Yes, it certainly helps to understand how the present moment has arisen.kirk5a wrote:Except "living in the present moment" has to include an understanding of causality.
Spiny
Yes, it certainly helps to understand how the present moment has arisen.kirk5a wrote:Except "living in the present moment" has to include an understanding of causality.
I meant becoming aware of the causality of craving/clinging in creating suffering. What do you mean?Spiny O'Norman wrote:Yes, it certainly helps to understand how the present moment has arisen.kirk5a wrote:Except "living in the present moment" has to include an understanding of causality.
Spiny
Yes, certainly that, but also more generally - for example how our current mind-state ( which is dependently originated ) determines the way we experience the present.kirk5a wrote:I meant becoming aware of the causality of craving/clinging in creating suffering. What do you mean?Spiny O'Norman wrote:Yes, it certainly helps to understand how the present moment has arisen.kirk5a wrote:Except "living in the present moment" has to include an understanding of causality.
Spiny
WikipediaStevenson never claimed that he had proved the existence of reincarnation, and cautiously referred to his cases as being "of the reincarnation type" or "suggestive of reincarnation".[13] He concluded that "reincarnation is the best — even though not the only — explanation for the stronger cases we have investigated".[14]
Stevenson's work has received a mixed response. In 1977, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease devoted most of one issue to Stevenson's work and the journal's editor described Stevenson as "a methodical, careful, even cautious investigator."[8] His methodology was criticized for providing no conclusive evidence for the existence of past lives.[15] In a book review criticizing one of Stevensons' books, the reviewer raised the concern that many of Stevenson's examples were gathered in cultures with pre-existing belief in reincarnation.[16] In order to address this type of concern, Stevenson wrote European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003) which presented 40 cases he examined in Europe.[17] Stevenson's obituary in the New York Times stated: "Spurned by most academic scientists, Dr. Stevenson was to his supporters a misunderstood genius, bravely pushing the boundaries of science. To his detractors, he was earnest, dogged but ultimately misguided, led astray by gullibility, wishful thinking and a tendency to see science where others saw superstition".[12]
Deducing from this research the conclusion that reincarnation is a proven fact has been listed as an example of pseudoscience by skeptics.[18] Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke felt that Stevenson's work fell short of providing proof of reincarnation (which they both viewed as unlikely). Nevertheless, they felt that further research was warranted. In The Demon-Haunted World (1996), Sagan wrote that claims about reincarnation may have some experimental support, however dubious and inconclusive. He said "at the time of writing, there are three claims in the ESP field that deserve serious study", the third being "young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation."[19][20] Sagan further stated he picked the three examples not because he thought them valid, but as examples of contentions that might be true.[21] Clarke observed that Stevenson had produced a number of studies that were "hard to explain" conventionally, then noted that accepting reincarnation raised the question of the means for personality transfer.[22] To date no physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body has been identified,[23] which researchers such as Stevenson and Tucker recognize as a limitation.[8] Skeptic Sam Harris said of Stevenson "either he is a victim of truly elaborate fraud, or something interesting is going on."[24]
Stevenson's research was the subject of Tom Shroder's Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives (1999) and Jim B. Tucker's Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives (2005). Psychiatrist Jim Tucker took over Stevenson's work on his retirement in 2002.
However, the anecdotes were scrutinized and verified as scientifically as possible I think and often quite compelling evidence was found in that way. For example facts about the previous family of the supposedly reborn child which the child couldn't have known without memory, etc.Moggalana wrote: As far as I know, his work is based on anecdotal evidence and that's not really a scientific proof.
In which sense is this considered a limitation?Wikipedia wrote:To date no physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body has been identified,[23] which researchers such as Stevenson and Tucker recognize as a limitation.
Ian Stevenson wrote:I'm not much of a missionary. Most of that was drained out of me on my first trip to India. I did have a certain zeal when I first went there. When I talked to Ramakrishna Swami in Chandigarh, he asked me what I was doing, and I replied with a certain enthusiasm. After a long silence he finally said, "We know that reincarnation is true, but it doesn't make any difference because here in India we have just as many rogues and villains as you have in the West"
End of interview.
In the sense that a scientific theory offers hypotheses to account for such processes, testable hypotheses which are then examined, and either refined or discarded; and then this process is repeated until successful predictions are able to be made on the basis of the developed model(s). Without offering a hypothesis about how such a mechanism might operate in the case of reincarnation, the research amounts to anecdotal correlation with no variable control. Making hard and fast conclusions on this sort of foundation is unwarranted.perkele wrote:In which sense is this considered a limitation?Wikipedia wrote:To date no physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body has been identified,[23] which researchers such as Stevenson and Tucker recognize as a limitation.
I disagree with some things that is said there.Aloka wrote:Here is a review that I found some time ago of Stevenson's book ''Children who remember previous lives''
http://www.skepticreport.com/sr/?p=482
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Sure we would know about them, if rebirth is truly the heritage of all sentient beings; for as many as have lived and died there would be a consistent sampling to be found throughout humanity, across all cultures. True, a culture where rebirth is not a belief would censor some accounts or not be as keen to the matter as those that hold rebirth as fact, but even still there would be those, random and not specialized, who would still listen to accounts and find what comparisons to evidence may be found. Yet what we actually find instead in cultures without rebirth belief is that the only voice for it's evidence (aside from immigrant cultures) is with the theosophists, the spiritualists or other dubious thinkers like Mr. Stevenson.alex123 wrote:If the memories were in skeptical communities or those holding other beliefs, the child could be told to stop fantasizing and the memories would be ridiculed and criticized so that child would disown them - thus we would never know about them.
Belief in rebirth apparently was in early Christianity and in ancient Greece, not to mention India.ancientbuddhism wrote:Sure we would know about them, if rebirth is truly the heritage of all sentient beings; for as many as have lived and died there would be a consistent sampling to be found throughout humanity, across all cultures.
They may be dismissed as child's fantasies, and who gives much credibility to "child's fantasies"? Furthermore the parents could dissuade the child so that the child himself will believe that these are fantasizes. A parent might not be able to check the facts, and wouldn't want to expose his/her child to possible ridicule.ancientbuddhism wrote: True, a culture where rebirth is not a belief would censor some accounts
Justsit wrote: In addition, science requires reproducible results to prove a theory; one set of results proves nothing. No reproducible results = no proof.
Full stop.
Okay. In physics and related sciences models are developed to explain certain phenomena which have been observed. These models then predict some phenomena to occur and it can be tested if they indeed do occur.daverupa wrote:In the sense that a scientific theory offers hypotheses to account for such processes, testable hypotheses which are then examined, and either refined or discarded; and then this process is repeated until successful predictions are able to be made on the basis of the developed model(s). Without offering a hypothesis about how such a mechanism might operate in the case of reincarnation, the research amounts to anecdotal correlation with no variable control. Making hard and fast conclusions on this sort of foundation is unwarranted.perkele wrote:In which sense is this considered a limitation?Wikipedia wrote:To date no physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body has been identified,[23] which researchers such as Stevenson and Tucker recognize as a limitation.
I never said there was a "proof" in the strict sense. My point was rather to show that it is moot to insist on unapplicable standards. That was my point when I asked this:Justsit wrote: In addition, science requires reproducible results to prove a theory; one set of results proves nothing. No reproducible results = no proof.
Full stop.
Anyway I'd call Stevenson's work scientific in the sense of "earnest, conscientious and rigorous investigation".perkele wrote:In which sense is this considered a limitation?Wikipedia wrote:To date no physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body has been identified,[23] which researchers such as Stevenson and Tucker recognize as a limitation.
Ian Stevenson wrote:When I talked to Ramakrishna Swami in Chandigarh, he asked me what I was doing, and I replied with a certain enthusiasm. After a long silence he finally said, "We know that reincarnation is true, but it doesn't make any difference because here in India we have just as many rogues and villains as you have in the West"
End of interview.