Still four centuries ago heliocentrism seemed as ridiculous as reincarnation today
 
wogoga said:
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.

Cheers, Wolfgang

Still four centuries ago heliocentrism seemed as ridiculous as reincarnation today
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Wolfgang, seriously...


 
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The OP is a variation on currency devaluation, with souls as a metaphor. As noted above, 1,000,000,000 humans in mid 1800's, 6,000,000,000 now. Each soul now is 1/6th as valuable, using the soul gold standard. (It's a plot by the Fed and the Rothschilds.)

Conclusion: Life is cheap

Under this idea, life is not just "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" per Hobbes' depiction, but continually cheapening as time increases. Calvin, with his insistence on predestination and being in the right club to get a membership at the Best Souls Country Club, would seem to be in accord with this offering from wogoga, if he ever got that board out of his arse.

Considering the tension between Calvin and Hobbes, how does the tacit approval of a seven year old boy cartoon character bolster the prospects of validity for wogoga's idea?

Calvin' dad may have the answer.

http://www.simplych.com/light.gif

DR
 
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Loss Leader said:
I like it. So, you think God is slow playing us.
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Maybe he has a marginal hand and wants to see a cheap flop with lots of people in the pot, hoping not to get reraised before the flop.

I'm guessing he has a middle pair.
 
Feeling free to stray off topic now:

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could track the molecules of our corpse?
Imagine the implications of different corpse disposal techniques!

What an amazing journey our molecules make after we are no longer in charge of them!
This should be worthy of some wooishness, but woo isn't frisky enough to play.

I've yet to meet a scientist that can list the top 10 species on earth, by bio-mass.

Never met a geologist that could tell me where the longest continuous flow of fresh water is. Said place should be a holy shrine. Instead, it isn't part of the conversation.

What?
 
jsfisher said:
If reincarnation is a trivial scientific fact, as you hypothesize, please provide a falsifiable prediction.
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wogoga said:
If reductionist materialism is such a self-evident fact, as you assume, please provide a falsifiable prediction.
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jsfisher said:
Evasion attempt noted. Straw man noted.
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This is the typical behaviour 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 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.

Experiments of this kind been performed. However, the results of such adverse selection experiments 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.

Cheers, Wolfgang
 
wogoga said:
This is the typical behaviour 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.
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You didn't present it as a religion or belief system. You called it a, and I quote, "a trivial scientific fact." So, while your "own religion or belief system is so self-evident that arguments or facts supporting it are not necessary" (to you, anyway), as a scientific fact, you need to provide a bit more.

Either provide the appropriate evidence to support your claim or retract it. And evasion attempts aren't evidence.
 
wogoga said:
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.
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It seems to me that there is a prediction here that can be tested.

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.

Is there any evidence of this?

--Tim Farley


P.S. Please do not simply Google "fertility" and "Japan" and use the results to compose an answer. The articles you get as a result of that are using "fertility" as a synonym for "population growth" and thus do not answer the question I am posing.
 
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krelnik said:
It seems to me that there is a prediction here that can be tested.

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.

Is there any evidence of this?

--Tim Farley


P.S. Please do not simply Google "fertility" and "Japan" and use the results to compose an answer. The articles you get as a result of that are using "fertility" as a synonym for "population growth" and thus do not answer the question I am posing.
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are you trying to force logic?
you should be called on this, yet I merely play a 'woo' on tv.

nevertheless,

May we survive logic.

(fuzzy is a good place to start, for wannabe cured of Asperger's people)

btw, I dig efficiency, but christ, can we have some color with that?
 
JoeEllison said:
No wonder all those Japanese ghosts are so angry!

[qimg]http://www.geocities.com/eigakai/sadako.jpg[/qimg]
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wogoga said:
This is the typical behaviour 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 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.

Experiments of this kind been performed. However, the results of such adverse selection experiments 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.

Cheers, Wolfgang
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sorry, but i'm not convinced until you can show me a documentary with spooky music.
 
wogoga said:
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.
Click to expand...

jsfisher said:
Either provide the appropriate evidence to support your claim or retract it. And evasion attempts aren't evidence.
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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 expained existing experiments after the fact? In this case you should take into consideration that until now such adverse selection experiments 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 sperma 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 neeed
Apriori (ie. 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.

Cheers, Wolfgang
 
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wogoga said:
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.
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So, in addition to there being only a finite number of souls of each kind, the souls retain the life-experience of their most recent owner, and they tend to hang around the same general area after the previous owner dies just in case that retained life-experience might be needed by the next generation in that same area?

Is that really your hypothesis?

Or do you claim that this is not prediction but a postdiction because I expained existing experiments after the fact?
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Well, that plus the fact that the Lamarckian inheritance hypothesis hasn't faired all that well under repeated experimentation. Nor has any credible scientist suggested a psychon-based explanation for Lamarckian inheritance.

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".
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You answered a question with a question wrapped around a straw man. That would generally be considered an evasion.
 
wogoga said:
This is the typical behaviour 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 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.

Experiments of this kind been performed. However, the results of such adverse selection experiments 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.

Cheers, Wolfgang
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So. Can you give us a reference to this experiment? While you are looking for it you might also check out the phrase "regression to the mean" as well. http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/regrmean.php
might be a good place to look. :boggled:
 
wogoga said:
Around 7 or 7.5 million in the case of human souls.
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Wow, that leaves about 5.993 billion people without souls, or 99.9% of the world's population.

Now that's what I call a soulless world! :rolleyes:
 
wogogo - your stuff is some of the silliest I've read in a long time.

I think you actually believe some of this crap.
 
wogoga said:
Because souls are reborn with increased probability in a similar environment by related souls...
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Whoa! Whoa!! Whoa!!! Hang on!

"Because souls are reborn"?

:confused:

Are you seriously expecting such wildly, extraordinarily unsubstantiated woo to pass on a sceptics forum?

If so, please think again... but go easy on the bong this time
 
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