Just a comment, but hypothesis testing is usually done a lot further down the line when there are, optimally, several mature theories that can be tested against each other for their predictive value.
When it comes to children who remember past lives, the research is at the stage of “hey, what’s the deal with all these children who say they remember past lives?”
Qualitative research is appropriate at this stage, and it’s also the normal course for how new phenomena are included in scientific studies, which usually leads to new theories being developed, and then more research, better data collection, better theory testing, etc.
And the evidence is obivously too compelling to brush it off with “it’s just a scam” or it’s “just for soft-headed people who want to believe in life after death” I mean come on even the die hard sceptic has to concede that it’s at least spooky that there are so many cases.
Edit: another question is whether it is falsifiable in the Popperian sense; but that is not really appropriate at this stage, which is trying to create explanations for “why are these kids reporting to remembering past lives?”
How about the Ps. I added to the previous comment? On the children’s claim as prediction and verification strengthens the claim that rebirth is a fact of life.
I saw this in one of the videos of the guy who took over after Ian Stevenson, I don’t remember his name.
He had a bunch of pictures that he showed the child. All the pictures were similar looking, but only one of them were related to the child’s claimed past life. For example, two similar looking playgrounds, but only one of the playgrounds were near the house where the child claimed to have lived in their previous life.
These kinds of picture showing are analogous to coin tosses, and they test whether the child is able to do better than guessing randomly.
Caveat: I don’t know if the researcher knew himself which pictures were the right ones. The person showing the pictures should be blinded (also not know which pictures are right) so the child doesn’t pick up any subtle cues from the researcher.
If these children are better at guessing than random (i.e. identify more than 50% of the pictures related to their past life on average, to some p<0.05) – this is still an explanandum, i.e. something that has to be explained by some theory, that might at some point later contain testable hypotheses.
For those who believe in rebirth, this finding is simply not that surprising, because it is seen in the context of very different assumptions than of the physicalist.
The physicalist is more prone to dismissing this as fraud, precisely because it is a genuine challenge to the explanatory power of their worldview, IMO.
Edit: To put it another way, I would think in terms of compatibility of observations with one’s world view, rather than proving or disproving hypotheses.
Edit2: If there are a lot of observations that are not compatible with one’s worldview, one is more likely to change worldviews.
This is incorrect. If you care to know the truth, you can check the texts. (Theragāthā and Therīgāthā are good places to look.) Ironically, Anuruddha’s verse (Thag 16.9) has a description of him where he recalls his past lives.
And this is also incorrect. See the very first discourse in the Pāli discourse collection (DN 1) for one counter-example.
And while were at it, this is incorrect as well. As someone else already cited, this is found in a particularly famous Jātaka tale:
When he was one month old, they adorned him and brought him to the king, and the king having looked at his dear child, embraced him and placed him on his hip and sat playing with him. …
The next day they laid him on a sumptuous bed under a white umbrella, and he woke after a short sleep and opening his eyes beheld the white umbrella and the royal pomp, and his fear increased all the more; and as be pondered, “From whence have I come into this palace?” by his recollection of his former births, he remembered that he had come from the world of the gods and that after that he had suffered in hell, and that then he had been a king in that very city. Jātaka 538
If you don’t believe in rebirth, that’s fair enough. But we should be careful about making bold, roaring claims around texts if we don’t actually know them as well as we’d hope.
The fact that we know which parts of the brain can affect memory does not prove that memory is stored in those parts, only that those parts of the brain are somehow involved in the formation, storage and retrieval of memory.
The fact that by cutting the LAN cable to your PC, or by turning off a Wi-Fi router, you would lose all access to the “memory” in the form of the Internet, does not prove that the entire Internet is stored in the cable or in the router.
AFAIK, there is no proof for your statement that “memories are stored in the brain”. Even more, I have grave doubts that there is even a clear understanding at the level of philosophy of science of how to prove this.
Remembering past lives is not an “advanced magical power”, only remembering them at one’s own will in the form of a skill is considered such. Spontaneous recollection is not such an ability.
Spontaneous recollection of past lives can happen to anyone, not just infants.
This may perhaps be correct if by “any Buddhist text of any kind” you really meant “any sutta”.
The said belief, however, is quite commonly depicted in post-canonical Indian Buddhist narratives. We even get one or two of the kind that would have Ian Stevenson rubbing his hands in glee, e.g., the Dhammapada Atthakathā’s background story to verse 62:
He went from house to house, finally coming to the house where he had formerly lived in his existence as Treasurer Ānanda. Remembering his former existence, he entered his own house. He went through three chambers, and no one noticed him. But when he entered the fourth chamber, the young sons of Treasurer Mūlasiri took fright and burst into tears. The treasurer’s servants came in and said to him, “Leave this house, unspeakable monster!” So saying, they beat him and pulled him and dragged him out and threw him on the dust-heap. Ānandaseṭṭhivatthu
As for non-Indian sources, in SE Asian Buddhist hagiography it seems to be almost obligatory for the narrator to include an episode in which the infant arahant-to-be spontaneously recalls either his immediately previous life or else some life in which he has a pivotal encounter with a past Buddha.
…and I recall a verse where Venerable Kassapa remembered that the beggar woman (where he gave the opportunity to give dana to him) was his mother in 3 lives before the current on (oddly specific!).
Well the question is written in an unnecessarily patronising way, but I agree with that being concerning. I don’t read these journals, but am on the Editorial team for a small medical journal in my area and it certainly would be problematic if the assertions you are making are true. There is no problem with an editor publishing in the same journal (in Medicine, the cohort working in a specific area can be relatively small and so its almost impossible to not have cross polination like this). (I recently had to find examiners for one of my PhD students in a very small area, and you need to find someone who has not published with them, nor any of their supervisors, in the last 5 years, and yet is a content expert in the area…it was very hard as I work in a very small niche field!)
When the EIC submits to our journal, they hand over decision making to someone on the Editorial Panel and they make all the decisions. Obviously that person knows the EIC submitted, but what else can you do???
Not sure I would call it scientific fraud, but it is definitely something that should be disclosed in the funding statement.
The issue is even more serious than that. Having to disclose conflicts of interest and sources of funding for all research came about in part after a big US university was caught publishing research that disproved the Armenian genocide, which was paid for by the government of Turkey.
It’s a fair criticism to level at this research, carried out by the head of an institution that is funded by a private donor to provide evidence of rebirth, that it has no controls. It isn’t even just at the level of publication, it’s at the level of the research itself. There’s every reason for Stevenson to have lied. His money and reputation were hanging on it, so why wouldn’t he construct convincing evidence as the person with total control over every aspect of the research process. Bias is a very serious thing. And did he actually publish his subjects names in his research? Or are they all pseudonyms? The privacy stuff is appalling. All personal information about research subjects is locked down tighter than Fort Knox these days.
You also need to explain how a child can remember specific details about the previous life they spontaneously claim to have had. You can argue that it is confabulation, I agree, that is possible, but then you need to explain how they know specific details they wouldn’t have had access to in this life. You can argue it is coincidence, I agree, that is possible, but there are now over 2,500 very well documented cases now in the Uni Virginia series. Seems like a lot of trouble you are going to in order to argue your predetermined case that it is wrong, rather than going with the more likely answer that the theory of rebirth is more likely than that many coincidences…
The idea that we know about consciousness and memory and it is all completely sorted doesnt stand the scientific test you claim, Im afraid. For nearly a century, people have been having hemispherectomies (having half their brain either disconnected or removed) and they are still themselves, they dont become other people. You can do this with either side. Yes, you lose some motor function and lose the opposite visual field (surprisingly not completely) but not your concept of self. Yes memories and “you” might be stored in the midbrain or pons or somewhere more central…certainly possible…except those are the bits that we share with crocodiles, not the bits of the brain we associate with being homo sapiens!
One theory could be that there is no location for “us”. The mental domain (the mind) may be interlocking with this physical domain (the brain) but not be in any identifiable location there. The memory of that mind could be stored in the brain, but the brain may not be the thing “generating the memory”. In other words, the processor could store information in the hard-drive, but the thing that is actually controlling things may not be anywhere in the computer hardware at all…ie us completely separate entities entering the info.
You can study the hard-drive and tell me how much you know about it, but that doesnt mean you are an expert and know everything about the being that inputted the data into the hard-drive. You have a shadow of information about it, sure, as that entity was making decisions that are recorded “in” the hard-drive. But that entity is not “in” the hard-drive.
What controls would you have in this research? There are 8 billion of us, the fact that there are only 2,500 cases reported is pretty good evidence that this is not a common phenomenon. Not sure what controls you suggest in this situation, we are not randomising people to rebirth!
If he published his subject’s names without their written consent, he should be sanctioned. If he had their consent (either to use pseudonyms or their actual names) then its fine. I don’t know either way, but case reports are all through the medical literature!
Furthermore, although there is a concern if these data are only published in some journals and not others, one of the reasons for that is the current scientific processes are not as objective as you might be implying here. There is subjective bias among the editors, who all have their preconceived ideas themselves, and there are multiple examples in science of Nobel Prize winning things not being accepted for publication initially but eventually the crazy out-of-the-box initially rejected theories becoming standard knowledge.
Just in case people doubt him, there’s plenty of other rebirth/reincarnation researchers out there, producing their reports in books etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/s/YQIOYM7LBU
Next critique would be: of course, they want to sell their book, they create fake data for it.
But then one has to be reasonable to know how else are the information is going to be published, especially before the online period.
Also this type of critique is actually grasping at straws, like would the whole of physics be discredited just because some people wrote popular physics books and earn from them?
It’s actually the other way around for Ian Stevenson. Imagine the backlash and opposition he would have to face in the academia world rooted in physicalism. There’s a lot of reason not to pursue the unpopular and paradigm challenging research of rebirth, not least to his career, reputation, social standing in the wider academic circle etc. Why would he risk it all?
It is also these kind of pressure which discourages more people from wanting to go into these kind of research.
Brian Weiss shared that his colleagues also found out past lives from their clients and tell him to not share it out to the public for fear of academic backlash. It is a rare brave researcher to go against the paradigm and just publish the truth as it is.
Imagine the pressure of Galelio publishing his work. And his predecessors who preferred to publish after their death, or not at all. And the pressure the catholic church hankers on him just because it didn’t fit with the paradigm of catholic theology then.
Who’s being unscientific? The ones who follow the evidences, or the ones witch hunting and suppressing evidence (and not reading them) due to adherence to a particular set of philosophy or worldview or paradigm?
Why the resistence to read it? Because of the need to avoid cognitive dissonance. It’s a mental self defence thing because the wrong association of physicalism to comfort, happiness, not having to ponder about the horrors of beginningless samsara, etc. All these have to be disentangled and then one can truly take refuge in the Buddha, dhamma and Sangha as the safety from the dangers of samsara. These worldview that are attached to doesn’t bring real happiness. Nothing in the world when attached to, bring permanent happiness, including the dhamma which is to be abandoned near the end of the path to nibbāna.
It’s obviously not clinical research, but why not randomize if everyone is supposed to have been reborn? What you are saying is akin to “all people are albino,” because some are. No. It has a genetic mechanism. Additionally, plenty of randomized trials have demonstrated that the placebo works almost, or as well, as the drug being tested. You’re talking about thousands of cases in which most everyone who has looked at them agree, most can be thrown out. All of that has to be explained.
And publishing names is not even the half of it. His research is borderline participant observation. Actually it is, but he’s clearly not trained for it, and didn’t even evaluate for his own influence on his field research.
And taking a swipe at all the institutions that produce reliable research to defend what is obviously not? Are we in the midst of a Buddhist Q-Anon?
How about proving the claim that this can produce convincing rebirth evidences cases with cases we know are not, and then the researcher try as much as possible to lead these two families on to produce his fake data?
See how successful that can be.
If you can even acknowledge that some people get reborn, it’s already enough to debunk physicalism philosophy. It sometimes takes some people some time to get to see that it’s not reasonable to suppose that rebirth is limited to some people instead of all.
In the Buddhist cosmology, it’s reasonable to expect only a small number of people out of billions can recall past life as a human. It’s not easy to get human to human rebirth and many people maybe from the lower realms or higher realms as well, both are not able to be verified via finding past life family in human world.
True, I believe it is estimated to be approximately 30% in clinical trials. But that raises a question in itself. Not sure if you are a materialist, but if physical matter explains everything: how does administering a molecule that doesn’t have an effect on outcome x, have a demonstrable effect on outcome x? Isn’t the well documented phenomenon of the placebo effect evidence of the existence of both a completely separate domain (the animate domain) in addition to the domain of in-animate objects (e.g., molecules)?
That separate domain being where rebirth is occurring- it has nothing much to do with the physical structure we see as the body or the brain, its that other “thing” (not a thing but I am running out of words in English) that is reborn not the physical body as you know.
But more generally, we know in great detail what the life cycle of stars look like. And we can tell where in the life cycle a star is by looking at its mass, size, colour, and luminosity. For many years now we have been able to predict which which stars will go nova or supernova. Now we have a pretty good idea of when.
Yes. They can. Using accurate knowledge of geology. We know what kinds of rock typically bear fossils and from which era, and we can seek those out. These days they use satellites:
What puzzles me is that you obviously don’t know anything at all about science, how it works, or the kind of knowledge that it produces, and yet here you are commenting on it like you are an expert. Better stick to interpreting scripture.
It’s because they got paid attention to, especially in a way they understood to bring care. We know this from all sorts of other situations and research as well.
Why are you drawing these things into it having been pointed out to you that this supposedly invincible evidence of rebirth has more holes in it than anyone could be interested in dealing with?
even the die hard sceptic has to concede that it’s at least spooky that there are so many cases.
!