If you always come back to life, and you remember your previous lives, is it really death? How is it really different from going to sleep?
Suicide would skyrocket, and people would be born with ungodly amounts of personal debt. Honestly, I don’t see any positive to this.
Lol saw an anime like this. Dude racked up huge debt from the same yokai over 5ish life times. Because MC is scummy in most life times. Now he’s actually competent and they wont wait for him to pay it off.
In the US? Worse, much worse. We’d have kings and queens at this point. The rich would make sure that their wealth always came back to them. People would probably have to test who their baby was before, probably a lot of adoptions and what have you. I could see parents suing the rich person if they didn’t share their wealth, likely new laws would need to be enacted to insure the wealth isn’t shared with anyone (and we know it’ll pass because anything that hurts people always passes). I could even see a greater decline in birthrates. Who wants to carry a baby to term just to have it snatched away by the Walmart empire and leaving you with nothing but the scars? Or what if you happen to get a murderer who did heinous things?
Oh god, and debt would never, ever die. As soon as you’re 18, they’d drop those same bills off, likely with interest. There would be no end to suffering, no peace at the end. You’ll be in your 80’s, still working to pay off debt that may be from two lifetimes ago. It would be harder for new artists as well. Just keep throwing Beyonce out there. Why get a new actor? Just keep putting the same guy in there, over and over.
Only thing I could see getting a little better is racism. Since you can’t control who or what you come back as, kind of hard to hate brown people when you’re just a flip of a coin away. They literally wouldn’t be able to judge a book by its cover.
Suicides would skyrocket, too, and probably at a young age. Probably infant death would skyrocket, too. Imagine you have a kid with a birth defect or some other kind of lifelong condition. Why make them live a whole life dealing with that when you can just let them take a mulligan and reincarnate, hopefully under better conditions.
Get into an accident and lose the use of your legs or get paralyzed or something? Oh well. Better luck on your next play-through. Hit the reset button and try again.
In the US? Worse, much worse. We’d have kings and queens at this point. The rich would make sure that their wealth always came back to them.
Why? In a world where everyone is reincarnated, what value does life have? If you get jealous of someone, you can kill them and kill yourself. If you have no material wealth, you have nothing to lose.
The “value” is the ability to escape from the cycle and exist outside of this world. Self realization is the goal. And to be able to understand the concept on a level that can get a person out of here means repayment of karmic debt that is tied to many previous lives. So by starting to be a good person today maybe in only a few hundred more lives we can become liberated. It’s not an easy game to beat.
It’s said that when we die everything can be accessed, every second of our life so reading the “Tibetan Book of The Dead” ( the great book of natural liberation through understanding in the between) even once we will have a better chance of closing a better life on the path of liberation from suffering.
I had a hard time understanding/ believing any of these concepts. But every question I had seemed to have a reasonable answer
But we do choose the next life. It is far to complicated to explain here. There are many factors in the afterlife that cause bad choices to be made, karmic debt ( which is carried on from many past lives) for one.
We are also reborn on other planets and have all been each other’s relatives in almost every combination possible.
We do remember our past lives but we are reborn into a body that barely functions. We can’t control it in the sense that even a 4 year old can. Rather than that information of our previous life being discussed we forget about it while being presented with our new life and the realization that we are once again trapped in the cycle of birth and death.
tw
It’s a bit dark, but I think suicide would become extremely common. Born in a third world country? Reroll. Born as the wrong gender? Mulligan. Getting old? Refresh. etc.
It would probably cause a lot of chaos in society. I think there would probably be a stigma around it unless there’s a good reason, with people going out of their way to prove that they died naturally. I guess you’d have to memorize a secret phrase or something to prove you’re the same person.
Also, would people even want to have kids, if it’s just some random old person’s mind? Not really sure how I would feel about that.
And what happens when the population decreases? Would everyone just be waiting in a queue to be born, or would they actually die? Either way, choosing to not have kids would become a bit of a tragedy of the commons.
What if you can only roll a luckier/comfier start if you “finish this run better than you start it”/you’re happy and truly grateful for it. That seems like a necessary rule to make this system work, lol.
Rich people would try to develop a technique to identify and transfer their wealth to their next life. If no way exists to identify people apart from memory, you would probably get a lot of people claiming to be the same wealthy dead person.
Things also might get ugly if people or states try to punish the reincarnations of people for whom death or a life sentence wasn’t determined to be “enough” (though on the other hand, I suppose murder would be less heinous a crime since the victim just comes back and isn’t gone), or if people seek out the reincarnations of dead spouses, since those reincarnated people would now be babies.
On the brighter side, if those past memories are good enough, education becomes a lot more effective since it doesn’t just teach the current person but all their future incarnations until the subject matter gets forgotten or out of date.
Never mind karmic debt, you’d carry your student loans over to the next life.
People would know what the last seconds before death actually feels like.
No one mentioned the sh$@! Lovers would go through. Like its great if you always have your soul mate but what happens if you love 2 different souls in 2 different life times and now they exist at same time or worst none exist at all.
I’m 50 and forget shit all the time now. I’m pretty sure the human mind was really only meant to carry a finite amount of data. Hundreds or thousands of years worth of memories probably wouldn’t be possible for us to hold onto, with any degree of accuracy.
I think carrying the weight of too many memories becomes psychologically harmful.
At a certain point, I think people would actively seek out ways to flush old memories. If there was technology to do a “reset” and start over, I think people would use it, perhaps like an alternative to suicide.
This is what alcohol is for.
You would just carry over the traumas, without any good memories.
And sometimes the good memories become traumas when you realize the circumstances behind them are gone forever.
In most versions of reincarnation mythology, you can’t remember your past lives, and the goal is to attain a peak and cease to rebirth.
Neuroscience is fairly certain that souls don’t exist, and rhat consciousness is just an emergent property of a brain.
No one has any idea of whether consciousness is emergent or not. It’s unfalsifiable. Emergent consciousness is just speculation.
When consciousness observes reality, reality will change its behaviour, or seems to, and that would suggest that maybe reality is emergent from consciousness. But again, unfalsifiable, cannot be proven nor disproven.
Point is, no one anywhere has a solid grasp on what consciousness is. That’s why it’s called “the hard problem of consciousness”
Whichever way you look at it both are equally absurd.
In order for that debate to even take place, it has to be proven that “consciousness” exists on some special level.
There’s no proof that there is some special sauce that is “consciousness” beyond just synapses, hormones and chemicals.
In other words, It’s very likely that consciousness falls under the category of “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…”
My answers aren’t dictated by an awareness of self; they’re dictated by a chemical hormonal soup that we pretend is some grand concept of self-awareness.
Uh, unless you’re a philosophical zombie, you have direct proof that consciousness exists. On a level that isn’t directly explainable from our current understanding of the brain.
I don’t have any proof that anyone else is conscious. For all I know, it’s possible that everyone else is just a biological automaton. (although occam’s razor suggests otherwise)
But I do experience my own existence and awareness. So because of that, I’m 100% certain that consciousness is a real thing, more certain than I am of literally anything else existing.
I’d like to clarify that it doesn’t mean that free will exists, and doesn’t suggest whether consciousness is emergent, separate, or universal. But it definitely exists beyond just being some observable collection of behaviours.
But I do experience my own existence and awareness.
Yes you do. we all do. But is your self-awareness of that fact merely a function of your synapses responding to stimuli in a predictable way?
In other words, is “I think therefore I am” just another biological response to stimuli rather than something philosophically greater than those “observable collection of behaviours” as you describe them.
I’d argue that no, it isn’t.
We are “aware” for the same reason that we pull our hand away from a hot stove burner; neural response to external stimuli.
It’s not that we are “programmed”, as you describe. It’s simply that (I believe) our self-awareness is a biological function, not an existential one.
I concur
2 words: Fuckin’ awesome!
Y’all already lay in bed awake at night thinking about that cringy thing you did when you were in middle school. Yeah, that thing. Y’all want lifetimes of that?
“Hey Carl?”
“Yeah, Mikey?”
“Remember when we-”
“No, and I don’t want to.”
“Inostrancevias, Carl. We were inostrancevias. And you-”
“Goddamn it, Mikey, I told you I hate remembering this.”
“Haha! Yeah. You did. So, like, we were inostrancevias, it was like 260 million years ago, and you - haha! - you managed to choke to death!”
“Shut up.”
“On a rock! Because you thought it was a small animal! Haha!”
“…I hate you so much.”
“Ever wonder what that rock reincarnated as? Eh?”
“I’m leaving.”
who would you like to be the incarnation of?
I would like to be Ataw Wallpa Churin de Wayna Qhapaq Tiyanhapiy
Horrible. Hell on Earth, even more hellish than it already is.
Like, when I kms, I wanna end this. If I get reincarnated, I want a fresh start, not having to fullfill past promises.
Can you imagine being the Avatar?
The Dragon Reborn in Wheel of Time?
Jesus christ, I’d go avatar state and kms to end it all. Or balefire myself. Fuck that. I aint gonna go on an adventure every life, learning 4 elements every fucking life. Or fight a battle with the evil forces of the universe, nor sell my soul to the Dark One. I wanna chill and watch TV, or play a video game, or just chill and not worry about the world ending.
Reincarnation is “meh”, but fuck the memories. Don’t want them unless every other soul in the universe become “enlightened” and conflict ends, and everyone stops judging me for past actions.
