Epoch Times in 2015 said Stevenson’s successor Jim Tucker has brought the total up to “about 2000 cases”.
Anyway, I will come out and say I don’t believe it. Reincarnation may be logically possible—many things are logically possible—but the ascertainable facts don’t provide sufficient reason to think it’s actually happening. Adults consistently underestimate the imagination and intuition of children, and scientists regularly convince themselves of things that are false (and then there’s the level of discussion present e.g. in cable TV documentaries, which is far more characteristic of ordinary thinking on the subject, and which cannot be counted on to have any respect for truth at all).
Also, our current understanding of neural networks, suggests that individual brains develop idiosyncratic representations for anything complex, a problem for the idea that memories of other lives, formed in other brains, get downloaded into them. This is not a decisive objection, but it’s definitely an issue for anyone seeking a mechanism.
It means very little evidentially, but I will report one thing that happened when I looked into this. In the opinion of some, Stevenson’s most convincing case was a boy from Lebanon. I thought: Lebanon is a Muslim country, and one doesn’t associate Islam with belief in reincarnation. Then I remembered the Druze sect—and indeed, on further study by myself, the boy turned out to be from a Druze family.
Reincarnation studies may be of interest from the perspective of “anomalistic psychology”—belief in reincarnation, after all, is part of some of the world’s major belief systems; and understanding why people believe in it, and how that belief is reinforced in new generations, may shed light on how those cultures work.
That’s definitely the proper naïve reaction to assume in my opinion. I would say with extremely high confidence that this is one of those things that takes dozens of hours of reading to overcome one’s priors toward, if your priors are well-defined. It took every bit of that for me. The reason for this is that there’s always a solid-sounding objection to any one case—it takes knowing tons of them by heart to see how the common challenges fail to hold up. So, in my experience and that of many I know, the degree which one is inclined to buy into it is a direct correlation of how determined one is to get to the bottom of it. Otherwise, I have to agree with you that there’s no really compelling reason to be convinced based on what a casual search will show you. That, as well, seems to be the experience of most. Those who really care tend to get it, but it is inherently time-and-effort prohibitive. I really don’t feel like asking anyone to undertake that unless they’re heavily motivated.
Stevenson’s greatest flaw as a researcher was that he didn’t look terribly hard for American and otherwise Western cases, and the few he stumbled into were often mediocre at best. Therefore, he was repeatedly subjected to justified criticism of the nature “you can’t isolate your data from the cultural environment it develops in”. However, this issue has been entirely dissolved by successors who have rectidfied his error and found that they’re just as common in non-believer Western families as anywhere, including arguably stronger ones than anything he found. This is definitely the most important data-collection development in the field during the 21st century.
I must say I’m not at all interested in belief systems as an object of study, though—my goal is more or less to eradicate them. They’re nothing but epistemic pollution.
Epoch Times in 2015 said Stevenson’s successor Jim Tucker has brought the total up to “about 2000 cases”.
Anyway, I will come out and say I don’t believe it. Reincarnation may be logically possible—many things are logically possible—but the ascertainable facts don’t provide sufficient reason to think it’s actually happening. Adults consistently underestimate the imagination and intuition of children, and scientists regularly convince themselves of things that are false (and then there’s the level of discussion present e.g. in cable TV documentaries, which is far more characteristic of ordinary thinking on the subject, and which cannot be counted on to have any respect for truth at all).
Also, our current understanding of neural networks, suggests that individual brains develop idiosyncratic representations for anything complex, a problem for the idea that memories of other lives, formed in other brains, get downloaded into them. This is not a decisive objection, but it’s definitely an issue for anyone seeking a mechanism.
It means very little evidentially, but I will report one thing that happened when I looked into this. In the opinion of some, Stevenson’s most convincing case was a boy from Lebanon. I thought: Lebanon is a Muslim country, and one doesn’t associate Islam with belief in reincarnation. Then I remembered the Druze sect—and indeed, on further study by myself, the boy turned out to be from a Druze family.
Reincarnation studies may be of interest from the perspective of “anomalistic psychology”—belief in reincarnation, after all, is part of some of the world’s major belief systems; and understanding why people believe in it, and how that belief is reinforced in new generations, may shed light on how those cultures work.
That’s definitely the proper naïve reaction to assume in my opinion. I would say with extremely high confidence that this is one of those things that takes dozens of hours of reading to overcome one’s priors toward, if your priors are well-defined. It took every bit of that for me. The reason for this is that there’s always a solid-sounding objection to any one case—it takes knowing tons of them by heart to see how the common challenges fail to hold up. So, in my experience and that of many I know, the degree which one is inclined to buy into it is a direct correlation of how determined one is to get to the bottom of it. Otherwise, I have to agree with you that there’s no really compelling reason to be convinced based on what a casual search will show you. That, as well, seems to be the experience of most. Those who really care tend to get it, but it is inherently time-and-effort prohibitive. I really don’t feel like asking anyone to undertake that unless they’re heavily motivated.
Stevenson’s greatest flaw as a researcher was that he didn’t look terribly hard for American and otherwise Western cases, and the few he stumbled into were often mediocre at best. Therefore, he was repeatedly subjected to justified criticism of the nature “you can’t isolate your data from the cultural environment it develops in”. However, this issue has been entirely dissolved by successors who have rectidfied his error and found that they’re just as common in non-believer Western families as anywhere, including arguably stronger ones than anything he found. This is definitely the most important data-collection development in the field during the 21st century.
I must say I’m not at all interested in belief systems as an object of study, though—my goal is more or less to eradicate them. They’re nothing but epistemic pollution.