I mean I actually think you are catastrophically wrong about there being any “hidden variable” knowledge-passing, but I’m going to talk to you to figure out why you believe it, not just dismiss it a priori! I simply expect the evidence for dualist violations of known physics to turn out to be very weak.
could you cite somewhere I can look to find more of this? after looking briefly at wikipedia, I find what I expected to find—careful analysis of a plausibly astounding phenomenon, carefully catalogued and currently expected to be found to not be blatantly violating thermodynamics about what the kids knew when. If the kids can recite passwords they could not possibly have had access to, then it would start to seem plausible—but it takes an awful lot of evidence to overcome “it was just the kid forgetting they’d seen the stuff before”, and it looks like the evidence probably isn’t there. certainly no causally isolated studies.
Critics of Stevenson’s claims include the philospher Paul Edwards, who criticized Ian Stevenson’s accounts of reincarnation as being purely anecdotal and cherry-picked.[275] Edwards attributed the stories to selective thinking, suggestion, and false memories that result from the family’s or researcher’s belief systems and thus cannot be counted as empirical evidence.[276] The philosopher Keith Augustine wrote in critique that the fact that “the vast majority of Stevenson’s cases come from countries where a religious belief in reincarnation is strong, and rarely elsewhere, seems to indicate that cultural conditioning (rather than reincarnation) generates claims of spontaneous past-life memories.”[277] Further, Ian Wilson pointed out that a large number of Stevenson’s cases consisted of poor children remembering wealthy lives or belonging to a higher caste. In these societies, claims of reincarnation are sometimes used as schemes to obtain money from the richer families of alleged former incarnations.[278] Stevenson later published a book of cases from a cultural area where belief in reincarnation is not mainstream, European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. Even still, Robert Baker asserted that all the past-life experiences investigated by Stevenson and other parapsychologists are understandable in terms of known psychological factors including a mixture of cryptomnesia and confabulation.[279] Edwards also objected that reincarnation invokes assumptions that are inconsistent with modern science.[280] As the vast majority of people do not remember previous lives and there is no empirically documented mechanism known that allows personality to survive death and travel to another body, positing the existence of reincarnation is subject to the principle that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Researchers such as Stevenson acknowledged these limitations.[268]
Stevenson also claimed there were a handful of cases that suggested evidence of xenoglossy, including two where a subject under hypnosis allegedly conversed with people speaking the foreign language, instead of merely being able to recite foreign words. Sarah Thomason, a linguist (and skeptical researcher) at the University of Michigan, reanalyzed these cases, concluding that “the linguistic evidence is too weak to provide support for the claims of xenoglossy.”[281]
There is a case on record that involved a recalled phone number. A password is a completely plausible next step forward.
For a very approachable and modernized take on the subject matter, I’d check out the book Before by Jim Tucker, a current leading researcher.
As a disclaimer, it’s perfectly rational and Bayesian to be extremely doubtful of such “modest” proposals at first blush—I was for a good length of time, until I did the depth of investigation that was necessary to form an expert opinion. Don’t take my word for things!
I mean I actually think you are catastrophically wrong about there being any “hidden variable” knowledge-passing, but I’m going to talk to you to figure out why you believe it, not just dismiss it a priori! I simply expect the evidence for dualist violations of known physics to turn out to be very weak.
could you cite somewhere I can look to find more of this? after looking briefly at wikipedia, I find what I expected to find—careful analysis of a plausibly astounding phenomenon, carefully catalogued and currently expected to be found to not be blatantly violating thermodynamics about what the kids knew when. If the kids can recite passwords they could not possibly have had access to, then it would start to seem plausible—but it takes an awful lot of evidence to overcome “it was just the kid forgetting they’d seen the stuff before”, and it looks like the evidence probably isn’t there. certainly no causally isolated studies.
There is a case on record that involved a recalled phone number. A password is a completely plausible next step forward.
For a very approachable and modernized take on the subject matter, I’d check out the book Before by Jim Tucker, a current leading researcher.
As a disclaimer, it’s perfectly rational and Bayesian to be extremely doubtful of such “modest” proposals at first blush—I was for a good length of time, until I did the depth of investigation that was necessary to form an expert opinion. Don’t take my word for things!