Theories of consciousness and reincarnation
Theories of consciousness range from the purely scientific - that personal consciousness, as we know it, is a mechanism of unique neural connections molded by genetics and experience - to the spiritual, which argue the existence of a non-corporeal component to life: the soul. Still other thinkers - like Roger Penrose - theorize that consciousness and human creativity may require a new science altogether; that, as Penrose and Hameroff (2014) put it, "consciousness results from discrete physical events; such events have always existed in the universe as non-cognitive, proto-conscious events, these acting as part of precise physical laws not yet fully understood."
For the layperson, however, theories raise more questions than they answer, offering little comfort in confronting the essential human questions of "what makes me me?" and, more poignantly, "what happens to to me when I die?" The latter question is arguably the real question of consciousness, as it comes as a result of recognizing the presence of one's own subjective cognition/individual consciousness and the realization that said consciousness erodes and eventually ceases with the end of physical life... or seems to. It's an existential black mirror; the dark side of Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." Without a cohesive understanding of or agreement on the mechanics and laws of consciousness, that question can't be answered. It cannot even be presumed to have an answer awaiting after death, for if death is the absolute negation of consciousness - if you cease to be when you cease to think - then there is no "finding out" after we die: there's just the vacuum of not-being, a state of statelessness.
In the midst of these theories, however, are those that believe in a kind of recycling of consciousness: that individual selves may be reincarnated in new bodies, sometimes retaining scraps of memory - and even physical features - from the lives they lived before. One of the most prominent proponents of that theory was Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist who worked for five decades at the University of Virginia's School of Medicine, where he founded the Division of Perceptual Studies, which studies "phenomena related to consciousness clearly functioning beyond the confines of the physical body, as well as phenomena that are directly suggestive of post-mortem survival of consciousness." Beginning in 1960, Stevenson traveled the world investigating thousands cases of reincarnation, documenting his findings and eventually writing several books on the subject, including his groundbreaking work Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and the massive, two-volume Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. The book documents 200 different cases of children - often from very remote areas of the world - who had memories and birthmarks that corresponded with those of deceased people whose lives they claimed to have lived before. Some, who claimed to have died violently, had birthmarks or physical defects where the deceased had suffered a mortal injury, while others suffered from phobias relating to their past death.
Theories of consciousness range from the purely scientific - that personal consciousness, as we know it, is a mechanism of unique neural connections molded by genetics and experience - to the spiritual, which argue the existence of a non-corporeal component to life: the soul. Still other thinkers - like Roger Penrose - theorize that consciousness and human creativity may require a new science altogether; that, as Penrose and Hameroff (2014) put it, "consciousness results from discrete physical events; such events have always existed in the universe as non-cognitive, proto-conscious events, these acting as part of precise physical laws not yet fully understood."
For the layperson, however, theories raise more questions than they answer, offering little comfort in confronting the essential human questions of "what makes me me?" and, more poignantly, "what happens to to me when I die?" The latter question is arguably the real question of consciousness, as it comes as a result of recognizing the presence of one's own subjective cognition/individual consciousness and the realization that said consciousness erodes and eventually ceases with the end of physical life... or seems to. It's an existential black mirror; the dark side of Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." Without a cohesive understanding of or agreement on the mechanics and laws of consciousness, that question can't be answered. It cannot even be presumed to have an answer awaiting after death, for if death is the absolute negation of consciousness - if you cease to be when you cease to think - then there is no "finding out" after we die: there's just the vacuum of not-being, a state of statelessness.
In the midst of these theories, however, are those that believe in a kind of recycling of consciousness: that individual selves may be reincarnated in new bodies, sometimes retaining scraps of memory - and even physical features - from the lives they lived before. One of the most prominent proponents of that theory was Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist who worked for five decades at the University of Virginia's School of Medicine, where he founded the Division of Perceptual Studies, which studies "phenomena related to consciousness clearly functioning beyond the confines of the physical body, as well as phenomena that are directly suggestive of post-mortem survival of consciousness." Beginning in 1960, Stevenson traveled the world investigating thousands cases of reincarnation, documenting his findings and eventually writing several books on the subject, including his groundbreaking work Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and the massive, two-volume Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. The book documents 200 different cases of children - often from very remote areas of the world - who had memories and birthmarks that corresponded with those of deceased people whose lives they claimed to have lived before. Some, who claimed to have died violently, had birthmarks or physical defects where the deceased had suffered a mortal injury, while others suffered from phobias relating to their past death.
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